Jeff Russell's Webstead

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Paper points out in the introduction that the term "theology" has some problems, but that it nevertheless seemed like the best word for what he was about with this book. If you go to a university (or these days, more likely a seminary) and look for professors of theology, or classes on theology, they will overwhelmingly be about Christianity, with maybe a handful nodding toward Judaism or Islam, but with crickets for anything polytheistic. In large part, of course, this is due to historical circumstance. For the last thousand years or so in the West, the only religious study that you could do at all was about Christianity, so of course theology was about Christianity, and today's institutions have inherited this bias. Another, more interesting wrinkle is the fact that monotheism, at least the flavors of monotheism dominant in the world today, is constitutionally predisposed towards "theology," whereas many (most?) polytheistic traditions are not. As their common label implies, the "religions of the book" are all based on an authoritative written document which is believed to contain most or all of what you really need for the religion, and all of them put a lot of weight on their followers believing what is contained in their respective books as literally correct truth-propositions. Yes, yes, I know, there are all kinds of esoteric interpretations and non-literalist schools of exegesis out there, but fundamentally, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all ask their followers to believe that certain things about the world are and must be true, and to shape their beliefs, values, and behavior to those propositions. Within this framework, you can see how a rigorous, logical, even "scientific" study of religion could not only arise, but become an important pillar in the overall religious undertaking.

Most polytheistic traditions, on the other hand, put far less weight on doctrine and episteme, and far more on gnosis. In a sense, it's more empirical, in the plain meaning of the word: we do some stuff, observe results, and go with that, without necessarily working out an explanatory theory behind it. This is not a universal rule, of course, as is made obvious by works like Proclus's Elements of Theology, which was exactly the kind of rigorous, logical, "scientific" attempt to analyze and understand the nature of divinity that I said comes so naturally to monotheism, but to say that that approach was/is not the norm among polytheists would be an understatement. Most polytheistic approaches to religion are shaped by custom, tradition, personal experience, and other such fuzzy, human variables far more than syllogisms grounded in bedrock premises taken from an authoritative text or philosophical reasoning.

Which brings us back to Paper's project with this book. If the kind of "theology" that the word usually refers to is alien to most polytheistic experience and belief, what might a book of "polytheistic theology" even be doing? He addresses this in a characteristically polytheistic way by stressing that any theology will, of necessity, be personal, because all religion, even religion of the book, is deeply personal, if it is to be alive and vital at all. So, the Summa Theologica is not the "theology," it is "Aquinas's theology," and by the same token, The Deities are Many is "Jordan Paper's theology." This stance has the benefits of being broadly defensible and consonant with the general ethos of most polytheistic traditions, but is, of course, a touch unsatisfying. If you're at all like me, and maybe this is just the weight of a thousand years of cultural history speaking, you want "the" theology: a definitive, reasonable exploration of what we do and can know of the nature of divinity and whatever Being or Beings embody that divinity.

I suspect that the best we can do, unless we accept the premise of the religions of the book, that this written source truly is authoritative, is something pretty close to Paper's approach here, as unsatisfying as it may at times feel. Perhaps if more of us could have the depth and breadth of experience he has had, reflect on it as thoughtfully as he has, and share it with each other, we might be able to arrive at some kind of tentative synthesis that gets closer to "this is the way divinity is," rather than "this is what my experience of divinity has been," even if the furthest we get is "this seems to be what divinity is usually like, for most folks." So, if that sounds like the kind of thing you could or would do, do please get on it - we'd all appreciate it.

As I mentioned above, Paper intentionally and forthrightly grounds most of what he has to say in his own experiences, giving the book a very gnostic flavor (note the lower case here, not "Gnostic" like the Nag Hammadi library, just meaning "based on knowledge through personal experience more than knowledge from books or doctrine"). Considering both his profession (an anthropologist of religion) and his personal experience (having participated in and/or been inducted into various American Indian, African-Diaspora, and Chinese practices), this turns out to be extraordinarily rich. I think I mentioned back in my review of The Idea of the Holy how there's some worth in approaching religion from the "inside" as a believer, and some in approaching from the "outside" as an observer (but likely more to come on this once I can get my thoughts in order), and Paper nimbly leaps back and forth between these stances, sometimes in discussing the very same event. Among the advantages of this approach is that he strikes a pretty good balance between systematizing, categorizing analysis and nuanced, organic discussion of particular ceremonies, beings, practices, and so forth. I have to imagine this particular approach would be wildly useful if you yourself were mainly interested in American Indian and Chinese traditional practices, with a smattering of African-Diaspora experiences, but the downside, of course, is that those of us operating outside of these traditions find much less that is directly useful or applicable. I know, I know, as an American Heathen with Revival Druid and Platonist leanings, I can't expect anyone to map to my weirdo beliefs 1-to-1, much less erudite and clear-writing scholars, but a man can dream, can't he? Instead, what I have to settle for here is a model of how to approach religious practice and myth, respecting local variation and specificity while still being alive to commonalities and linking threads. Luckily, Paper gives an excellent model for this, and I expect to come back to it again and again as I make sense of my reading and experience.

There were a few bits and bobs in the book that I liked and wanted to call out, but didn't seem to fit into the broader strokes I was painting with this overview, so I thought I'd jam them in here. For one, Paper talks about the entertainment value, especially humor, especially especially scatological humor, in many traditional tales, giving some examples from American Indian myths with which he's familiar. Why do stories of the holy have poop jokes? Well, because one of the ways stories of the holy persist and get passed on is by telling them to children, and kids love poop jokes. Likewise with older audiences and the more salacious elements of myth (this idea was first introduced to me by a memorable passage in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, where a priest with a classical bent tells the myth of the conception and birth of Erechtheus, the first king of Athens. NSFW). Thus, these stories "stick" and get retold, and whatever lessons or insights about the holy they have to convey pass on through the ages, not despite the poop jokes and sex, but because of them. I thought that was pretty cool. Another interesting bit to me was the role of what is usually called "automatic writing" in the West in traditional Chinese religious traditions, where it is known as "spirit writing" and is very old and very well respected. Apparently, there are mountains of texts purportedly written by various Gods and spirits via human mediums in China and Taiwan, and they're still going strong on cranking them out. These have the strength of being (apparently) direct communication from the focuses of worship Themselves, but of course, the downside of being hard or impossible to verify here on the material plane (take a look at the track record of prophecies via automatic writing sometime if you want to get a feel for how much salt you ought to buy before taking on texts of this sort). One tidbit where I was excited to read, but ultimately disappointed, was his treatment of the Sun and the Moon as deities, and Their genders. See, in Germanish belief, Sun is female and Moon is male, but in most other bodies of myth (including those of most other Indo-European folks), these genders are flipped. He talks about how a female Sun is more common in polar regions, with a male Sun more common in temperate areas, but alas, he offers no way to metaphysically reconcile these, and keeps with his emphasis on the particular human experiences of different groups. Another bit I found useful was the nitty-gritty detail given on ancestor veneration as practiced in Chinese traditional religion, far more than I got in The Ancient City - hopefully by putting these two together, I can get a better handle on what to do with such practices in my own work. Speaking of Chinese religion, I also rather enjoyed his description of local temples, which begin dedicated to one God, but end up with images of whatever Gods locals bring there, and act not only as centers of worship, but also as places to gather, be entertained, and even store grain. They work as community hubs in more ways than one, and are run by a neighborhood committee, not a distinct class of religious specialists. There's a lot more of this ilk in the book, but I'll leave it at that for now.

As much as I liked this book, it does, of course, have a few shortcomings, as any book will, but they were mercifully few and detract very little from the overall worth of the book. To me, the most glaring was Paper's antipathy to monotheism throughout. While not as strong or caustic as you might find in, say, books from the Wiccan end of the height of the Neopagan fad, it is there, and I think it weakens his overall take on humans' interactions with the divine. Sure, monotheistic religious experiences are different from polytheistic, and this book is about the latter as distinct from the former, but for better or worse, many of the most profound religious experiences of the last one to two thousand years for large swaths of humanity have been within a monotheistic context. To write these off as wrong or broken somehow strikes me as the same kind of closed-mindedness that Paper castigates monotheists for. Along similar lines, Paper peppers in the kind of denunciations of patriarchy and colonialism you might expect from an anthropologist working around the turn of the 21st century, sometimes with some justification, other times less so. Given some of the biographical details he shares, none of these are that surprising, and strike me mainly as an artifact of his time and place, but as such, they're also less helpful and universally-applicable than much of the book. In my own experience, I find I have far more in common with fellow believers, fellow theists of whatever stripe, than I do with non-believers, whether we worship one God or many, and the kind of needling found here strikes me as undermining that. Overall, though, that's a fairly minor quibble in a generally excellent book.

I know that I'm usually much more equivocal in my recommendations for these reviews, but really, if you're reading this blog, you'll very likely like this book quite a bit, it's not all that expensive, and it's quick. So, just go read it yourself, and let me know what you think!

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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The main thrust of what Fustel de Coulanges is putting forward is that the oldest kind of worship among the folk we would today call the Indo-Europeans (the then-current word, "Aryan" has some issues, of which the connotations it has gained in the last 70-80 years are not the smallest). He comes to this position by looking at the earliest Greek, Roman, and to a lesser extent, Indian writings about custom and religion and noticing remarkable similarities, specifically around the worship of the dead from whom they came (ancestor veneration). He goes on to argue that much of the Roman and Greek world, especially early on, doesn't make sense unless seen through this lens, and that many of the upheavals these folks went through can best be understood as this early way of seeing their role in the world breaking down or changing over time.

A quick word on words, here: when I can, I try to use words that come from Germanish roots, rather than Latin, Greek, or elsewhere. Mostly this is a taste thing, but it has the strength of often making me say things more simply and concretely. I do this even more with religious words, as there's some worth in using less-familiar words to talk about the numinous. In some religious traditions, there are fine gradations between "veneration," "worship," and other words that are nearly synonymous in everyday speech. Here, I'm using "worship" thanks to its Germanish stock, though in today's English it tends to have a stronger weight than "veneration," and might at times be a touch misleading. The Romans, Greeks, and Indians of elder times may or may not have seen the honored dead as "of the same level" as the Gods (Fustel de Coulanges seems to imply such, but I lean towards the thought that the Catholic and Orthodox distinction between dulia ("veneration," as for saints) and latria ("adoration," for the holy Trinity only) comes from an earlier analogous distinction amongst pagan Romans and Greeks, which is common amongst folks who still perform rituals in honor of their dead while also worshiping more than one God). If it helps, you can remind yourself that "worship" means "to give worth to" and so is a fitting word for any kind of acknowledgment of greater strength and holiness - that's how I square it, anyway.

So, with that out of the way, back to Fustel de Coulanges. He notices a few key things about Roman and Greek religious writings and law, links them together, and draws reasonable inferences from them, tracing their influence through historical events and changes. In the very earliest writings of both of these folks, we find that law was mainly understood as something religious - the Gods and spirits have given us things to do, ways to be, and rules to follow, and it's the priests' job to remember them, and later write them down, so that we don't screw it up. Among these commandments are several regarding the proper treatment and maintenance of the familial dead and their altar, the hearth. These duties fall upon the eldest man in a household, leading to the paterfamilias (the Greeks had a similar concept, but uncharacteristically, no special name that has come into English). It worked like this: dad died, so we bury him on our land. Since he was a powerful and respected man in life, we keep on honoring him in death. Different families work out different ways of how precisely to do this, leading to a specific family cultus (usually rendered in English as "cult," but I'm using the Latin here to emphasize that I don't mean a small, socially rejected and possibly abusive religious sect, but rather a specific set of religious practices, which is the common usage of "cult" in classical and religious studies writings). Despite the variation between families, there were certain things common to all: keeping the grave clean and nice, regular offerings of meals, asking for help in earthly things, acknowledging that help when it comes, and so forth. Okay, so far so good. So, dad's buried in the backyard, and the oldest brother has learned from him this family's ways of worshiping him (and his dad, and his dad, and so forth). His wife, his brothers' wives, and all of their kids, give this worship every day - saying prayers on re-kindling the still smoldering embers of the hearth each morning, readying just the right foods and wines every so often for the grave feast, casting lots or reading the signs of the birds to understand what the forebears are telling them, and so forth. A whole little religion, just for this family. That's the foundation for everything else that follows.

Since this grave and this hearth are sacred sites for this religion, you can't just move or, forebears forbid, sell the land. Which means that the Greeks and Romans developed a sense of land as property much earlier than other Indo-European folks, but not "property" meaning "your own thing to do whatever you want with," but rather meaning "something that no one else has a right to infringe on." Further, since the eldest man in the family is the high priest of his own religion, and only his eldest son can become the next priest, that man gets special status, respect, and powers. The right to approve marriages, tell the kids (and siblings) what to do, and even, if things get bad enough, the power of life and death over everyone in the family. So, you have these self-contained, inviolable little units, literally sacrosanct from the intrusions and interference of the wider society. Law, including what we would think of as "secular" law, reflected this - in most things, it was left to the paterfamilias to decide, and even if not left wholly to him, he was largely deferred to by the courts and magistrates.

But speaking of society, what of other families? How might men and women come together into larger groups? Well, over time, a family tree does tend to branch, and if every generation has 2-4 sons, the backyard is gonna get pretty crowded. So families split into new families, but remember where they came from. You might have a different paterfamilias than me, but if we recall that some time back we had a shared forebear, we can come together to worship him. Now we have clans, or as the Romans called them, gentes (singular: gens). Daily you worship the dead of your family, but once a year or so, you might get together with a few other families to worship the common dead of your gens. Alright, well, after a long enough time, what of multiple gentes with a forebear common to all? That's where the titular "city" comes in. The founder of a city becomes the ultimate forebear of every gens, and thus every family. Beyond this, everyone is an outlander, whether they speak the same tongue, look roughly the same, or even worship the same Gods (more on this in a tick). How might this city work out what it should do? Well, obviously, ask the head of each gens, who might ask the head of each constituent family what they think. From these seeds grew the shapes we came to know as the republic (from Latin res publica, the "public thing," which in light of this book, has an evocative contrast with the private things of the family and gens).

All of this is neat and tidy enough, but obviously it didn't last for the whole of classical history. If the only way to get into a family, much less a gens, is to be born there or marry into it, what about folks who move to the city to make a living? Or who spring from a distant enough branch to have lost the trunk from which it sprang? In this original conception, there's no room for them. In both the Roman and Greek worlds, these folks ended up as clients of the families with land, names, and rites/rights. In Rome, they came to be known as the plebeians. Remember, law and rights were originally expressions of what was commanded or guaranteed by religion, and religion as we've spoken of it so far only came with membership in these families, so outsiders had none unless they could get one of these families to act on their behalf. Well, if you're one of these outsiders, this kind of sucks, especially if you're an "outsider" who was born in the city, and your own forefathers were born here, back as far as anyone can remember. Oh, and what if you're rich? And the fancy, ancient family next door is poor? You might feel a bit of dissatisfaction, to put it mildly.

Fustel de Coulanges outlines some workarounds that were added as the plebeians started to demand more and more recognition. At first, they were allowed some amount of participation in the gentes of their patrons, and eventually were put into "artificial" gentes. The need for plebeian participation in the army drove a lot of this. Fustel de Coulanges also argues that as time went on, more weight was put on the temples and worship of the Gods held in common by everyone in the city - the familiar "great" Gods, like Jupiter, Venus, Minerva, and so forth. Their worship was public and shared, and so it was easier to fold in the plebeians. As they became more important economically, politically, and militarily, worship that included them became more prominent. This is one area where I think Fustel de Coulanges might be a bit off. He subscribes to the common view of the late 19th/early 20th century that these Gods were "only" the Gods of natural phenomena - Jupiter is the thunder, Venus is the attraction between men and women, Hephaestus is the volcano, and so forth. While not wrong, I think this view is overly simplistic, due to being overly materialist. Sure, Jupiter is the thunder, but He is not only the thunder. I would instead say that the thunder is one manifestation of the bigger sphere owned by Him. I also think that Fustel de Coulanges over-commits to his (real, legitimate) insight on the importance of household worship, which leads him to downplay how important the Gods of the pantheon always were. The comparative mythological evidence for these Gods among Indo-European peoples is too strong for them to have been added late or lacking in importance from a very ancient date. This doesn't necessarily undermine the historical and political ramifications he spells out for worship within the household, most of all of the family's forebears, but I think it means that the impression he gives of what ancient religion "felt" like is somewhat off, which is clearly of more interest to folks interested in religious reconstruction than those of a more traditional historical bent.

That brings us to what I was most hoping to get out of this book, which was a deeper and more granular understanding of Roman and Greek forebear worship. Having read the book, that was clearly secondary to what Fustel de Coulanges was up to. For him, the forebear worship was mostly interesting as a factor in shaping the worldview of the Romans and Greeks that showed up in how they organized politically and interacted with the wider world. So, I want to give full credit to him for doing a great job on what he set out to accomplish. That goal just wasn't what I was most interested in, especially since I already felt like I had gotten a good feel for that from the reviews I had read/listened to on the book. My own religious practice features forebear worship, but it's a part of it where there's a lot less to go on from the historical and mythological sources we have for pre-Christian Heathenry (Germanish polytheism) than we might like. As such, today's Heathens have to look to other traditions that include forebear worship to get ideas. Many of these traditions, like Chinese traditional religion or the African-diaspora religions, spring from very different cultural and historical milieus, and so might have limited value as relevant inspirations. While the Greek and Roman religions incorporated a lot of different influences than the other Indo-European religions, they're at least coming from common roots, so there might be more directly relevant insights there. I've talked before about the mixed role reconstruction has in my own practice, but it is a factor. As such, I was excited for what this book might have to teach me.

On this front, I'd say it was a mixed success. There are a few evocative details of what day-to-day forebear worship was like, but time and again, Fustel de Coulanges's focus on what this behavior means for the social and political world of the Greeks and Romans takes precedence. He also takes what I might characterize as an absolutist position on such practices: he stresses the absolute secrecy and exclusivity of the family cult, the unyielding precedence of the eldest male family member, the impossibility of changing ancient ways of doing things. To a certain degree, this makes sense, as a way to counter our too-ready tendency to project our own mindset and way of seeing the world onto folks in the past, but I think he pushes it too hard. The very fact that he outlines several changes to what he describes as the ur-religion shows that some amount of flexibility was there over time. I suspect that all along these practices were more flexible than Fustel de Coulanges presents them.

If you're willing to go a bit "out there" with me for a tick, there's an added wrinkle that builds on our discussion of the planes. In The Secret of the Temple and Monsters, John Michael Greer talks a bit about something he's expanded on in comments on his blog here and there. According to the traditional beliefs that have informed modern occult philosophy, the etheric body separates from the physical body at death (the body of life-force leaving the body of meat is, in fact, what defines "death" in this model). Under normal circumstances, without a physical anchor, this subtle body dissipates within a few days, especially as exposed to etherically charged phenomena in the natural world, most of all sunlight. If you look at various ancient tales and at the archaeological record, though, at some point, you find cultures that built elaborate tombs for their highest-status dead, and along with this, where we have writing, descriptions of these dead having some continued presence and influence, hopefully to the benefit of their folk. Occult philosophy provides an explanation of what might have been going on here: by burying the body and applying certain preservation methods, you keep the physical anchor for the etheric body around. By burying it in a special way (mounds made of alternating earth and stone, or later, perhaps, pyramids), you protect the etheric body from the natural forces that would normally dissipate it. By giving it sustenance in the form of offered food and drink (which contain etheric energy) and certain forms of worship (which transfer etheric energy from the living to the dead recipient), you could keep this etheric body around and active for some time, and it would be able to keep on acting on the etheric plane to do things like bless crops, heal illness, and so forth. Folks being what they are, though, at certain times in certain places, the fear of death and desire for power came to dominate the pro-social ends for which this practice was developed (or so the story goes), and you started getting individuals kept around through these means that were less concerned with the blessing and healing, and more concerned with holding on to their place in this world, no matter what. As their influence became more obviously baleful and less and less wealful, you got hungry ghosts roaming about looking for etheric energy wherever they could get it, like from spilled blood or drained from the unwilling living, and returning to the protection of their graves to hide from the destroying sun. Why, yes, that is, in fact, what we call vampires. Speculative, I know. Out there, I know. But intriguing, and consistent with the teachings on the subtle world I'm working with right now.

I bring this up because it raises some pretty serious questions about the practice of forebear worship. Is "maintaining the etheric body of specific dead indiviudals so they can (hopefully) bless us, the living" the only thing it's for? If so, then it has little to no value for those of us who don't bury our dead in the backyard, un-embalmed, in natural coffins, and then offer them meals and prayers on the regular. Further, even if we did somehow manage most of these practicalities, outside of a culture and context that prepares us for it, in life and after, might we inadvertently create literal monsters of our loved ones? That's horrifying. Much of what Fustel de Coulanges describes seems consistent with the "keep the etheric body alive" school of forebear worship, but luckily it's not the only game in town, and not all of Greek or Roman practice can be explained in these terms. Besides the possibility of a lingering etheric body, occult philosophy also says that we spend a certain amount of time hanging out on the astral between lives, processing how the last one went to get ready for the next one, and after enough incarnations, we stop incarnating all together and start spending all of our time on the astral and above. This allows for souls who still care about their material descendants to hear prayers, give guidance through dreams and feelings and the like, and to otherwise help in non-material ways. Also, though I don't have a good explanation for this just yet, many (most?) traditions that include ancestor worship also allow for worship of "the ancestors" as a group, as distinct from any worship given to individual forebears. Is this "just" an egregore? A convenient astral "label" that various souls can rotate into and out of? One or more Gods that take on that role? I'm not ready to say.

Altogether, I didn't get as much practical out of this as I might have hoped, but it did help to give some feeling for what hearth and forebear worship would look like as a day-to-day practice, and what role it might play in comparison with worshiping the "great" Gods of myths and public rituals.

I've hit on most of these already, but I thought it'd be helpful to call out what I saw as the greatest strengths and weaknesses of this book in its own section. As I said before, Fustel de Coulanges is very careful to stress how strong a role these beliefs must have played for those who held them, and to spell out how different they were from the beliefs most of us hold today. He also takes great pains to emphasize that no, really, the ancients actually believed this stuff. Amidst the growing atheism of his time, there was a tendency among academics to look back on the religion of the Greeks and Romans, notice how it favored the upper classes, and assume that it was a cynical ploy to control the masses. This allows him to very effectively counter the tendency to see the ancients as "just like us," which is a helpful corrective. He also shows a phenomenal command of primary sources - almost everything in the book is backed up with quotes from ancient sources, which is nice to see. Put these together, and you see Fustel de Coulanges draw the implications of his core argument through disparate sources over long stretches of time. It's all very convincing and very carefully done.

On the weaknesses side, Fustel de Coulanges shows some of the biases of his time, such as the particular combination of scientific materialism and casual, default Christianity particularly characteristic of European intellectuals of the late 19th century. His remarkable command of the classical sources also doesn't include what we've come to know since through a century of comparative Indo-European study. The few comparisons he makes with early Indian sources were groundbreaking for the time, but our picture these days has been enriched quite a bit. I think this contributed to the lower weight he put on worship of the Gods of nature (which was also undoubtedly a response to an over-emphasis on the neat, tidy impression of the Gods of myth as "the whole religion" that was common from the Renaissance through the 19th century). Also, though Fustel de Coulanges stressed that the ancients actually believed what they said they did, his "reasonable" late 19th century frame can't help but assume the reasons they believed these things were all psychological in nature, or due to mistakes (since, obviously, some combination of science and monotheism was the real truth). As such, the idea that they believed these things because there was something to them (like, say, your crops actually growing better when you performed the rites the way you were supposed to) doesn't seem to cross his mind. Fair enough, from his frame of reference, but disappointing for those of us who don't share it.

I mentioned above that I had read and listened to some reviews about this book before finally giving it a read. While I enjoyed these and found them valuable, they also all came from various standpoints of not really buying that the Greeks and Romans were right to worship their dead. Instead, most of these commenters have focused on how useful believing such things seems to have been. In fact, it was in response to some of these reviews that I wrote my post on social technology. It's not that I disagree that the social technology side of these beliefs wasn't real or potentially useful - besides social and cultural continuity, it also fostered an extremely strong attachment to decentralized decision-making and power that I can't help but admire. Since each family was its own little religious community, and the law was (largely) based on religious strictures, each family was also its own little political entity. This aspect of things was extremely persistent, even through major upheavals in the social and political structure of society - even the rather late law code of Justinian, compiled after Rome had become an empire, lost its western half, and even become Christian, reflected the ancient weight put on families as the building block of the body politic. So, I sympathize with those who read this book and say "wow, it sure would be nice if we had something like that today." The trouble is, I don't think you can just decide to start worshiping your ancestors for the purposes of social cohesion or stronger political decentralization. Especially if, as some of these commenters assume, that society ought to be mostly or entirely Christian. It's putting the cart before the horse. It's not just a technology you pick up or put down as it's useful. You worship your forebears if you believe it's a religiously meaningful thing to do, and if enough folks in your society agree, then you get a society with these strengths.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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The beating heart of this book, and the reason that it has remained central to the field of religious studies for over a century is Otto's identification and naming of the concept of the Mysterium Tremendum, and that which engenders that experience as the Numen, which can be described as "numinous." If you've read anything in the field, it might surprise you to learn that these terms are so relatively new. I know it did me. On the other hand, if these terms are new to you, let me break them down. Otto contends that religion is not merely about logically-arguable propositions or developed theology, but instead an essential component is direct experience of something other, something weird - the Mysterium Tremendum or "Tremendous Mystery." Something that folks can feel very deeply, but not fully understand or describe. He goes on to say that whatever it is that produces this response is the numen, a Latin word that meant something like the power and/or mind of a divine being, the special something that a God has that lesser beings lack. The adjectival form of this word is "numinous." So, to put all of this together: when a man encounters the numen, that encounter is numinous, and the feeling he experiences is the Mysterium Tremendum. Are we good on these terms? Good, because they'll be coming up a lot throughout this review and in later posts.

Otto touches on a few interesting things in discussing this facet of religious experience. For one, he points out that some English words better convey it than his native German (which is especially interesting to encounter in an English translation) - take the word "awfulness." As you may or may not have reflected on, the original meaning of "awful" is "full of awe," though, of course, these days we use it to mean "very bad." How did we get there? Well, imagine sitting on a surfboard looking up at a monster wave looming over you, or standing at the top of a sheer cliff with nothing between you and a few seconds of regret before a hard landing but whistling wind. Such immensity inspires awe, but it is also dangerous, which we usually see as a bad thing. Over time, the danger came to be emphasized over the awe, and so now awful just means "pretty bad." Otto's point is that this original mixed response to something utterly beyond us pretty well captures what a raw, untaught response to the numen feels like - a sense of something big and thus worthy of respect, but also wariness. Many other instances he cites as less refined experiences of the numinous have an element of fear - the creepiness of a ghost story, the thrill of overlooking a canyon, that kind of thing.

Another of Otto's points I found especially interesting is how he distinguishes this religious experience from the merely subjective. He talks about how the experience of the numinous is felt as an encounter with something obviously separate, and obviously there - something objective, not merely subjective. This jives with my own experiences so far. A religious experience doesn't feel like "just" a feeling, it feels like an encounter with something else, which produces certain feelings. This is one of those things where Otto's sensitivity to the kinds of things empirical materialist rationalism tends to ignore shines through, I think to his credit.

Speaking of Otto taking seriously those things that rationalism tends to miss, a central thread running through the book is the importance of both the rational and the non-rational in developed religions. He has a lovely metaphor for this: the rational is the warp of religion, and the non-rational the weft, woven together into a full tapestry, but each incomplete and unstable without the other. He's careful to distinguish between the ir-rational and the non-rational: whatever is irrational goes against reason and is undone by it, but some things are not properly subject to reason (love being the canonical example, of course), and these are simply non-rational. Not against reason, but merely inadequately understood by it. In the realm of religion, the heart of this non-rational field of experience is the encounter with the numinous.

The numen is something experienced as somehow "supra-mundane": Otto uses the word "supernatural" to convey that it is qualitatively different from meeting something awe-inspiring, but wholly understandable in material terms (like a majestic mountain or an apex predator), but I prefer to avoid that term about spiritual things, because I don't believe that Gods, spirits, magic, and all the rest are "beyond" "nature." Rather, they are parts of nature far beyond our mundane experience, in part because they partake of other planes of being than the more familiar material. Because these decidedly non-ordinary experiences are outside of what our senses and reason can confidently handle, we have trouble explaining them, giving them an "ineffable" quality. In this way, such experiences are somewhat akin to subjective judgments like sublimity or beauty, but are still distinctly something else. One set of metaphors you encounter over and over again in attempted descriptions of the numinous is a quality of "void" or "emptiness." Otto had what I considered a very worthwhile insight here, which I think came from the sensitivity to qualitative factors over slavish devotion to the rational that I've been praising throughout. When you consider the objective quality of the numinous mentioned above, then it's obviously nonsensical to consider the "void" to mean actual, literal "nothing." Instead, it's an attempt to describe the utter lack of the familiar, a loss of presence or significance of all of the mundane perceptions and concerns that usually so occupy us. I rather liked this, as it helps me put a lot of spiritual writings I've always found somewhat off-putting, like much of Buddhist and Taoist teachings, in a wholly different light, whereas before I'd always picked up a sense of nihilism from my potentially naive reading of terms like "void."

One of the reasons Otto insisted on cooking up a new terminology, and that everyone since has found it useful, is that words like "sacred" and "holy" (despite the name of the book) have become less helpful due to acquiring connotations that cloud the perception of the core idea. Specifically, these words have come to have moral weight in addition to describing the sense of the "other" and "mighty" that the numinous imparts. Otto tries to deal with the complexity of this, and has some good insights, but this was one area where I felt his own religious beliefs intruded on clear-eyed analysis (more on this in a moment). Basically, he highlights the fact that many, maybe even most, experiences of the numinous include a sense of at least desirability, if not outright goodness. Something about an encounter with the numinous makes folks (at least, some folks) want more of it, to the point that some end up devoting their whole lives to it (monks, mystics, and the like). Coming at it the other way, the immensity of the numinous can also often instill feelings of smallness, inadequacy, or even unworthiness. Often, the nearest experience that folks who have encounters like this can compare to is that of being unclean in the midst of something pure. The reason I think Otto's religious beliefs overly-color his discussion of this point is that, as a Christian, he believes that all experiences of the numinous are experiences of the font of all goodness, or maybe even of Goodness itself, and that the feelings of unworthiness or uncleanness are appropriate due to mankind's fallen nature. Not all religions share these doctrinal positions, and looking at some others can make sense of them in other ways.

For one, the fact that some numinous experiences are attractive and others are quite the opposite might instead be explained by encountering the numen of different beings, some beneficent, others not. For another, feelings of unworthiness or uncleanness before such beings might not be due to some intrinsic flaw, but rather due to a condition or exposure to some unclean "substance," what was known to the ancient Greeks as miasma. If you're not familiar, the Greeks believed that certain activities, or being around certain things, left you spiritually "dirty," not due to moral judgment, but rather in the same way that if you trudge down a muddy road, you're going to be dirty, however good or necessary your reason for walking that road. Miasma came/comes from things like handling dead bodies, having sex, or contact with blood. If you're at all familiar with occult philosophy, you might notice that many (all?) of the things said to leave you with miasma expose you to etheric energy, often in some kind of unhealthy manifestation. Dead bodies have the lingering scraps of the etheric body of the once living being for a time, sex is one of the more intense exchanges of etheric energy available to living beings, and blood is powerfully infused with etheric energy as the material vehicle of the life force within a body, but once it is outside of a body, it's not part of a healthy, functioning system anymore. You find similar thoughts on ritual purity amongst many religions, ancient and modern (see especially Shinto), and maybe that's not only an unsophisticated kind of health science, but instead a genuine insight into spiritual dynamics. This an area I haven't studied as much as I'd like, and I'm not (yet) sensitive enough to make especially precise observations of my own. All of which is to say, I think this is a potentially fruitful area for research.

All of the above ties into another thread running through this book, the necessity of personal spiritual experience to a rich and full religious life. Doctrine alone won't get you there. If you've read anything else I've written on religion, you'll know that I'm big on gnosis. As a quick recap, gnosis is the kind of knowledge gained by personal experience that can't be conveyed conceptually. "Faith-knowledge," as Otto aptly calls spiritual gnosis, is simply not the same as "sense-knowledge," and so the same kinds of empirical observation that are so useful to building scientific knowledge just don't do the job for building religious knowledge. John Michael Greer gave a great example of gnosis in a response to a comment on a recent post - imagine someone shows you a spread of photographs and asks you to pick out the picture of your mother. How do you know which one is the right one? Even if you are a master physiognomist, describing every detail of bone structure, collagen distribution, and subtle variation in pigmentation, that's not how you recognize her. You just know. That's gnosis. As such, no one can tell you what the \[numinous\] is, you have to see it for yourself.

Historically, the dedicated way of "seeing" the numinous for yourself has been mysticism. For some reason, Otto is kind of down on mysticism as somehow too excessive. I suspect this is mostly his Lutheran tastes coming through (again more on that in a tick), but he seems to see mysticism as paying too much attention to the weft of the non-rational, and not enough to the warp of the rational in religion. Almost certainly, some mystics go too far, or at least it sure looks that way from the outside, and given men's ability to overdo things in every other human endeavor, it sure seems likely that it happens here too. Anyway, I think he's a bit too dismissive, even if the point that we should take the reports of mystics with some amount of salt seems reasonable to me.

For the faculty of noticing and experiencing the numinous, Otto uses the term "divination" (which, as student of occult practice, is somewhat confusing to me - where are the cards or lots or flights of birds?). He compares this faculty to aesthetic taste (again, with the caveat that it's not exactly the same, but instead merely of a similar kind). Some folks are naturally better suited to picking up on this stuff than others, but without cultivation, they will get only the grossest and vaguest of impressions. Those who put in the time and effort can make finer distinctions and come to prefer the better sorts of manifestations of the numinous. Here's another place where I largely agree with Otto, but feel like his preferences tilt him a bit off of true. Yes, training and experience lead to making worthwhile distinctions between various experiences and manifestations of the numinous, but he's a bit more dismissive of those experiences that don't accord with Christian doctrine than I think is helpful.

So, as I've mentioned a few times now, Otto was a Christian, and apparently earnest in his belief. On the plus side, he takes religion seriously in a way that "outside" observers like anthropologists or historians of religion often don't, but on the minus, his particular beliefs lead him to dismiss explanations for what he discusses that fall outside of what he accepts as orthodoxy. A Christian acquaintance pointed out that earnestly believing Christians have to take such an attitude, but that's kind of my whole point. Most polytheists can better accept ambiguity and uncertainty on some of these points, because their beliefs don't require the same kind of certainty in which experiences are correct, and which mistaken. Otto also demonstrates some of the cultural chauvinism you'd expect from an educated European of the early 20th century, pooh-poohing "primitive" religions and practices, calling out things like animism, ancestor worship, and magic as more-or-less mistaken responses to or interpretations of the spiritual Truth. Overall, though, this defect is much more mild than amongst some of his contemporaries, and he's remarkably fair-minded in recognizing pieces of beauty or truth in traditions he believes to be ultimately mistaken on fundamental questions. One example that shows both side of this coin is his discussion of "redemption:" on the one hand, he recognizes and commends teachings on redemption in religions other than Christianity, but on the other, he asserts that religions that lack this orientation don't qualify as "truly great." If you don't believe that men are fundamentally broken and in need of saving, you might feel otherwise.

As much as I liked this book, for my own idiosyncratic purposes, it lacked some things I'd have liked to see. Specifically, okay, experiencing the numinous is an important part of authentic, living religion, so how do I do that? This book was written more for the understanding and documentation of religion than for its practice, which is ultimately what I'm after. That being said, there are a few thrusts in this direction. For one, the insight that both second and third person prayers are valuable - the one fostering a personal connection with the divine, the other acknowledging that numinous beings aren't just some guys. He also devotes an appendix to the value of silent worship, helpfully delineating the different flavors - sacramental silence, which is what happens when you fall silent before something immense, waiting silence, which is where you shut up and pay attention to what the divine might be trying to convey, and the silence of communion, which is where you fall silent because you are focused on coming together with the divine. He gives examples of each, and I think this bit will come in handy for coming up with approaches to prayer and ritual.

As I said up top, overall, I think this book is well worth reading for those interested in the study of religion, especially if your interest extends to the study of religion as a field (as opposed to just wanting to study religion yourself to deepen your practice). If you're more interested in the brass tacks of practice, you might find even this quick and well-written read less helpful. Otto spells out that the encounter with something vast, mighty, and uncanny is core to a living religion that doesn't want to become dry and sterile, and gives some helpful terminology to help our rational minds and discourse grapple with this fundamentally non-rational experience. So, it strikes me that perhaps some of the value of this book is beyond the terminology, arguments, examples, and other accoutrements of rational inquiry, and instead lies in immersing yourself for a time in the thoughts and feelings of someone else who has had that encounter and tried to come back and tell the rest of us something about it. Like all other such explorers of those mysterious lands, his reports may fail to convey what it's like to truly be there, but unlike most, he brought back one heck of a map.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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Our first hurdle is that without embracing a complete, coherent system of thought and belief, we don't have a ready definition of what a "God" even is. Hell, even my language there points to a fundamental problem - is there a God, or are there lots of Gods? Not an insignificant question in the history of religious inquiry. For now, I tend to like something very much like John Michael Greer's definition from A World Full of Gods: a "God" is a being that is worshiped by humans. I might add the further qualifier that those worshipers report having religious experiences of that being, as a way to distinguish between real and pro forma worship (an example to clarify what I mean: if every single Roman citizen required to give worship to the Emperor thought "I'm just lighting this incense and pouring this wine to avoid problems with the authorities," should we consider that emperor a God?). The sharp-eyed among you might have noticed some fuzziness already in my use of the term "religious experiences" - just what the heck are those, anyway? William James, Rudolf Otto, Mircea Eliade, and others have given us some idea here, but we're necessarily dealing with something a bit fuzzy, since we're getting into subjective experience and self-reporting. The waters are further muddied by the fact that a single man might report a religious experience at one point in his life, and then later on look back and say "naw, I don't think it really was after all" - picture a hippy regretful of all of the acid trips that seemed so freighted with meaning at the time. Still, it is very nearly a human universal that folks experience something that inspires behavior we recognize as worship, and go on to do just that. All that being said, as a jumping off point, let's take a look at some of the ways folks have tried to define Gods and worship to see what kind of insights these might offer.

Starting with the most grounded, and dismissive, take, there are and have been plenty of folks who flat out don't believe in Gods at all. For a time, I counted myself among them. Many of these folks have never had a religious experience of their own, and those who have dismiss it as some kind of misfiring or error of the equipment we have to make sense of the material world. One typical argument goes something like "humans are predisposed both to seek causes behind things and to interact socially with other humans. These predispositions combine to see anthropomorphized beings behind what we cannot otherwise explain. As our ability to explain the world has expanded, the room for invisible hands steering those things has shrunk, and it's purely superstition and inertia based on these inherent predispositions that keeps some folks insisting that there is any such thing." The chief benefit of this explanation is that it doesn't rely on anything out of our experience that we can't compare with the experiences of others, and it's explainable through our currently accepted tools or understanding the world. Neurology, psychology, anthropology, even history and politics, can all perfectly well inform our understanding of religion under this model. Any discussion can be grounded in ways readily explainable to just about anyone with a functioning nervous system and normal sensory experience. Many folks are (or claim to be) wholly satisfied with this explanation, and it's certainly in keeping with the zeitgeist. You won't get kicked out of any parties or passed over for promotion for holding to this way of seeing the "Gods." The only problem is that while it might explain the craving for religion and experience of the Gods, it doesn't do anything to satisfy that craving, and leaves you in the unenviable position of trying to recreate a basis for meaning and value without any recourse to the transcendent, a project that's had its challenges at least since Nietzsche laid out the problem.

Some folks seek a way to sate this craving without abandoning the seemingly solid basis of material epistemology, leading them to engage in religious experience while believing it is "all in your head". Again, I have a certain amount of sympathy here, because I've been in this boat as well. These folks use depth psychology, usually of a Jungian flavor, to both explain what's going on and as a guide on what to do. The argument here goes something like "sure, our propensities to religious experience are materially grounded, but that doesn't make them mistaken. Religion is a toolkit of means for engaging with the non-rational parts of our self, including the titanic forces buried way down deep in our mind that are shared among folks. Since they're common to all humans, they're bigger than any one of us." Under this model, any given God is a pattern of thoughts, feelings, and experiences important and general enough that just about anyone can tap into them, especially with the right cultural "programming," through the use of symbol and ritual. "Jupiter" may not be a literal guy who lives in the sky and turns into various animals to impregnate human women, but is instead a particular collection of patterns of thought and meaning constellated around the "wise (and/or horny) king" archetype, and His various myths should be seen as symbolic tales meant to give us some understanding of those patterns through non-obvious means. Rituals in honor of this figure can help you to tap into the parts of your mind that might manifest as a beneficent, generous king, and thus bring the benefits of that way of being into your life. Say a weekly prayer to Jupiter on Thursdays (Dies Jovis - the Day of Jove/Jupiter), and you will find it easier to act like a mighty, generous king, and more of the benefits such a person might expect will come into your life. You might even experience this figure as "separate" from yourself, to the point of having mental images or conversations with Him, and He might through these give you guidance. That's just the user interface for the subconscious, taking advantage of those predispositions toward human social interaction we mentioned above. I think there's a lot of truth here, and a lot to recommend this method of understanding. We do have an outsized amount of our mind devoted to understanding and modeling other people. We do have patterns of behavior, thought, and feeling buried way down deep that can be called up through non-obvious means, and many of the benefits of calling them up likely do manifest as changes in your own understanding and ways of being (easy example: you start acting more generously, using Jupiter as a model, and more people like and respect you). The trouble is, if you're much like me, you can try this approach and find yourself unable to get past the knowledge that you're faking it. Talking to yourself. Playing pretend. LARPing. If you have that experience, as I did, while still craving religious satisfaction, you might go looking elsewhere.

One step beyond "it's all archetypes and subconscious patterns in your own mind" is the idea that the Gods are somehow emergent phenomena. Depending on just how materialist you roll, this can have a lot of overlap with the prior way of understanding Gods and religion. The wholly material explanation is that these Gods are not made up by any one person, but the understanding of Them and Their manifestations ground out in the material world in individual brains and the communication between them - myths, practices, and the beliefs they shape. These shared understandings undergo a mimetic evolution of sorts, where the stuff that resonates or "works" gets spread, while that that doesn't gets forgotten. This is pretty close to what Jordan Peterson was saying back when I last was paying much attention. A lot of rationalists and post-rationalists have become enamored of the formerly occult-only concept of the "egregore," a manifestation of collective action and incentives that seems to have a life of its own, but (if you're a rationalist, rather than an occultist) can be explained at the individual level - the way a flock of birds can be made up of individual birds each making relatively simple decisions ("turn right when the bird to my left gets too close" and the like) and end up moving as if one big organism. If you're willing to leave materialism behind a bit, you can come closer to the occult understanding of egregores and believe that collective belief, thought, and action can create something on the Astral Plane, and that something can start to act somewhat independently. So, an occult, but non-theistic, understanding of Gods would say that they are co-creations of large groups of folks, with independent existence, but only so long and to the extent that they are reinforced by belief and action by humans. I'm not totally sure, but this seems to be what Shani Oates is getting at with "God-forms" in her books. The key difference between this model and the previous is the idea that you can't just "make it up yourself." Under the archetypes and depth psychology model, theoretically you should be able to have full and satisfying religious experiences with any sufficiently crafted symbol or ritual. Under this model, only those models that have some "life" to them, whether a seeming life borne of socio-cultural reinforcement, or a more substantial artificial life in the shape of an astral construct charged with the emotional energy of many folks, will respond when you try to perform rituals or worship. Joining a currently active church or coven or whatever ought to get you better results than trying to worship Osiris with a translation of The Book of the Dead open in your hands, much less performing a ritual you made up in honor of Batman or Zardoz or one of Tolkien's Valar. Once again, I think there's something here that's right, but I take issue with it as the whole explanation. Keep that in mind for my proposed model later on.

Here, we come to the belief that has held for most folks in most times - there are many Gods, of many kinds and ways, and some of us may worship some of Them more than others, depending on where we're from, what we do, and what experiences we have. That grove over there? It has its own holy presence. This stone? Another. The great sea? Still another. Law? Again, another. Kingship? Yet another still. Gods for every thing, way of being, and institution in the world, and maybe more beyond that. This belief has much to recommend it. Folks have all kinds of religious experiences in all kinds of steads under all kinds of circumstances - why wouldn't each of those have its own God behind it, unless there's some reason to think it was the same One? Also, as I said above, this seems to be the default interpretation of folks everywhere, which some would say is an argument from popularity, but over thousands of years and across the whole earth, they just might be on to something. Polytheism is inherently bendsome and open-ended: there might be a handful of Gods or millions of Them, maybe depending on what you call a "God" rather than a spirit, angel, or other incorporeal being (and to call back to our definition, on whether or not anyone gives that being worship). Further, how you count the Gods might be influenced by the lack of certainty we've been going through on whether these beings exist, if different experiences were of the same or different beings and how to tell, or whether Their numbers might change over time (we have tales of Gods having children, are They still?). Spoiler alert, this is the position I've come to find most likely and upon which I base my practice (more on that below). The chief troubles with this belief are that it's complicated and that many religious experiences, especially of the more "mystical" variety (as in, those experienced by mystics), speak to some kind of unity between beings that can be hard to reconcile with many Gods without some philosophical hoop-jumping.

One belief that might be included in "the Gods are many," but feels worth calling out on its own due to its historical importance, is the that there are exactly two Gods. This comes in two main flavors that I know of: there is a good God and a bad God, or there is a male God and a female Goddess. The former is usually called "dualism" and is what was/is believed by Zoroastrians and the latter is best known these days as what Wiccans and their offshoots believe. In both, there is the belief that there is some kind of duality or polarity that is so fundamental that it goes right to the very bottom of all that is - Good is purely good and absolute in itself, but so is Evil. Or else the polarity between "masculine" and "feminine" is a deeply intrinsic facet of being, again, fundamental and not to be mingled. This belief neatly sidesteps some of the traditional troubles with monotheism (more on this below), like "why is there evil in the world?" or "how did we get all of this variety we experience out of the source(s) of all things?" It also appeals to a deeply and widely felt intuition of the importance of opposite and (usually) balanced forces that might be static on their own, but are alive and moving when put together. There's a certain logical appeal to it, though once you get to "there's definitely two forces/beings from which all things spring," the obvious next question is "but from whence do these spring?" Which brings us to the elephant in the room when it comes to theological discussions in today's world: monotheism.

Lastly, we come to the position most familiar to the religions of today's Western world: there is only one God (definitely with a capital 'G,' though you may have noticed that I extend this courtesy to the many Gods I believe there to be). Under this belief, all of the experience of "the holy," however unalike they may seem, wherever they may happen, and whatever may be going on when they happen, are actually of the same God. Weeping, shivering acknowledgment of your smallness in the face of the universe? God. Singing, shaking, electric ecstasy? God. Sublime brotherhood with all of mankind, or even all living things? God. This belief appeals to the kind of logic that a belief in two Gods stops just short of: if there is something divine, however multifarious our experience of it, mustn't it all come from somewhere? And mustn't that somewhere be a single thing, ultimately? Monotheists say this must be so, and if it is, that one "thing" or somewhere must be a sole God - perfect, undivided, and whole. For all of the exploration of this line of thinking, including its pitfalls and how they might be addressed, I direct you to the entire tradition of Western theology, at least since Judaism, but some would say beginning with Plato and the Greeks. Of course, there are some problems here. Why is there evil in the world? Even if ultimately all of the divine flows from one source, is it right to call this source "God?" Is it a "person" or "being" or something more impersonal, like a force? What do we make of very different religious experiences across time and space? Many of the traditional attacks on theism are, in fact, attacks on monotheism, highlighting the logical flaws in the attempts to address these pitfalls that have come about over the years.

So, each of these positions has things to recommend it, and problems it has trouble addressing. Strict materialism may seem to accord with what we've been able to learn from science, but it leaves many feeling a keen lack deep enough that it seems willfully perverse to assume the lack is right and and a way of being that makes life better and more meaningful in every way is an unfortunate error, a bug in the programming. Conceptions of the Gods as creations of mankind allow for the great variety of religious experience and the felt power of what we take to be Gods, but stumble over the seeming agency and insight of these supposed empty shells. A belief in many Gods easily handles why religious experiences are so different, but struggles with the most fundamental questions of where it all comes from and the feeling of unity and connectedness found in many religious experiences. Two Gods answers where the apparent opposites in life come from, but why only two? And lastly, a single God answers for the universality of religious beliefs and the commonalities between them, but if there is truly but one God, why do we get up to so many different weird things when we worship and seem to experience Him, and why is the world so messy and so often hurtful?

Another wrinkle in evaluating these beliefs is that these positions differ in how much weight they put on orthdoxy, the correctness of beliefs. They form a bit of a horseshoe - materialism says that opinions ought to converge due to the provably correct observations of constant natural laws, and monotheism says that opinions should converge because they all ultimately come from the same source. In both cases, differing opinions must necessarily be wrong in some important way - either by being mistaken or by willfully choosing the wrong thing (consider a Christian that believes Muslims are simply missing some important details about their belief in a single God versus those who think they have been duped by the devil, or a materialist who thinks religionists are simply superstitious fools versus one who thinks it's an intentional scam to keep others down or pick their pockets). Religions that believe in two Gods have a very similar tendency, but perhaps with more room for variation in valid beliefs and practices - Wiccans are fine with folks worshiping either Diana or Freyja, they just think both are different masks for the same ultimate Goddess. On the other hand, those who believe that the Gods are manifestations of the unconscious, co-creations of groups of folks, or that there really are lots of Gods, tend to accept variability in beliefs as a matter of course - your local God is obviously different from mine, so why wouldn't He have different characteristics, expectations, and forms of worship? This wrinkle matters less for the actual truth of these beliefs and more for our ability to investigate that question - if you start from a premise of what must be right, you'll have a hard time acknowledging contradictory evidence. Coming at it the other way, strict orthodoxy makes your beliefs more fragile to arguments about why they are wrong. If you believe that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good, questions like free will and the problem of evil become very thorny. On the other hand, if you remove even one of these famous premises, it's harder to craft a logical argument about why such a God can't be real.

In my own explorations of this topic, I've hit most of these stops. As I've talked about in more detail before, I grew up as a fairly indifferent Christian, read Mere Christianity in college, which led me to take that a bit more seriously for a while, and then slowly drifted into indifferent agnosticism and on into harder-edged materialist atheism. While an atheist, I took a shot at pursuing "spiritual" practice on the model that it was an effective way of interacting with the subconscious and the forces to be found there, but I didn't find it particularly satisfying and ended up dropping it. The single book that has had the biggest impact on my current thinking about these things was John Michael Greer's A World Full of Gods, mentioned above. This book led me to take seriously the idea that there might be lots of Gods, and it might be worth trying to get in touch with some of them to find out for myself, and so I began a daily spiritual practice calling upon the Germanish Gods as an experiment. Sure enough, within a few weeks, I had had a full blown religious experience, and I decided the experiment had been successful. Since then, I've continued to have experiences that seem to be interactions with more than one genuinely distinct non-corporeal being that is somehow "greater" than me, and so I call them "Gods," and accept that They truly are multiple in an important way, even if there might be some kind of unifying "divinity" behind them (and/or everything else - the occult teachings I'm currently working with are mostly Platonic in character).

Among the arguments that got me to give this experiment a try were those that pointed out that most arguments against Theism are really arguments against mono-theism, and even more specifically, against Christianity (such as most traditional "Problem of Evil" arguments mentioned above), and that polytheism has been the reported experience of almost every human culture ever. "Everyone believes there are lots of Gods because there really are" is just as reasonable a starting place as "everyone believes there are lots of Gods because we're all delusional in the same ways due to the same faulty wiring," unless you insist that material evidence is more valid than any other kind, which is itself a presupposition that can't be argued logically. In the end, though, I found logic and argument only got me so far. I can construct a perfectly logical explanation of how my own religious experiences have been "nothing but" my imagination, happening entirely within my head, the result of certain firings of neurons. These explanations, though, don't account particularly well for the qualitative side of these experiences. Through them I have found a sense of meaning, satisfaction, and goodness that I have found nowhere else that seems profound enough to be worth taking seriously. I've decided that even if I'm wrong, what I get out of believing these things to be true seems well worth it (and I think there's good enough reason to think I'm right to not assume I'm deluding myself, but I won't hold it against you, dear reader, if you disagree).

One of the reasons I wanted to lay out the classic occult model of the planes before writing this post is that I think it gives us a terminology to discuss what is or might be going on that is lacking when we stick to the tools of more mundane exploration we've been using so far. I've talked a lot about "experiences" and been vague about what that includes. If you dig into reading about religious experiences, you'll hear descriptions of sights, sounds, feelings, and more. Sometimes it's hard to tell if these folks are describing literally seeing/hearing something, as if it were material and right there, or if it appeared "in the mind's eye." The Planes of Being give us a helpful way of discussing this. For my part, most of my religious experiences have been primarily Astral in nature - they have happened "in my imagination" with much the same quality as what happens when I daydream or fantasize or engage deeply with a book. That being said, they don't feel just like those things, as my earlier experimentations with "depth psychology religion" did. Some of the more striking have included feelings of liveliness, energy, and tingling that I assume were mainly Etheric in nature, and the prevailing sense of meaning that makes them feel more significant than fantasizing about when I'm a rich and famous writer (hah) seems likely to be a hint of the Mental or higher planes. The sense of otherness worthy of respect seems likely to be an echo of the Spiritual or higher planes. I suspect all of these are significant, but given its prominence, it's the Astral part of things I want to dig into the most.

As I said, most of what has gone on during the experiences I believe to have been of Gods has been astral in nature - images that come to mind, feelings, unprompted thoughts, and so forth. I am still learning to discern the fuzzy difference between things that I "make up" and things that I "perceive" astrally, but there is a difference in how it feels. Think about a time you've tried to imagine something specific, vividly - maybe you're trying to draw a picture and want to see it in your mind's eye before you draw it, or perhaps you've tried to recreate a piece of music you heard but can't quite call to mind. For me, at least, there's a clear feeling of effort, and the image or sound or other sensation I am trying to reproduce will often be fuzzier than I want it to be. On the other hand, now try to think of a time where you've been struck by something forcibly - maybe a horrible image that popped into your mind and wouldn't go away, or a song that's stuck in your head, or an emotion you just can't shake. That's more what astral "perception" tends to feel like to me (though in the case of the Gods, far more pleasant than any of those examples). What's really striking is that sometimes I can feel it pass from one over into the other - I begin by working to picture something, and then it "shifts" or "takes on a life of its own" and the feeling of productive effort goes away.

Our model of the planes gives us a handy way to understand this. The astral plane is a mode of experience shared by all conscious beings. Apparently, part of that mode of experience, is to "come up" with things - new images, sounds, nuances of feeling. Also apparently, part of that mode of experience is to "run into things" - images, sounds, and so forth that just "pop into your head." So, it seems that whatever the astral is "made of" (imperfect analogy, since it's not material), we can both shape it and perceive shapes within it (again, imperfect analogy, as I'm using "shape" for all modes of "sensory" stimulus - sight, sound, feeling, emotion, and so forth). So, when we feel things are effortful, we are exerting some kind of shaping influence on the astral, and when they just come to us, we are encountering something that has been shaped already by someone or something else. Sometimes these efforts can be shared - like all of these examples I've been prompting you with. I've given you a general idea, and to the degree you've played along, you've shaped or recalled something in line with that idea.

I believe that this co-creation of astral phenomena is one key to understanding what's going on with most experiences of Gods - co-creation both between multiple humans, as well as between humans and the Gods. If I just say the name "Thor," an image might come to mind, but depending on your own associations and proclivities, it could be wildly variable - maybe it's a Romantic painting, maybe it's your own imagining, or maybe it's Chris Hemsworth. On the other hand, if I do something more to specify what I mean, I can guide you closer to what I have in mind. In one sense, art is the ultimate "guiding" of this sort - I literally show you what I had in my mind, so we can both see (almost) the same thing. On the other hand, even there, it's not all one-way. If I paint a beautiful depiction of a lithe, beardless young man, perfect in all of its technical execution, and an exact match to what I pictured in my head before putting brush to canvas, and then tell you "this is Thor," you're going to be like "no, it's not." For a variety of reasons (more on some of those in a tick), "Thor" means something, and it is not "lithe, beardless young man." Maybe more interestingly are those depictions that are in more of a gray area. I might see a painting of Thor and while it gets the essentials right (burly, prime-of-his-life, beard, red hair, hammer, and so forth), and I might even like the picture, sometimes it's just not "right" to me (here's one, for example). Here, the artist has clearly conveyed his vision, and there's a lot we'd agree on, but it just doesn't quite feel right to me as "really" representing Thor, the God who receives worship, rather than a mere fictional character. I wouldn't get upset with anyone picturing this when trying to picture Thor, but I'm not going to be doing so. But maybe some element of it does work for me - like those cool bracers, which I assume are the artist's take on His iron gloves, with which He catches red-hot Mjolnir after felling a troll somewhere. The pattern on them is subtly reminiscent of a face, which is a common motif in Germanic art. So, maybe if I decide to take a crack at drawing or painting Thor, I'll incorporate something like that.

My current model is that this back-and-forth exchange of astral material (even if instantiated in material form, like a painting or a carving, or the words on a page) builds up shared (or at least partially shared) astral forms that can be "perceived" rather than "made up" (though obviously this is fuzzy). So far, so good, right? Well, here's where things start getting weird. Remember how I said that I thought the "Gods are a Co-Creation of Mankind" line of thought was somewhat right? I think that the astral forms of the Gods are a co-creation of mankind (mostly), and that most of the time, that's as close as we get to experiencing Them directly. The Gods, though, you'll remember from our discussion of the planes, aren't mainly astral beings - Their true existence is on higher planes that we can't access directly except perhaps in very special circumstances, with Their help. Instead, They reach down to the "common ground" we share on the Astral Plane. Through our art, stories, songs, and so forth, we come up with particular, perceivable, understandable shapes to represent the Gods, and in our interactions with Them, They temporarily inhabit and bring to life those shapes. Lest you think I'm straying too close to "it's all made up and arbitrary," though, I would point out that the Gods are Their own beings, with Their own agency - almost certainly far more agency than we have. So, it's not like we as a species just make things up and then call down whatever we want into those things. Instead, I believe that the Gods get a say too. Sometimes this might be startling and direct - I've read stories of folks who suddenly had a vision (astrally) of a figure, and when they've gone and done some research, that figure very clearly corresponds to the traditional depictions of a God that this person had never seen or heard of before. Other times, I think it works by reinforcement - no matter how many times I try to call upon Thor with an astral image of a lithe, beardless young man, He's not going to show up. I'll just be talking to myself and daydreaming. When I get the astral form more "right," maybe my results are better, and tweaks along the way work more consistently. Repeat this process among many folks over many years, and you get standardized iconography, epithets, and ritual.

One advantage of this model is that it gives a solution to the question of what to make of changes to worship and belief over long stretches of time, to the point where they no longer seem to be "the same" (though, admittedly, not one that is as satisfyingly definite as I might like). Here's an example of what I mean: the Greeks, Romans, Germans, Aryans, and maybe more (evidence is scantier for the Slavs and Celts) had myths about a burly heroic God who was famous for killing monsters with his magical blunt instrument. Indo-Europeanists take this as pretty solid evidence that the speakers of Proto-Indo-European worshiped a God with these characteristics, and their daughter cultures carried on myths and worship of this figure, but those myths and worship changed and diverged over time. To the Greeks and Romans, this became Herakles/Hercules, the son of the Thunderer. For the Aryans and the Germans, this figure is the Thunderer, but among the Aryans, He is the king of the Gods, and among the Germans, the king's son. Are these different Gods? The same God worshiped in different ways with different tales told about Him? If the former, how do you explain the continuity and similarities? If the latter, how do you explain the divergence and differences? Here's where my attempt at an answer comes in, and why it's not as satisfying as I might like: it gives us an excellent answer as to why images, stories, and modes of worship might change while still maintaining that when a worshiper makes a call, Somebody's home. What's not so satisfying is that it doesn't give a very definitive answer as to whether it's the same Somebody that answers the call. This model is equally satisfied with an answer where a single divine being is willing to respond to very different prayers and worship over time and across space, so long as those prayers and worship are close enough to His nature to be fitting, as it is with the answer that over time, astral forms change enough that Someone Else comes to make use of a form that evolved from an earlier form that served another God. As I said, it leaves some open questions, but it at least reconciles historical, comparative, religious, and occult philosophical lines of evidence. I tend to use passage of time and changes to culture as a rough proxy for how likely two astral forms are to be inhabited by the same God - I think it quite likely that whether someone calls on Woden or Odhinn, he's getting a response from the spiritual being inhabiting the astral form, but it's less likely that someone calling on Thor and Indra (or Zeus, or Perun) is calling on the same God, but I can't really say for sure.

Ultimately, this whole discussion isn't really needed at all. I think that when it comes to religion, what you do and come to know through experience (gnosis) holds far more weight than a set of propositions you think are true (episteme). You can get very satisfying spiritual results without giving any of these ideas another moment's thought ever again. So, why'd we just spend so much time on it? Well, for one, I find this stuff interesting, and I thought you might too. For another, I believe that rational inquiry is one of the gifts given us by the Gods, and stretching it to the very bounds of what it can handle is a way of both developing our own powers as well as honoring what has been given. Lastly, I believe that thinking through some of the difficulties of religious experience, both our own difficulties and those raised by others, can help make it easier to accept and heed those experiences and what we get from them. Shortly after my "conversion experience," I wrote a letter to a good friend of mine who happens to be both a Christian and rather knowledgeable about myth, ancient history, and esotericism of various sorts. In it, I shared that it felt a bit embarrassing to admit to others than I earnestly, truthfully pray and make drink offerings to the Gods of the Anglo-Saxons. Looking back, I recognize that some of that embarrassment came from the discomfort most of us in today's world feel for anything sincere and not cloaked in multiple layers of protective irony, but my friend had a very insightful reply for which I am still thankful. He pointed out that the idea that polytheism was somehow "silly" or "primitive" or "unsophisticated" was, in fact, a relic of Christian missionaries and polemicists, who saw the austere simplicity of a single God as more serious and logically satisfying, and hammered on that as a selling point for their beliefs. Ever since they won, in the West, at least, that attitude has remained, and is likely still lurking somewhere if it hasn't been addressed. So, consider this piece an attempt at coming at that head on, so that I (and again, perhaps you) might feel just a touch more justified in acknowledging my (your) own religious experiences.

As groping, hazy, and confusing as they might sometimes be - they're at least not "irrational," and there is, after all, some comfort there for those of us who value reason.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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This one loosened up the "three stanza" format I tried with the previous ones and also breaks all the rules of Anglo-Saxon long lines on line two, but it has a few more mythic references than other versions, and I mostly like its rhythm.

All Father, || who art in Fallhall,
Welcome us with mead, || as our forefathers before us
From barrows cold || called on to your benches.
From plighted eye, || plucked fearlessly,
Share your drink || drawn from Meomer's Well
That we lose not || learning hard-won.
By Wyrd's dear Runes, || raven's whispers,
Let us rise up || and look full upon
Those worlds ninefold || with naught hidden from our sight.
Alu.

This one is another take on what I did with the Lord of Fallhall's Prayer - both are modeled very closely on the "Our Father/Lord's Prayer," though this one departs a bit more semantically, as I was mostly seeking to emulate the rhythm, and secondarily things like repetition and alliteration. Mark that this one doesn't follow any kind of Germanish Lay, but instead rests its poetry on evoking the feel of the familiar Christian prayer.

All Father, who art in Fallhall,
Welcome is thy call,
Thy wisdom taught, thy mead be shared,
On earth as it is in Fallhall.
Teach us this life your mighty Rune,
And open our inmost souls,
As we open our eyes to what's before us.
Let us not forget your teachings,
And make fast our mind-stock,
For thine are the worlds nine,
And the Tree on which they hang,
Forever and Ever.
Alu.

This one obviously shares a lot with Draft 3 - I was mostly trying to see if I could get more of a clear through-line with some of the same ideas.

All Father, || who art in Fallhall,
Welcome is thy call - || from cold barrows
To benches warm, || where beer freely flows,
Almost as stirring || as mind-stock there shared.
Wisdom you won || from Wells threefold:
Mighty was your thirst, || as Meomer well-saw!
Through worlds all-nine || naught is hidden to you,
With ravens whispering || rede overheard,
Kindly teach to us || the ken you have learned.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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We'll begin with the plane most obvious to us with the least controversial existence - the material. This is the realm of experience that includes matter and energy, the one that materialists claim is all there is. The scientific method is our species's great triumph in interrogating and understanding this plane, and we have learned much by assuming that things ought to be explainable on this plane, and setting about clever ways to work those explanations out. See all of 19th and 20th century physics for a hint at how far exploration of only this plane can take us. I don't think I need to say much here, as most of us have a pretty good grip on what the material world is like and how our experience is shaped by it. Our senses give us certain information about the world around us, certain forces and laws that can be observed and measured influence us, and what we can accomplish is limited by certain constraints. Straightforward enough.

Some practical tips for the Material Plane: If you want to explore this plane, the first and most important thing is to pay attention (this will be a running theme). Spend some time observing very closely what your senses are telling you. Get curious about things you usually take for granted. If you want to go deep, science is your greatest tool, with some helpful assists from philosophy, art, and history. For your material body, do all the stuff you already know you should be doing to take care of your health: eat a good mix of real foods, get a decent amount of moderate exercise, sleep enough, and so forth.

As we leave the familiar material plane, we run into one of the bits of planar lore that you might find confusing if you decide to do some reading of your own, which is the seemingly fundamental concept of "how many planes even are there? and what are they?" At first glance, it looks like a big, ugly jumble with little to no agreement amongst occultists of various stripes and times, which might lead you think it's all mularkey. Careful attention suggests an alternate explanation, though: different thinkers and explorers have drawn the borders at different places, some lumping together fields of experience, others parsing them more precisely. But when you actually dig in to what is described, you find a great deal of agreement, albeit with different categorization, which isn't so surprising when you consider we're talking about fields of experience that are not so amenable to experimental and shareable verification as material experience. The model of seven planes that I currently work with comes from John Michael Greer, and is drawn largely from late 19th and early 20th century occultism, which is itself a distant descendant and rebirth of Renaissance occultism, which was a descendant of traditions reaching back to ancient Greece and Egypt ("Hermeticism" is the usual word for this throughline, as Hellenistic (and maybe earlier) explorers of the esoteric traced the tradition back to the Greek God Hermes, syncretized with the Egyptian Thoth). The seven-fold division is something you'll find all over the place in occult literature, and it most likely derives from the seven classical "planets" (luminary bodies visible to the naked eye that move through the sky in different relative positions, rather than keeping fixed positions like the stars - the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn). This puts this system farther toward the "fine distinctions" end of things, as opposed, say, to some Revival Druidry teachings I'm also working with that settle on three planes, clustering these seven into broader categories (Physical for one, Etheric + Astral + Mental for two, and Spiritual, Causal, and Divine for the last).

Anyhow, as for the Etheric itself, this is the plane of the "life force" that is commonly experienced and understood by just about every culture ever except for the modern industrial world. Think of Obi-Wan talking about the Force, and you're not too far off. One clear, if fairly harsh, way to understand what the etheric plane is about is to find yourself looking at a fresh corpse, especially one of a pet or loved one. If you've ever had this unfortunate experience, it'll have been obvious that this collection of matter is not the person or animal that was there a few hours ago. A materialist might say that this sense comes from picking up on subtle physical cues like the lack of breath or subconsciously-noticeable movement, but the occult explanation is in some ways more straightforward: something that was there before is now gone - the etheric body that gives life to dull matter. Another common way we experience the etheric plane is when we go to a place and get a sense of its "vibes" - are there some places where you just feel good, and you don't really know why? Or where you feel unsettled and want to leave straightaway? A large part of that is likely what's going on there etherically. More personally, any time you feel alert, alive, and full of energy, your etheric "body" is likely doing well, and any time you feel drained, sluggish, or unhealthy, it's likely not.

I mentioned that this plane is one of the first where you get into disagreements about how many planes there are and where their borders are, because some folks consider the etheric the least-obvious part of the material plane, others the "most physical" part of the astral plane, and still others call it a plane of its own (as this system does). The different categorizations stem from the fact that the etheric plane interacts pretty strongly with both the material and astral planes. Ever gone for a run or done a hard lift and walked away feeling strong and alive and on top of the world? You just charged up your etheric body. On the other hand, if you've done one of those and come away drained and exhausted, you maybe pushed your etheric body too hard. Alternatively, ever found yourself stirred and driven by an inspiring story or uplifting song (maybe before or during that run or lift)? Here, the astral has woken up the etheric body. The point is, if you pay close attention, you'll start noticing that this feeling of energy is correlated, but not 100%, with what is going on in your body or your thoughts and emotions.

One rather dramatic illustration of this struck me a few years ago. I teach at a university, and in the spring of 2020, we had to go from teaching in person to teaching via Zoom. From one week to the next, I went from giving a lecture to a room full of students to giving the exact same lecture to a computer screen. Before that, I had never understood what folks meant when they talked about getting "energy" from a crowd while public speaking, but this made it very clear. After a lecture in person, I'm usually a bit tired, but I feel good, satisfied. After giving a Zoom lecture, I felt completely drained and foggy, like I needed a nap. Another, slightly spicier case - have you ever found yourself surprised to feel attracted to or aroused by someone? When I was in college, there was a girl in one of my classes, and every time I was around her, I was distractingly turned on, but if I thought about her when she wasn't around, I was like "she's cute and seems nice," but that was all. Looking back, I suspect that something about our etheric bodies was compatible, but less so astrally, in which case my imagination would have been more inflamed (of course, it might also have been something physical, like pheremones, but either way, the difference was very striking).

Some practical tips for the Etheric Plane: Most of what you do to explore the material world can help in exploring the etheric plane as well, but you'll have to pay attention to some different things. For me, I most strongly feel what I believe to be etheric influence as a tingly feeling of "energy," mostly in my chest and belly, but sometimes in my arms or the back of my neck. From what I hear, something like this is fairly common, but other folks experience it different ways - some see colors or flows of energy, some just get an intuitive sense of things, others feel some physical movements as easier or harder, so there's a lot of variation. Pay attention to how you feel at different places and see if being around certain people perks you up or drains you. As for taking care of your etheric body, all of the physical stuff will help, but add to that regular doses of clean, fresh air and sunlight. Intentional breathing exercises, like pranayama or Wim Hof breathing, can help to cultivate etheric energy and the health of your etheric body. Cold water can also be helpful, though you don't have to go full polar bear - even a washcloth of cold water rubbed all over your body can have a remarkably invigorating effect. Sex is another place you can learn things: when are you turned on? When are you not turned on even if your mind says you "should" be? How do you feel after having sex? What about after getting yourself off? All of these can be useful clues about how these experiences are not only mediated by raw physicality or mental images and emotions.

This is the plane that almost every model of the planes includes as its own thing, in large part since it is where most occult work takes place. The Astral Plane is the plane of concrete thoughts and emotions - images, sounds, words, and all of the feelings that go along with them. Whenever you daydream, whenever you read a novel and imagine what is going on, whenever you craft an argument in your head before saying it out loud, you are operating mostly on the Astral. Maybe our purest experience of the Astral Plane is when we dream. That being said, most of what consider "thinking" happens on the Astral (more on the exceptions when we get to the Mental Plane). The Astral has a funny relationship to time and space - it has some kind of association, which you'll notice if you have a favorite place to read or study, or if you've ever felt certain thoughts or feelings stirred by a place where something important happened, but it can also clearly ignore typical spatial limits, as when you find yourself thinking the thoughts of an Athenian from more than 2,000 years ago by reading his works, or the way that in a dream you can be in a room that is simultaneously your childhood bedroom and a library.

If you give any credence to the more woo-woo way of taking this model, this is where things start to get really interesting. The Astral Plane provides the causal mechanism for most phenomena we call "psychic" or "magical." If you are a materialist, there are some ways to assume that these effects might be possible with some kind of physical intermediation, even if its non-obvious. For example, if I vividly imagine an emotion I want you to feel and focus all of my mental effort on "putting it on you," and you end up feeling that emotion, the occult explanation would be that I've influenced you via the Astral Plane. A materialist would likely look for some means of physically transmitting that intention - words spoken between us, subtle body language cues, pheremones, or something of the kind. Whatever your beliefs, I ask you for a moment to consider what I think is one of the most interesting (and sometimes alarming) implications of the occult model. In the occult understanding, most thinking is more akin to an act of perception than production - you are accessing things that are "out there" in the astral. In some sense, as you direct your thinking, it is less that you are "making" your thoughts as you are steering from one to the next, an act of exploration rather than of creation. Now, my current understanding is that this isn't 100% the case - there is some amount of creation involved, but it gets fuzzy and hard to tell what is creation and what perception. As far as I know, most occultists don't believe that every thought, imagination, or feeling that will ever be conceived is pre-existing and just waiting for us to find it. But most thinking, especially the kind that involves concrete imagination of sights, sounds, smells, and so forth, is built out of our stock of experience. I have a much easier time imagining a newly-made-up tree for having seen a lot of trees in my life - something of all of those trees is in the new one. If I had lived my whole life in a desert or out on the steppe, I might not be able to conjure an image of a tree at all! Likewise, none of us is an island, and we grow up surrounded by the stories, images, and other accoutrements of our culture. We likewise draw on these when we imagine things. Another example is that if you've ever collaborated with someone on a creative project, you've also no doubt had the experience of describing things to each other, each of you adding on to what the other puts out there, and ending up with something that neither of you could have made on your own.

The point is, the occult view is that the products of these imaginings are now "out there" in the astral - the more thought, effort, and emotion you put into coming up with it, the more sturdy the new image. If you repeatedly come back to the same imagining and each time invest it with as much vividness as you can, over time, it might start surprising you with some amount of independence - think of the way authors of fiction talk about a character "taking on a life of his own" or letting him know that "I wouldn't do that." So far so good, but the really freaky implication of the occult model is that these constructs are not "just in your head." "In your head" is not a real place, it's just the part of the Astral where you have the greatest perception and control. But everything you put into the astral is now out in the realm of experience shared by all conscious beings. If your thinking is at least as much "finding" as it is "making," that means so is everyone else's, and if something you made/found/shaped is out there, then others can find it too. And more freaky still, "your" thoughts might not always be as wholly your own as you like to think. The more time you spend with the thoughts of others, the more they become your thoughts. The more time, effort, and energy you put into certain kinds of thoughts, the more your astral life will happen in the kind of neighborhoods where those thoughts are at home. In other words, spend all your time thinking hateful thoughts and around hateful folks, and you will find it harder to have any other kinds of thoughts or feelings. And so will the folks around you. Scary stuff.

Some Practical Tips for the Astral Plane: To explore the Astral, find various "creative" ways to use your mind. Daydream. Draw. Write fiction. Fantasize. Make music. As you do, pay attention to what feels like hard work and what just "comes to you." Pay attention also to what kind of stuff you spend your time with - what shows do you watch? What social media do you read? What music do you listen to? Do you find yourself having more or fewer of certain kinds of thoughts when you spend more time with certain kinds of media? Or people? Discursive meditation and basic ritual are also great ways develop your astral awareness, if you want to jump in with both feet. As for keeping your astral body healthy, here, "you are what you think." Try to pay attention to how you think, what you think about, and especially what you vividly visualize or fantasize about. Is that what you want your thoughts to feel like? If not, find some ways to start avoiding the kind of thoughts you want to indulge in less. For example, I tend to get pissed at other drivers for doing things that inconvenience me or that I don't understand. In the grand scheme of things, that's kind of a stupid thing to get mad about. So when I catch myself feeling that way, I try to remind myself that this person is not necessarily an idiot or an asshole, but rather they just did something that I wish they didn't, and it's me reacting that is causing the anger. A word of caution here: I don't think you'll have a very good time trying to overly-constrict your thinking, for example by trying to think nothing but happy thoughts at all times, squashing forcibly any anger, grief, or other "bad" emotions. Those feelings, or at least the tendencies toward them, are just as much a part of you as the "good" ones, and a certain amount of exploration and acceptance is helpful. That's one reason meditation and ritual are so helpful - they help you develop a better sense for when you are in the grip of some feeling and it is steering you, rather than when you are feeling it or trying to understand it.

Things get a bit tough with the mental plane, as we have only very limited direct access to it. All through this post, I've been mentioning "bodies" on each of the planes, so I suppose I ought to talk a bit about that. In the teachings I work with, we exist on more than one plane, and the part of our existence on each plane can be referred to as a "body." On the material plane this is, you guessed it, our literal, physical body, the thing even the staunchest materialist acknowledges as existing (well, unless you run into some real weirdos like the brain-in-a-jar folks that helped inspire The Matrix). On the other planes, these "bodies" are a little different, and they don't map exactly one-to-one with our physical body, though there are important points of overlap. Chakras, meridians, and other systems of energy centers are various attempts to map these subtle bodies out, but then so are auras. Being the closest to the material, your etheric body is the most like it and most closely linked to it - it fills and interpenetrates everywhere your body is and extends a few inches beyond it, though it's capable of interacting with things beyond that range. Your astral body, what is often called your aura, extends up to a few feet vaguely in the shape of an elongated sphere or egg, though the area around your head tends to be especially active and visible to folks with that gift either naturally or through hard work. The reason I bring this up now is because it's at the mental plane that things get a bit weird. Again, according to the system I work with, we don't really have a mental body yet. Instead, we have a far less-developed presence called a "sheath." We're able to experience the mental plane, but not as directly or with as much control as on the other planes. So, any description of it is necessarily tentative and vague.

With these caveats in mind (heh), the mental plane is the realm of meaning, pattern, and value. When you've been pounding your mind against a thorny math or philosophy problem and it suddenly "clicks," you've perceived something about the problem on the mental plane. When you infer a unity between disparate examples, you are getting at least a taste of the mental plane. As I said above, much of what we tend to consider "thinking" doesn't happen on this plane, despite its name, as most thinking is more concerned with the concrete: objects, forces, emotions, and so forth. In and of themselves, words are astral phenomenon, as they are concrete representations (in sound, text, or the mind's ear/eye) of the things they refer to, but our ability to use words for more than immediately referring to objects of sense experience comes from some link to the mental plane, and certainly words can be a vehicle for the kind of insights that come from there, but the essence of the mental plane is fundamentally ineffable. If you've ever learned another language, try to think about when a particular collection of sounds, or certain arbitrary changes to those sounds for grammatical purposes, started to mean something. It's the itch you get when you notice a translator has rendered arete as "excellence" and thereby lost some of its nuance, or when someone says "octopuses" instead of "octopodes" (mostly joking here). It's the feeling of "getting" something rather than merely repeating the arguments for it you've heard from elsewhere.

Some Practical Tips for the Mental Plane: As I said, we have far less capacity for direct experience of the mental plane than those discussed so far. Developing further is ahead of us, when each of us reaches a point of no longer needing material incarnation (oh yeah, the teachings I work with also assume reincarnation as a given, with eventual incarnation into non-physical forms). In the meantime, we can get some intimations of the mental plane through the kind of work that grapples with meaning and value, especially of the abstract, hard-to-concretize kind. Studying math or philosophy can do it, but the very best practice is discursive meditation on a variety of subjects symbolic, philosophical, and spiritual.

Remember how I said the mental plane is where things get vague? Well, beyond that, things get downright obscure. Above the mental plane, we do not even have a sheath, and so we have no direct experience of these planes in the ordinary course of things. Instead, only the divine spark that accumulates the means to experience and understand each of the planes - the soul - touches these planes, and due to the lack of a body or sheath, only in a very vague, you might even say "sleeping" way. From this comes your consciousness - the part of you that notices when you notice something, for which one set of physical, etheric, astral, and mental stimuli differs from another. But as that implies, it mostly only does so through the mediation of the planes where we have some capacity for experience and control. Tastes of these planes might come through particular religious or mystical experiences, with the help of non-physical beings (in plain English: Gods and spirits). Thanks to this, our knowledge of these planes is theoretical and based on what is shared by folks who have had these kinds of experiences, or inferred from the kinds of meanings and values grasped in our tentative contact with the mental plane (which is, of course, reflecting something of these planes, just as every other plane is in its own way). Teachings of oneness, of impersonal and universal love, and of transcendence of all kinds come from these experiences, and these notions of transcendent unity underlie the system taught here. At the very top is the source of all rules, causality, and goodness (this system derives largely from the Platonic, which likely drew on teachings from Pythagoras and he claimed to get most of his stuff from Egypt, so this may sound familiar if you've encountered those).

Some Practical Tips for the Spiritual Plane: Here we mostly leave the realm of DIY experimentation and get into the realm of religion. If you want to gain experience of the Spiritual, Causal, and Divine Planes, you'll very likely need some higher help. Regular prayer and worship of some kind are the traditional approaches here, but the good news is that it seems like just about every religion ever practiced by mankind will work (you'll just have different experiences and learn different things along the way). If you are especially drawn to this kind of exploration, those paths usually called "mystic" most directly try to approach this realm of experience. In the West, that mostly means some of the weirder ends of Christianity, but some work has been done to cast light on non-Christian approaches, and in the Mid- and Far East, there are many traditions of mysticism appropriate to their religions. Admittedly, at this point, we've likely left behind where this model can be thought of as a helpful, materialist-friendly metaphor, as this level and above posits things pretty much wholly outside of material experience, but even if that is where you started, perhaps your explorations of the other planes will give you some cause to consider the value of religion.

So, there you have a very quick and very incomplete survey of the planes of being. I've set them out here as much to solidify and test my own understanding as to teach, but I hope you'll find this helpful nonetheless. As I said, I have found this a useful lens for understanding my experience, most of all what has come from spiritual practice, so hopefully you might as well. I also think that having a post to refer back to will come in handy for some things I want to share down the line, like "are Zeus and Jupiter the same God, or what? What about Dyeus Phater of the Proto-Indo-Europeans?" Of course I'm happy to answer any questions, but I'm still very much learning, so I can't claim any authority and I encourage you to do your own research. If you have any knowledge or experience that contradicts any of this, I'd love to hear about it. Otherwise, happy exploring!

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

Want to get new posts emailed to your inbox? Sign up here.

---

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

Want to get new posts emailed to your inbox? Sign up here.

---

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

Want to get new posts emailed to your inbox? Sign up here.

---

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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As I said above, most of what has gotten me thinking about this is running across talk about what this thing is not, so I feel almost as if I must start apophatically, with one of the bigger ideas that is nearly the opposite of what I want to define: James C. Scott's Legibility. Scott discusses this in Seeing Like a State, but I first found the idea in The Uruk Project series on sam[]zdat. My understanding of legibility is the desire by technocratic managerial types to render the complexities of life, especially as they regard politics and economics, understandable and standardized. It's easy to see the good side of this, especially within the prejudices of our culture. I'll give an easy example: street addresses. If you want to find a building, or to send a letter from far away, having a unique identifier makes that far easier. In the days before addresses, the way you mailed a letter was to find someone going vaguely toward where you wanted it to go, pay him some money, enough that he could pass some of it on and keep a bit for himself, ask him to find someone heading even closer to where you want it to go, and give it to that guy to take it the next leg of the trip, and so on. Eventually, when it got to the town where it was going, whoever had it would ask around until he found someone who knew whoever you were sending it to, and then go knock on the door and confirm that guy was there. Likewise, if you were in a new town and wanted to find a business, folks couldn't just say "go to 1234 West Street." They'd have to say something more like "okay, go down the main street, then when you see the Red Lion pub, not the Blue Panther, turn right, walk for 5 or 10 minutes, and when you see the big oak that was hit by lightning, you've found the place." To a typical modern guy, having an address, ideally in a logical grid, just makes sense and seems way easier and better. And maybe for addresses it is.

But let's go to another case of legibility we take for granted: last names. Back in the day, if you were talking about someone, you'd say "oh yeah, you should talk to John," and if your interlocutor was like "which one?" You could say "oh, you know, the smith's son." If there's only two or three Johns around, and only one of them has a smith for a dad, that's plenty good. But what about when you're not from around here and you don't know John or the smith or who is whose son? That's a lot less helpful. On the other hand, if you say "okay, the smith is going to be Bob Smith, and his son will keep his name, so now he's John Smith," well, it's a lot easier to find John Smith if you're from out of town, which sounds pretty helpful, right? Except, you know who comes from out of town and wants to be able to find folks easily? The taxman and the press-gang. Last names, and other legible ways to identify folks, were mostly dreamed up by the state as ways to more readily gather taxes and conscripts. If you don't want to pay your taxes or die in some faraway land, all of a sudden, legibility doesn't look so hot.

One more example that starts hitting closer to what I'm trying to work out here: laws and their application. Once again, given our modern presumptions, it's quite likely that a consistent, universal, and easily-understood application of the law strikes you as a good idea. Let's go with public drunkenness. If you have a town or neighborhood overrun by rowdy drunks breaking things, picking fights, and passing out in the street, that's obviously not good. A nice, legible public-drunkenness law that arrests anyone being drunk and disorderly, enforced to the same standard on anyone, sounds fair, right? Sure, but let's contrast with a small town with a sheriff as the only peacekeeper. One day, Old Jed is found in the street drunk and waving his gun around, shouting incoherently at anyone who so much as looks at him. Under a legible, universalist application of the law, this is an open-and-shut case. Arrest him, lock him up, and convict him with the eye witness testimony of everyone in town. On the other hand, what if Old Jed has never broken a law in his life, is a well-loved member of the community who has lent a hand putting up every building in town since his farm was the first homestead for miles, and the reason he's gone on a crazy bender is because his wife of 50 years just died and he's mad with grief? Should Old Jed get treated the same way as Mean Gus, a drunkard and brawler mixed up with the Red Bandana gang? Maybe not. Having a system where you say "hey, sheriff, keep the peace in your county, use whatever means you have and the best judgment you can" is not very legible. The steely-eyed sheriff is going to decide, based on years of experience, his own sense of fairness, and the support (or lack thereof) of the community whether he should just lock up Old Jed for the night to dry up and not press charges, or throw the book at him to show that no one is above the law.

What I'm getting at is that legibility is not an unalloyed good - yes, often, it has its upsides, but like most things in this messy world, those upsides come with trade-offs. Another example: much of modern, "evidence-based" medicine is built on legibility - look at epidemiological factors, play the odds, make the call that you can back up with studies and statistics. On the other hand, the human body and its health is incredibly complex, and what works for one guy doesn't work for another. Sometimes, the right call for most folks is exactly the wrong call for this guy right here, or the other way around, and a doctor who deeply knows his patient can make a call that "by the numbers" looks all wrong. Legibility is all about what makes sense on average, from far away, at a low level of resolution. In situations where you can't rely on deep familiarity, judgment, and caring about the folks involved, legible approaches are often very helpful, but they can erase those factors when applied crudely (spoiler alert: they're usually applied crudely). It used to be that many, if not most, of the decisions that affected our lives happened in a high-touch, high-knowledge context full of judgment calls and subject to nuance and extenuating circumstances. Of course, these kinds of judgment calls can be terrible when the folks making them are assholes or can't be bothered, which is one of the reasons legibility has caught on so much in our culture, but they can be extremely flexible and responsive when handled by reasonably decent folks. Also, though legible processes can put a floor on how badly things can go by disallowing the worst abuses, they also tend to put a ceiling on how great the outcomes can be by leaving no box to check for the exceptional.

Okay, so if legibility is the opposite of what I have in mind for politics and economics, what's an approach to those fields that leans on the strength of the thing we're trying to discover? The first one that comes to mind is subsidiarity. As far as I know, this idea originates in the Catholic Church (happy to be corrected here), where it means that lower levels of the church hierarchy ought to handle as much as they can without stepping on the toes of other jurisdictions or ignoring the authority of higher levels. But it's a handy way to think about certain political and economic systems as well. Politically, the original intention for the United States hewed pretty closely to this, and in a very different way, so did feudalism. Decisions were made, disputes resolved, and judgments enforced at the lowest level that was able to do so effectively. In the US, that meant that the city handled what it could, the county what needed a wider scope of authority/coordination, the state whatever was bigger than that, and the federal government above that (you'll note, he said wryly, the past tense used here). In the feudal system, if two peasants had a dispute, they went to their lord, if a lord had a dispute with his reeve, they went to the next lord up, and if two mighty lords had a problem, they went to the king (this is all greatly simplified, of course). In economics, Schumacher proposed a similar devolution of decision-making in economic matters in Small is Beautiful. The core idea is that in politics and economics, there is so much local knowledge needed to make the right call that any top-down, one-size-fits all decision imposed from far away will necessarily fall short of addressing the reality on the ground. A tax that funds needed services in a busy port might be onerous to the point of stifling in a small inland town. Rules that suit orderly townspeople may be oppressive for rowdy hill folk. The strict enforcement of laws needed to keep the peace in New York City might put poor Old Jed in jail for the rest of his life. If you want to get an idea of what this might look like if done well, John Michael Greer's Retrotopia paints a rosy, but not so far-fetched, picture.

Here, the key idea is that folks are complex, each with his own drives, needs, wants, means, and so forth. Then, when you start these many-sided folks interacting with each other, you get complexity multiplied by complexity, quickly spiraling into a mess that's nearly impossible to keep track of beyond a certain scale. The legible solution is to boil down all of this complexity to a "good enough" abstraction and so work with the (apparently) simpler situation that results. Obviously, there's some merit to this approach: many great things have been discovered or enabled by incisive abstractions or simplifications. As they say, though, the map is not the territory, and any time you simplify, something is lost by definition. The more that you lose, the more likely that what you lost was important in some non-obvious way (Chesterton's Fence and all that). Farming is a good example, here. Back in the 19th century, the discovery of the macronutrients needed by plants, combined with new industrial methods of fertilizer production, led to easier, far larger crop yields. Bring in the green revolution, which combined these approaches with selective breeding of wheat and corn strains to be more pest and disease resistant, and you got huge factory farms feeding larger swaths of folks than ever thought possible. On the other hand, this highly-legible, scientific, government-backed endeavor has resulted in the long-term degradation and depletion of soils as they neglect to put back the biomass that comes in natural fertilizer (that's the polite way to say "animal shit"), to say nothing of the still-poorly understood role of soil bacteria, fungi, and other tiny, highly complex things that make and keep soils healthy and fertile for long stretches of time. Or take how the size of fields can have their own non-obvious effects - if you have acres and acres of cropland with no trees, there's nowhere for birds to hang out, and that means fewer bugs get eaten, and those bugs eat the crops. Small fields with hedgerows and patches of trees dividing them do much better at this and are more productive because of it (to say nothing of supporting other pest-hunters like foxes and wild cats and such). Or for still another example, look at the traditional fertility rites of parts of southeast Asia that include nighttime, torch-lit processions. Those torches apparently attract bugs, and the processions happen when the most destructive kinds of bugs are breeding. Whatever other spiritual benefits these processions may have for the folks participating, the land, or the plants, they also greatly reduce the population of crop-eating insects. Unluckily, though it's easy to the point of being the default to handle this kind of thing locally, that's the kind of thing that's really hard to try to plan from the capital. In part, this is because if you asked the villagers why they're having the procession, no one is going to say "to kill bugs that eat the crops." They might not have any idea that the processions have that effect. So when a central planner shows up and says "you guys are wasting valuable time and resources on your superstitious processions," it's hard for the villagers to push back in any way that the legibility-focused manager will respond to, and when that legibility-focused manager is backed up by the force of the state, well, guess who's going to get his way. The beauty of subsidiarity is that they don't have to know why they do stuff. If you just let folks decide to do things how they want at a level they mostly understand, they'll keep doing what works as long as they think it's right. If they make a wrong call by stopping doing something that works, or starting something stupid, the ill effects are close enough and relevant enough for them to notice and fix it, but that kind of experimentation is likely to get lost in the statistical noise of the central planner's office, and so the one-size-fits-all policy can't be adjusted as quickly or flexibly.

Let's step aside from politics and economics and into two of my other favorite fields: war and business. In both of these fields, something like subsidiarity has for a long time been the name of the game: delegation. For most of human history, if you wanted to get something hard done outside of your immediate vicinity, thanks to limits on communication and transportation, you had no choice but to tell someone else to do it. If you wanted them to do a good job of it, you had to pick folks who were smart, flexible, and highly motivated. Sure, you could do your best to align incentives to create some of those characteristics (like letting navy captains keep a portion of the prize money for seizing enemy ships), but mostly it boiled down to "pick someone good enough to handle it, and then let him handle it." The siren song of telecommunications has lured leaders in both the military and business worlds into thinking this kind of delegation is outdated. Now, we have so much data and such quick communications that folks higher up the pyramid can stick their fingers in all of the pies. This attitude is, to put it bluntly, really fucking stupid. So, of course, I've seen it all over the place in both fields. When I was in the army, we had all kinds of fancy communications - radio, satphones, Blue Force Tracker, the works. On the other hand, the minute one of these gizmos hiccuped, or once things started moving fast, all of these oh-so-shiny technologies became far too slow, and we're back to operating at the speed of one guy yelling at another and pointing at something he can see.

In the business world, I got to see the same thing with the Agile way of managing undertakings. One reason this approach came to be in the world of software development is a key difference between writing software and building traditional capital projects like skyscrapers and bridges: there is no such thing as a complete specification of what software does short of the working code itself. On the other hand, in a very real sense, if you have a blueprint of a bridge, you really do know everything that matters about what the bridge will be when its built. That blueprint is a meaningful (and very useful!) step that can be undertaken at less cost and effort than building a bridge or three and seeing how it goes. With software, though, that's not true. Architecture, requirements, specifications, features, user stories, however want to define it, nothing you come up with before writing code captures enough about what the code will do once you write it. Think about what a computer program is - a set of instructions to the computer. The whole point of writing code is to work out the instructions that will make the computer do what you want, and with just about every program more complex than "hello world," there will be so many interactions and edge cases between the pieces of the program that you can't know what it's going to do until you build it and test it. Agile embraces this. Instead of trying to specify the entire program ahead of time on paper, which is a fool's errand anyway, it says "build a bit, test it, make tweaks, test more, and repeat until you have something that works." Luckily, this is much cheaper than building and testing a bridge as you go, so it works. To do this effectively, though, you need a team that has all the skills to make the product, get it in front of users, and get feedback on the results. One reason that software startups can get so much done so fast is because this is what they are - a small team, with all the skills necessary to make the product, and ruthlessly minimal overhead. There are almost no layers intervening between those doing the building and the customers who will use what gets built. The trouble comes when big companies see this productivity and say "I want that!" without understanding, or at least accepting, what makes it work. Large enterprises will try to "go Agile," while also keeping the centralized, top-down command and control of a traditional organization. To be fair, there are advantages to centralized control - better coordination, better standardization, ability to balance the needs and benefits of one product versus another, that kind of thing. But the fundamental problem is that they don't actually let their "product owners" (the standard title for the leader of an agile team) own their product. The on-paper pitch for a product owner is that he's like a mini-CEO for that product, because that's what's actually needed to make Agile approaches work - someone who gives a shit, that knows the work in intimate detail, and has the power to make actual decisions. Instead, you usually get middle managers who are told what to do by their bosses and are pulled in so many directions they can't keep a handle on what their team is actually doing (yes, I know, shockingly different from those in charge of non-Agile teams). The very reason you created the role (up-close, detailed, nuanced knowledge, with the temperament and power to make decisions based on it) gets entirely undermined.

The need for delegation in both fields largely comes down to handling what Clausewitz called friction, which is one of my very favorite mental models since it is almost always over-looked despite its wide applicability. The way Clausewitz put it is that in war, everything you actually have to do is very simple: walk from here to there, line up next to these guys, point your gun over there and fire it, and so forth. The reality of war, though, is such that even doing such simple things is very hard. In a way, friction is both the dark side of what we've been talking about - the way that the specific, local, and concrete messes up what you're trying to do, but being willing and able to attend to the specific, local, and concrete is also the cure for friction. Let's take a hands-on example: your commander orders you to take your company, march 2 miles to this hill on the map, form up, and await engagement with the enemy. Simple enough, right? Well, what if it's been raining for the past two weeks, and the road is knee-deep mud? Oh, and your company spent the last three days force-marching 25 miles a day to get here, and everyone's shoes are busted and the blisters are out of control. Also, thanks to the force-marching, nobody's had a decent meal in four days, and the supplies you expected to find at this muster point never made it, so everyone is hungry and thirsty too. Even still, you're here to do your duty, and your men are tough, so you step out. Well, the hill isn't where the map said it was - do you push on or turn back? You decide to push on. It's also not a gentle, grassy hill, but covered in boulders, making it impossible to march up in formation. As you're about halfway up, the enemy you were supposed to await crests the hill and starts firing on you. Do you charge into his guns, uphill, with a broken formation of tired, footsore men? Or retreat?

Friction. All of it. The mud, the food, the blisters, the enemy fighters, the lack of clarity on priorities - all friction. If you are relying on explicit, highly detailed orders from higher, any one of those things might paralyze you. On the other hand, if you know why the hill needs to be taken, and have confidence that your command wants you to be aggressive (or, contrawise, to preserve your strength), you can make a call that you aren't worried will get you court martialed and shot - instead, you can respond to the inescapable unknowability and complexity of the battlefield and make the most of it. And by giving you big-picture guidance and empowering you to make decisions, your commander can have some influence on the battlefield - in fact, more influence than if he tried to micromanage you, with everything that can and will go wrong. Turns out, this principle applies all-the-way down the chain of command. You know the smallest unit in the modern infantry with someone in charge of it? A three-or-four-man fire team (including the junior NCO in charge of it). In other words, it is so hard to properly direct men in battle from afar that you want an experienced guy telling two or three others what to do from literal shouting distance (if not "I can put my arm on your shoulder" distance).

That's how far down and up close you want to delegate if you can.

Let's zoom out a bit from people and their interactions and look at the spaces in which we move and live. Wrathofgnon gives a good lead-in to this in The Human Scale and it's follow-on essays. For most of mankind's history, we have been forced to live at a certain scale, a human scale. If you needed something everyday, it had to be within walking distance. The folks you leaned on were all your kin and neighbors. Sure, there are some downsides to this - anyone who has ever liked living in a city knows the pull of new faces, new experiences, open possibilities. But what is lost in such wide-open living? Folks who know you, businesses where you know every wrinkle and nuance of day-to-day rhythms, strengths and weaknesses, when things are hopping, and when they are dead. Yeah, nosy neighbors all up in your business can be a pain, but they also can lend a helping hand before you even ask for it. Some of us may want this familiarity more than others, but some yearning for it is written deep into our blood, whoever we are. Not too long ago, in the face of larger and less personal cities, we sought to find some of this through clubs, lodges, and other associations, and lately we've looked for it in the ephemeral ether of the internet, but there's something to be said for simply being right there.

If you learn any art or composition, you'll come to know something called negative space. Call to mind a bird sitting atop a stem, with a caterpillar climbing that stem. The bird, the stem, and the caterpillar are all positive space - the objects the picture is "about." Now take a tick to think about the whitespace, the blanks around the things you're looking at. In a well-put-together drawing or painting, these negative spaces enfold and define the positive objects, focusing attention by making clear what is not the focus. Negative space is what makes a composition read as meaningful rather than busy. The well-known vase/profile optical illusion emphasizes this distinction by playing with what is positive and what is negative - look at it one way and the white part is negative, look at it another, and the black part is. I bring all this up here, because back in college, I found out that architects think about positive and negative spaces as well. Interestingly, folks respond to these spaces differently. Positive spaces pull us in, beckon for us to stay a while. Negative spaces, on the other hand, encourage us to keep on trucking, to get from one positive space to another. In a house, the rooms are positive spaces, and the hallways negative. In a city square, the big open space in the middle is negative, the nooks nestled under the surrounding overhangs are positive. If you've ever been in an airport, though, you've seen and felt these spaces getting jumbled together unpleasantly. Think about folks camped out in the hallway, bags strewn about, working on their laptops, tuning out the world with headphones, all because that's the only place where there's an outlet - using a negative space as if it were positive. Or think about the boarding "lounges." When you're sitting, waiting for your flight, it's meant to be a positive space. But the moment a flight starts boarding, you have lines of folks between the seats, bumping your leg, crowding you, because it has become a negative space for all of these folks trying to get on their plane.

Here's the thing. Due to a variety of factors, like local ordinances, weird incentives, and changes to technology, much of today's world is made up of negative spaces, far more than the delicate and organic interplay of negative and positive you'll find in a charming village. The suburbs might be this taken to 11: huge, generic boxes of positive space set amid swathes of negative roads, lawns, and parking lots. What does it do to us to spend so much of our lives in spaces that are subconsciously telling us to "get out, move on?" I think the result is a giant anomie machine. You leave your "machine for living", get in your machine for driving, zoom down the negative space of speed-optimized roads, park in the negative space of the parking lot, and go to Home Depot (a machine for buying) to get a tool you need for some project. While there, you walk down long, negative aisles, check your phone for confirmation of which tool, exactly, to get, grab it, check out at a self-serve machine, and repeat the process in reverse to go home. Contrast this with going to the hardware store in your small town. Maybe you walk there, or if you drive, it's slow, down familiar roads, full up with shops you know backwards and forwards. You get there, go inside, and you run into a few of your neighbors. You shoot the breeze for a few minutes, get a few tips on the project you're working on, and one of them helps you pick the tool you need. As you're checking out, the owner recommends something else you might need, and tells you to bring it back if you don't end up using it. Later, you have a couple of beers with the same neighbors and the owner and talk about how your afternoon of work went.

Is the latter somewhat idealized? Sure, of course. But the point is that the spaces we live and work and shop in shape not only how we spend our time and money, but how we feel about it, and who we do it with. Here, again, much of what differentiates the spaces from which interaction and connection naturally arise and those in which we have to fight to make that happen is how close we are to the things and folks we need. How often do we see them, how deep are the interactions, how much individual, specific texture is there to those interactions instead of sterile uniformity? The various "machines for living/buying/interacting" are easy, but they are poor - shallow, un-nutritious. If anything, that may be one of the highest costs of our spread-out, legible, rationalized world - everything has to be intentional. Nothing "just happens." Nothing takes care of itself. You don't just run into your friends, you have to set up a get together. You don't just know eligible young women through your friends and neighbors, you have to join clubs or sign up for an app. You don't end up in a stimulating conversation with someone with very different interests because you both go to the same coffee shop, you have to track down substack writers or Twitter spaces. And that's on top of everything that has always been conscious, rational, and intentional - work, planning for the future, getting involved in politics, whatever.

It's all exhausting.

No wonder so many of us feel simultaneously worn out and unfulfilled.

Now let's dig into something a bit more individual. I was introduced to the idea of "procedural knowledge" by Dan Wang, but it resonated because I instantly recognized a helpful name for something I had long known about, but had never pinned down without that name to give it. Wrathofgnon has another post that touches on this idea and its relationship to the "human scale" we talked about above. The heart of the idea is that there's a difference between "knowing how" and "knowing what," and that much of our know-how comes from direct, personal experience, and is difficult to learn or teach outside of a hands-on context. Even for skills you can readily teach things, procedural knowledge takes time and practice. If you've ever engaged in any kind of craft or handiwork, you've gotten this lesson full-force: you read about something like drawing, or leather-carving, or woodworking, or whatever, and you have a vision in mind of what you can craft, and conceptually, it's so simple. Let's go with leather-carving as an example I'm learning right now. Here's how you do it: find or draw a design, transfer it to a clear plastic film, get the leather pretty wet, trace a stylus over the design, making impressions on the leather, then while the leather is still wet, use a sharp knife to cut along the lines and little tools that you hammer to create beveling or stippling or the like, and voila, you have a lovely bit of decorated leather. Sounds easy, right? I just explained it in a sentence, didn't I? Well, if you decide to go out and put your new-found knowledge to work, you'll find that I left out all sorts of little things. How wet should the leather be? What kind of stylus will work? What do you do if you make a mis-cut? How hard do you press with the knife? How hard do you hit the tools for tooling? Will a plain rubber mallet do, or do you need a leatherworker's specialist tool? What do you do to make the edges of the leather neat and smooth? If you want to color it, or protect it from future dampness, what do you do? Even these few questions only hint at what you'll have to work out and internalize if you want to make stuff that looks good.

Here's the thing, though: it's not only leather-carving. Or even only handicrafts. Those just make a handy, straightforward example. It's everything. No matter what you set out to do in this messy, complicated material world, no set of written instructions will fully get you to doing it well. Heck, even if you add a great deal of information through pictures or video, or even better, in-person interactions with a teacher, you're still not going to "get it" until you actually do it, likely many times, with lots of mistakes along the way. Too much of any task is implicit, associational, embodied. In other words, too much of any task is just not suitable to being communicated rather than experienced. Now, don't get me wrong. Teaching can still play an important role, here. Having someone right there with you pointing out "oops, that's not gonna work how you think" or "ah, yeah, I see what you did there, but you need to pay more attention to this over here" can go a long way to learning this kind of implicit knowledge of doing. But if the teaching is remote, or non-interactive, it very quickly degrades in value. A big part of my job is teaching folks how to be better public speakers. I'd put good money down that I can help you more in an hour or two of in-person coaching than I could with thousands of words of blog posts, hours of video, or even a full-day remote workshop. Are there ways to mitigate these constraints? Of course. Is having a youtube video a hell of a lot better than a few sparse sentences? Absolutely (how do you think I got started with leather-carving?). But you will never master something unless you actually do it and experience all of the nuance and complexity of interacting with a bit of the world and trying to make it more the way you want it.

Even more personal than your know-how is who you are - your identity. When you look in the mirror, who looks back? When you sit with your thoughts, who is thinking them? This answer is so hard to pin down that there are entire religious traditions built on the notion that it is fundamentally illusory, that the "self" is just a grab-bag of habits and thoughts. The teachings I work with suggest that this is a partial truth, that our day-to-day personality is indeed such a collection of habits, thoughts, wants, needs, and fears, but that above that, our Individuality, or "higher self," is more real and substantial, but it takes ongoing spiritual work to get to know it. For now, though, let's look at that personality, however ephemeral or arbitrary it may turn out to be. It's shaped out of many threads - where were you born? Who were your parents? What life experiences have you had? What kind of art and literature speak to you? For most humans in most times and places, much of this was determined for you, with little to no input from you. Much of today's society tries to make as much of this voluntary as possible. For now, we'll leave aside the relative merits and drawbacks of the voluntary versus imposed aspects of identity, but whatever else we can say about these threads, there are a lot of them that come together into the piece of life's rich tapestry that is you. Something that Jordan Peterson often brings up is that when the post-modernists talk about "intersectionality," they're actually onto something important. When you put together two influences, the outcome is not merely additive: whole greater than (or at least different from) the sum of its parts, and all that. He goes on to say, however, that most post-modernists don't take this idea far enough - if you follow it to its logical conclusion, the only truly accurate unit of analysis for humanity is the individual. However much you have in common with other folks who were born where you were, came from the same ethnic stock, grew up in similar financial means, or studied the same subjects, not one of those other folks has experienced everything you have, been shaped in just the way that you were, turned into the person that you are. If I want to truly understand you, I have to go very local - not just what college did you go to, but what classes did you take. Not just what genres do you read, but what specific books. Not only what city are you from, but what neighborhood. Not just what cliques did you hang out in, but who were your actual friends. You get the idea. For "identity" to have any meaning besides the grossest approximation, it has to be very up close and personal.

When you have two identities meet and begin to intertwine, sometimes you fall in love. Sure, you're likely attracted to certain traits or personalities. Heck, you might even have a "type," but you fall in love with this woman right here, not with every single one of your type. Something about her laugh, or what she cares about deeply, or some shared experience is how you know you love her. If you've ever been in love, you know it's not the same as the attraction you feel to a lovely stranger, or the infatuation you might have for some movie star. A crush you have for someone you've come to know a bit has more in common, but love comes from up close, personal contact. And if it's just not there, it won't happen, even if she checks all the right boxes. Sometimes it comes even when you'd rather it didn't! Or won't go away when your thinking mind tells you things would be easier if it did. From the dawn of writing, we have tales of love as involuntary, even unstoppable, but always for someone, something about your interaction, not women in general, not by formula, not to be 100% predicted. Love is specific, particular, and immediate.

In some ways still more personal yet, we get to gnosis, something I've written about before, and which is a core part of how I go about religion these days. If you watch a cooking show or read a cookbook, you may "know" some dish, but until you eat it, you don't fully know it - that's gnosis. Gnosis is irreducible personal experience of a thing, the kind of knowing you get through experience. You can know the catechism of the Catholic Church forwards and backwards, but unless you have felt the presence of Jesus Christ, Christianity might not do much for you. Like me, you might like the idea of what a concert is/can be about - a shared, visceral experience, a live, organic performance, the interplay of energy between the crowd and the band - but, it might take actually going to a few concerts to figure out you don't like them after all (I know, weird, but I've made my peace with it). Sure, different kinds of knowing can help get you there - I don't think I ever would have had my own experience of gnosis of the Gods if not for the episteme of reading John Michael Greer's A World Full of Gods. But for most things that matter the most, without gnosis, it just doesn't really count. It's empty, unsatisfying - like watching Food Network instead of cooking, or porn instead of making love.

In a way, gnosis is one answer to what I'm trying to find with this post - what is it that makes the nearby, the immediate, the organic so vitally important to so many different fields of human experience? Well, to some degree, it's gnosis. But these strike me as related but distinct concepts. When you have some kind of first-hand experience in all of its fine-grained, nuanced glory, what you get is gnosis, but immediacy was the needed precondition. If I do, in fact, work out what this thing we're coming at sideways is, I predict that seeking that thing out would be a recipe for gaining gnosis (maybe not the whole recipe, but a big part at least).

So, we've fared pretty far afield, from the big picture of politics down to our most personal and private experiences, but what have we found? Well, in one sense, we've found the kind of thing that Ian McGilchrist talks about with his work on the strengths and leanings of the left and right brains. Much of what I'm talking about here is the sort of thing that comes naturally to the right brain's experience of the world, and many of my implicit recommendations map to McGilchrist's: we live in a world that way over-favors the left brain, and for sanity, health, and happiness, we need to find ways to let our right brains step into their rightful place as the fundamental experience of the world, with the left brain retreating to its proper role as a helper and tool for that mode of experience and consciousness. But I'm not really satisfied with just saying "ah, so right-brainedness is what we're talking about." It seems to me, rather, that right-brain consciousness is the way that we notice and respond to whatever it is we're trying to define here, or at least, that's a big part of it. Our right brains may very well be how we notice, appreciate, and interacte with what we're getting at here, but what we're trying to name is that which is out in the world for our right brains to pick up on. To go back to an earlier example, it's almost certainly right that tapping into your right brain is an essential step in creative work like leather-carving, but if you don't pick up a piece of leather, a pattern, and a knife, the most perfect state of consciousness in the world isn't going to get you anything.

Likewise, if you cultivate the most perfect aesthetic sensibilities, the finest sensibilities to the feeling of place, the most community-minded attitude to your fellow man, unless you go look at some art, walk around a human-scaled village, or live and work around folks you come to know, you're not experiencing what we're getting at here.

So, how are we to name this thing we've spent nearly 7,000 words warily circling? Let me say that I am fully aware of the irony of coming up with a named abstraction to talk about the quality of things that are engaged with concretely, as they are, rather than as abstractions, but, well, here we are. It's not that abstractions are bad, it's that they lose their value when they aren't grounded out in what we're talking about here. You get what Giambattista Vico called the barbarism of reflection. In a way, I hope that having a handy abstraction for what we've been getting at will be a kind of poison pill in our abstraction-obsessed day-to-day life. With it, maybe while we're flitting about from thought to thought, free from the constraints of coarse material reality, we might bump up against this reminder of what we're missing, and close the laptop and go outside to get some sun.

At this point, you might, like me, start to suspect that I am stalling and putting off naming this thing. We've been talking and talking, using some words that help get the idea across, but none have yet sprung forth as "just right." Given my quirky fondness for words of Germanish stock over Latin, Greek, or French ones, I'd like to find something there. Unluckily, for the past 1,000 years or so, which happens to be when English has grown its stock of words for abstractions and intellectual concepts, the fashion has been exactly the opposite of that. On the other hand, maybe there's some luck there, as I don't want to wrench a word already freighted with associations too far away for my ends. The best I'm able to come up with right now is "nearbyness" (that seems more straightforward, if slightly less fun, than "nearth"). What seems to hold all of these many thoughts, experiences, and so forth together is that they are in some sense near - whether literally, physically nearby, or else near in a more metaphorical sense of close to our hearts or knowledge. On the other hand, it's not a very lovely word, and it doesn't right away jump out with the full breadth of meaning we've tried to wrangle here, so I very much welcome suggestions for alternatives. Whatever we end up calling it, I very much doubt I'm through writing about this and fleshing it out.

Rather, I suspect I'm just getting started, and I hope you'll join me.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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Hallowward we have  our hearts fore-turned,
To give worship  to wealsome Gods,
Watering anew  that nut life-bearing.

Bright with holiness  our hearts become
As troth we give  to trustworthy Gods
In fair trade  upon Tree life-binding.

Shining with happiness  our hearts should be,
For steering will be given  by steadfast Gods
To bless us  with blossoms life-healing.

One drink from death  daringly gotten through
Lying three nights  with lovely maiden,
Winning songcraft  for worthy talespinners.

One mead from memory,  meetly gained by
Fearlessly plucking  plighted eye,
Earning mind-stock  for open-hearted thinkers.

One draft from doom,  dearly bought with
Three time three nights  thirsting upon the Tree,
Winning Runestaves  for rede-fast wizards.

Allfather,  who art in Fallhall,
Through forefathers biding  in barrows well-laid
Fill us full with  fire well-stoked.

Galdor-father  who gifted his eye
to Bestla's brother,  bold Well-keeper,
open our minds  to awesome spell-songs.

Baldaeg's father,  who from bough was hanged,
Food for ravens,  by ravens full-taught,
Help us our wyrd  to weave with runes.

So, even more so than with most posts, I eagerly ask for your thoughts on these. Hearing what others had to say on the earlier takes on the "Hail Idun" was very helpful in getting me to a prayer I was (and still am) happy with, and I don't doubt that it will be the same with the "All Father," so thank you for anything you're willing to share!

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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---

This book makes the point, I think well, that pretty much anywhere you go, the folks you find will pray. Today's West might be the least prayerful folk to ever live, and even still, a lot of us pray (or at least, still did when this book was published nearly 20 years ago in 2005). The book shares examples and anecdotes of prayer from Mesopotamians, American Indians, Indian Indians, Japanese, Africans, and more, but, of course, much of what it talks about is drawn from the Abrahamic tradition, most of all Christianity (more on this below). Even still, the Zaleskis do a good job of showing that most folks in most times and steads have ways of calling upon the holy, for many ends, but that most of these ways reasonably answer to the name of "prayer." There's a few places where they stretch things a bit for my taste - like including Buddhist mindfulness meditation as "prayer," but overall, they make a good case for "almost everybody prays." I say "almost," because even though they didn't touch on it here, I happen to know that the Comanche and a handful of others were deeply weird on religion compared to the rest of mankind. It's a shame they didn't mention these handful of outliers, as it seems rather relevant to making a case that prayer is (nearly) universal, and for me, the tiny number of "not religious" folks that we know about strengthens the point about how common religion is.

Even though the book most strongly stresses the universality of prayer, at times it also puts weight on how prayer is actually deeply rooted in the culture and religion from which it grows. Even when not making this point "out loud," many of the examples given are so evocative of their own imagery, assumptions, thews, and so forth that the point comes across nonetheless. Still, though, I think this book leans too strongly into the universality of prayer, ironing out interesting differences in its quest to reaffirm that we all pray and can all learn from each other. The modern American experience of prayer as something mainly individual, mainly spontaneous, mainly unstructured, and resulting from and subject to individual conscience and preference is very weird, historically speaking. Of course, I reckon that's our deeply local and "traditional" take on prayer (I'm half joking, but only half. How Americans can and should work out our troubled relationship with tradition is a long-term interest of mine). There's a chapter on what prayer was/is like in "traditional societies," which was one of my favorites in the book for the very interesting examples it included, but unluckily, it keeps up the book's trend of painting with too broad a brush. It treats late 19th century highland Scotland, early 20th century Hopi reservation lands, and the Classical Mediterranean all as "traditional" societies and contrasts these with "modernity." On the one hand, this is a helpful lens through which to look at the world, as today's Western outlook is indeed very unlike, well, everyone, anywhere, or anywhen else, so "modernity" is a meaningful term and useful to contrast with everything that is not it. On the other hand, though, that's a really big bucket to dump everything else into! Especially when we're talking about the most deeply local and traditional parts of those cultures, their religions. Overall, I find an approach like Spengler's more helpful, which recognizes the underlying morphological similarities between cultures and their religious feeling, but then explores the very different content of those morphologies.

Though it can be helpful to make distinctions, the Zaleskis make a point early in the book to emphasize the similarities between prayer and magic, and how the two often bleed together, sometimes to the point of being indistinguishable. I suspect that part of the reason for the strength of their emphasis is the largely Christian audience they anticipate, who are used to magic as being something not only not religious, but anti-religious. At this point, it's a bit hard for me to remember that is a lot of people's default understanding, because I've so immersed myself in the older and more widespread view that magic is one expression of the hidden world of spirits, Gods, and forces that prayer also calls upon. Anyway, I think the Zaleskis were basically trying to say "guys, chill out, asking the divine to help you get what you want is not that weird, whether you do it on your knees with hands clasped or standing before an altar having invoked the four elements." Or something like that - their discussion of "magic" is pretty much limited to verbal formulas, which makes the distinction from prayer even fuzzier, with zero discussion of things like visualization, meditation, ritual, symbolism, or the other ways of working that the mage keeps handy. Which is a shame, because I think that much of the discussion I've seen about prayer from the magical side of things would support and deepen much of what they say here: namely that naked "gimme gimme" prayers/magic seem to do something, since they show up everywhere, but are also decried in every tradition as fundamentally a bad idea. Ah well, chalk it up to one more bit in the book that I likely would have enjoyed more as a standalone work of its own.

Though the book is not quite as straightforwardly organized as my MBA-brain might crave, a good chunk of the book broke things down in an interesting way: by four "archetypes" of the kinds of folks who pray, namely "the Refugee," "the Devotee," "the Ecstatic," and "the Contemplative." Each of these chapters explores a different flavor of prayer, seeking to organize by the goals of and effect upon the one praying rather than by specific methods, formulae, or traditions, and I found this an interesting and helpful way of looking at things (though, to be fair, I've never put much time or thought into ways of analyzing prayer!). These kinds of prayer are intercessionary (asking for help), devotional (expressing love/respect/connection with the divine), ecstatic (experiencing the divine through non-ordinary states of consciousness), and contemplative (experiencing a deep bond with the divine, often to the point of "oneness"). Clearly there might be any number of other ways to chop up prayer, and these neat and fast categories bleed together (one of the most common forms of devotional prayer, the Rosary, has plenty of intercession baked in, and for advanced practitioners, may lead to ecstatic or contemplative states, for example), but I liked the emphasis on "why is someone doing this/what is he getting out of it?" for thinking about what makes different prayers different. Due to its nature, this section included the most examples of different kinds of prayer and well-known folks who have given them, so it was the part of the book I liked best and found most helpful. Lots of good stuff to follow up on here, but with the same caveats as the rest of the book, as I go into below.

So, as I said, one of the things I liked best about this book was the way it brought together selections from different kinds of prayers from different times and steads, but given context by the wider discussion. If anything, I might have liked a whole book that was just this - a lot of prayers from widely-flung traditions brought together, compared, contrasted, and analyzed, but even still, I was glad for what they did have. Given my own weirdo interests, I especially valued when they got into a discussion of what appealed about different prayer traditions, how they shifted to meet the needs of those who took them up, and so forth. For example, even though the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous ended up as a Christian, he remembered his resistance to religion as an atheist and insisted on a more generic spirituality for the program, which has allowed it to become incredibly popular. Likewise the discussion of the various teachings and approaches tried by the broader New Thought movement - some believing that "prayer" was merely a way to direct energies within yourself, others that it attuned you to your fundamental oneness with the universe, and still others that you were praying to the Christian God in the traditional sense. Others of the examples given were just interesting, like the tidbit that some commentators have seen the postures of the Muslim Salat (the five-times daily prayer toward Mecca) as a kind of calligraphy, which, of course, brought to mind the letter mysticism I have brushed up against - might there be an influence there? Or a shared common source? Might be interesting to look into. Also interesting as springboards for further research down the line were some of the prominent pray-ers (those who pray), poets, and thinkers talked about. I, of course, knew about John Donne, and I had heard of Gerard Manly Hopkins, but seeing them discussed for the role prayer played in their lives and how their poems can be construed as prayers was interesting and helpful. George Herbert was one I don't recall hearing about before, but who apparently made quite the impression not only on those who knew him, but most English poets to come after. Even if I am working in a quirky mode, since I want to write prayers that are poems (or the other way around, as you prefer), I reckon I ought to come to know better those folks who have done that best in English.

Again, for my own narrow ends, likely the most helpful bits were those discussing specific repetitive devotional prayers, with the "Jesus Prayer" of the Orthodox Church getting the most attention. While the book gives a lot of details on who says it, when, how often, with what postures and physical aids, and so forth, once more, it was likely most helpful in giving jumping-off points to look more into, like The Way of a Pilgrim for the "Jesus Prayer." Thus far, I've mostly only had the Rosary as a point of inspiration for the Heathen Rosary, but the Jesus prayer has some different ways of doing things, with a different flavor, and this book mentioned some others that surely do as well, like the Muslim (especially Sufi) use of the list of divine names/attributes in a similar fashion. Here again, many such cases!

So, I've saved my beefs with the book for near the end, because I didn't want to give the wrong impression or devalue the good stuff I have gotten out of it. For one, it took me nearly four months to read it, because I put it down to read a couple other books that seemed more interesting and engaging at the time. Some of this was the writing. I can't quite put my finger on it, as nothing jumped out at me as clearly "bad," and it wasn't hard to read, in the sense of needing work to understand what they're saying, but it was, for some reason, tiring to read. I just couldn't make myself get through all that much of it at a go. Some of this, I'm sure, is my internet-rotted brain craving constant distraction and stimulation, but I don't think it's just that. Anyhow, I'm not sure how much of that came from my issues with what it actually had to say, but I did have some. For starters, this book suffers from the all-too-common affliction of presentism. Despite reaching back to Gilgamesh and Inanna, everything is firmly viewed through a comfortably ecumenical, laid-back American "it's all good, man" kind of lens. Which I can't fault too much, as that's not so far from my own default sensibilities, but more damning is how much weight is given to the last century and some change, whether in what examples to share, which thinkers to discuss, or what concerns to give the most weight to. It's a bit hard to tell how much of this is an intentional strategy to make the book "relevant" to its audience, and how much is the unthinking default of the writers, but either way, for a "history" of something as old and widespread as prayer, the weakness was keenly felt.

Next, I felt that the book suffered from being too obviously written by a couple of Christians grounded in their own tradition, looking at others for inspiration and a bit of comparison - which, hey, fair enough, that's almost exactly what I'm doing from over here in my tradition. On the other hand, it weakens the book's attempts to be "universal" and comprehensive. Remember how I mentioned that touching on the handful of seemingly nearly-atheistic folks that have been written about would have strengthened the sense of universality they were going for? Well, here, I think they got the same effect unintentionally. A handful of times, they bring up prayers from traditions way outside of the Abrahamic faiths (Mesopotamian, Native American, Neoplatonic, whatever), but the sheer sparseness of these examples and the nagging feeling that they've maybe been cherry-picked to harmonize with the mostly Abrahamic, mostly mostly Christian examples and analysis takes away from their helpfulness a bit. The viewpoint of the book, which I assume reflects that of its authors (again, fair enough), seems pretty well-described by concentric circles of diminishing frequency and relevance: Christianity - Abrahimic Faiths - Monotheism - Monism - Everything Else. I would have really liked something that made more of an effort to cast a wider net, but maybe that would have been unwieldy: Mircea Eliade took three volumes to discuss big picture religious ideas across time and the world, without a lot of focus on the kind of nitty gritty details that a discussion of prayer requires. Or maybe no one else wants that, and they wisely kept their book to the kind of stuff that would be relevant and interesting to the kind of Americans who want to read about prayer (read: Christians), but this is my review, so that's what I'd want.

Lastly, the bit that I've alluded to a few times above: this book can't quite seem to make up what it wants to be, and there's the hint of at least two or three books in here, each of which I kind of wish I'd gotten instead. Is this, as the subtitle suggests, a history of prayer that gives a definition of "prayer" and then traces that thing through time and human experience? Is it, instead, a taxonomy of the kinds of prayer that men regularly engage in and how to tell them apart? Or is it instead an analysis of what it is that's going on when folks pray, what it does, and how to do it? There are elements of all of these in the book, and as I said, I think it's the weaker for it, at least at this level of depth - write two, or three, or four smaller, more focused books, or write a behemoth multi-volume definitive treatise to crush your enemies, er, I mean, set the standard for posterity. Again, I can't really blame the Zaleskis for writing the book they did, rather than the hypothetical books I'd prefer, but as with some other books, it can be frustrating to see the potential and not get it.

Okay, the header likely comes across as harsh, since ambivalence is very hard to express online without it coming across as dislike understated for humorous effect, but really, I ask you to believe me when I say that my feelings about this book are truly "middle of the road." If you are interested in prayer as a topic and want to go deep, this has lots of great jumping off points. Likewise, if you have a fairly narrow experience of prayer traditions or history, this will give you some idea of the breadth of what you're missing (but only an idea). If you are a fairly open-minded Christian looking for insights and parallels from other traditions, this book might be just right. On the other hand, as I was thinking over the book for this review, I was struck by the thought "who is this book for anyway?" It lacks the clear "how to" or "newly unearthed truth(!)" of a self-help book. It doesn't quite have the focus, depth, and rigor of an academic work written for specialists and researchers. It's obvious grounding in Christian assumptions makes it less helpful to folks coming from outside that religion, but it's lack of a firm theological position (besides something like "God is (probably) real and good, and prayer is a way to tap into that") makes it less helpful to Christians looking to deepen their practice or faith. It just so happened that I'm in the narrow range of folks whom I can imagine finding this book actively helpful, but I'm really scratching my head at how we got this kinda dry, academic book written and marketed like it's supposed to be pop spirituality. All of which is to say, I think this book is interesting and helpful if you have some reason to want to understand prayer, but if all you want to do is pray in a way pleasing to your Gods and helpful to you, you might be better off looking elsewhere.

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Just to make sure we're all on the same leaf here, let's do a quick rundown of what the Shadow even is. The Shadow is any thought, feeling, drive, want, image, or other "psychic content" that we shove down into our subconscious because we refuse to acknowledge it as a part of ourselves. One distinction that Davis made that I hadn't before seen said so clearly that was helpful is that the vast majority of subconscious content if just fine down there - it's in the subconscious because your conscious mind doesn't need it, at least not right now. If and when you do, it will bubble up. Think about the memories that bubble up when you encounter a particular smell (it was years before I figured out that the smell I associated with the game and comic store that was my favorite haunt in adolescence was paper and glue, until I went into a post office and was like "why does it smell like Game Parlor in here?"). Or about the way that muscle memory comes back for a physical task you couldn't describe in words, but your hands just know what to do. All of that stuff being subconscious is just fine. The Shadow is made up of that stuff that in some sense should surface to the conscious mind to be dealt with one way or another, but instead is repressed. Since this psychic material contains insights or other stuff that would help your conscious mind, it becomes charged with "energy" that needs to find a way out, which leads to all kinds of "displacement." The most common form of displacement is projection, which has become fairly well-known these days, but basically, if a particular behavior or mannerism or belief really winds you up, there's a good chance that you refuse to acknowledge the place that behavior, mannerism, belief, or whatever is a part of your own self. This can go to some fairly nasty places, like projecting a negative trait onto someone else, and then using their guilt for that bad thing to justify doing some other bad thing - think of revenge fantasies or the wrathful violence of righteous anger and you're on the right track.

Okay, so far so good. "The Shadow" is not just one thing, though. Jung distinguished between the "personal Shadow" and the "archetypal Shadow." The personal Shadow is everything that you, John Q. Random, do not accept about yourself and push down due to your very own rich and complicated life experience. Maybe your folks yelled at you whenever you were rude, and so now rudeness is part of your Shadow (and other rude people really piss you off - projection!). Or maybe you internalized one way or another ideas of care and compassion and you don't believe yourself to be "mean." Point is, there's variety from person to person here: one man's healthy assertiveness is another's horrifying and unacceptable aggression. The archetypal Shadow, on the other hand, is everything that humanity as a whole tends to reject as unacceptable to one degree or another - rage, hatred, selfishness, deceitfulness, lust, pride, and so forth. Obviously, your personal Shadow is going to overlap with the archetypal Shadow in certain particulars, but what makes the archetypal Shadow different is how it comes as something of a "package deal." Manifestations of the archetypal Shadow are what get called "villains" in stories - they lie, cheat, and steal for selfish, hateful ends. Typically, the more strongly you repress psychic material that overlaps with the archetypal Shadow, the more your Shadow displacement will draw on the strength and partake of the flavor of the archetypal Shadow. If you see your lust as a personal foible that causes you some trouble sometimes and you wish would leave you alone, your Shadow displacement will likely not be so strong, but if you view your lust as proof of your intractably evil, base nature, filthy, vile, and wicked, proof that you're fundamentally no good to begin with, well, your displacement is more likely to partake of what that wider-cast net brings in.

Anyhow, that's all pretty typical Jungian stuff you'll find in any book on the Shadow. Davis proposes a slight modification that I think is helpful and makes good sense. Rather than treating the personal Shadow and the archetypal Shadow as two distinct things, he puts forward treating them as two ends of a spectrum, with intermediate steps in between. Yeah, you have your own weird foibles, but everyone in your family might share hangups about politeness, and everyone in your Puritan culture has the same hangups about sex, and everyone in your country is a bit weird about unchosen bonds, and all of humanity is kind of weird about anger and lying. Not a super hard idea to come up with, and maybe others have talked about it, but this is where I found it, and I thought it was a good one, and I plan to incorporate it into my own thinking.

"Complexes" will again be familiar to anyone who has spent any time with Jung's thought - they are like "organs" of the psyche, sub-processes with a certain amount of separateness and coherence to them. In and of themselves, complexes are neutral - they can be healthy or unhealthy depending on what they do and what they're like. Davis highlights "autonomous complexes," which tend to be on the unhealthier side of things, because by definition they "do their own thing" separate from what the conscious mind wants or tries for. I am not sure if autonomous complexes are by definition Shadow phenomena, but I'm having trouble coming up with counter-examples. At any rate, it is specifically Shadow autonomous complexes that the book deals with and which we care about here. These are chunks of psychic processes and material that get repressed into the Shadow and then glom together into something with internal coherence and distinctness and proceed to steer thought and behavior, usually in subtle ways that the conscious Ego might not pick up on. Typically these autonomous complexes come about from either a traumatic experience or some kind of moral quandry where you want mutually incompatible things, especially if one of the things you want is prone to getting Shadow-boxed anyway: you really want to get into medical school, but you strongly doubt your capability, so do you cheat on the exam or not? You want to be an upstanding and honorable public servant, but you also want to take care of your family, so do you take the kickback? You want to be a loyal spouse, but you also really want to have sex with this beautiful stranger, so do you do it?

I was familiar with this idea, though I'm not sure I had the terminology "autonomous complex" before this, but the insight that I found most helpful was that these complexes tend to exert their control mostly through emotional means: feelings of fear, excitement, anger, or whatever else "nudge" you toward whatever behavior the complex thinks is the solution to the problem. One of the most dramatic and hardest-to-deal-with examples of an autonomous complex is an addiction. The sneaky thing about addictions is that they present to the conscious mind exactly the same as any other preference - you just "want" the thing. Even if you know that the thing you want would be harmful or dangerous, the autonomous complex can get very sneaky. The reason AA recommends "if you don't want to slip, don't go where it's slippery" is because the autonomous complex behind your addiction to drinking is very likely to convince you that the bar would be a wonderful, fun place to go, not to drink, of course, who said anything about drinking? Let's just go be around people and good cheer. Once there, though, a drink starts to sound like a better and better idea, and if any circumstance conspires to give you a "good" excuse, well, there ya go, you didn't decide to go get drunk, it just happened. From the outside, this sounds like obviously self-serving ridiculousness, but from the inside, it really does feel like that, because the part of the self driving you to go have that drink (or 7) operated on harder-to-be-conscious-of drives and impressions. So, once a behavior or cluster of behaviors is recognized, the trick becomes looking for what subtle feelings and impressions steer you toward those behaviors.

I've heard some mixed things about Tolle, but some folks that I respect have found some useful stuff in his work, so I don't dismiss him outright. Here, Davis talks about a concept of Tolle's called the "pain-body," which Davis equates with the Shadow. I'm not so sure it's the same thing as the Shadow, but I've spent a lot less time and mental energy on this than he has, so maybe I'm mistaken. Anyhow, Tolle says that when we refuse to acknowledge or engage with negative feelings like pain, grief, anger, and so forth, we shove them down somewhere into our psyche/subtle body, and there they join up like the world's crappiest Voltron and form a semi-autonomous thing (so far, so consistent with autonomous Shadow complexes, though Tolle seems to group together all negative emotions, rather than those associated with particular triggering events). Well, since this pain-body is made up of negative emotion, it needs fresh infusions of such emotions to maintain itself, and it exerts an animal-like cunning to feed itself - this plays out as behaviors like picking fights, choosing crappy partners, indulging in addictions, and other things the point of which is to make you suffer, because suffering is what the pain-body is looking for. Tolle's answer for this is to practice mindfulness so that you can be aware of when this is happening, and then to consciously choose positive thoughts and feelings, so as to stop feeding the pain-body. Davis instead recommends the "emotional processing" technique (see below), which is a slight variation that strikes me as useful and more in keeping with Shadow psychology. Tolle's method seems like it would just lead to more ingenious and circuitous repression, as it still seems to fundamentally reject "negative" feeling as not appropriate and not truly a part of yourself, which is where these problems came from in the first place. I can't claim that I fully understand this concept, though, as I'm getting it second-hand via Davis (though he does quote Tolle extensively in the bit describing this), but it struck me as a potentially useful model for dealing with challenging stuff.

This was a bit that I had to come back to and think about and where writing my thoughts out for my slipbox helped me get a better handle on what Davis was talking about (I think). So far, I've been fairly neutral in describing the kind of stuff that ends up in the Shadow, whether closer to the personal or archetypal end, but one of the reasons a lot of this stuff gets repressed is because it actually is bad - your lizard brain may want to kill and eat the guy that cut you off in traffic, but that would be bad for you, bad for society, and especially bad for that guy. So, it's not unhealthy to refrain from that behavior or even to consciously try to change how you feel about such things (was cutting you off really that bad?). What's unhealthy is when you deny that the anger you felt was there at all or a part of you. At any rate, this means that the Shadow is inextricably linked with evil, because things that are evil are very near the top of the list of what will get shoved into the Shadow by just about everyone, and they will be encouraged to do so by their societies. This means that the more archetypal end of the Shadow spectrum especially tends to be nearly synonymous with the concept of evil. Again, no one's arguing that lying, cheating, stealing, killing, and otherwise hurting others for your own ends is good, or that there's no reality to evil, just that denying your own capacity for evil is likely to go to some bad places. Jordan Peterson has done a lot to explore and talk about this.

Anyhow, that all sets us up for what I think is a fairly useful mental model that is less personally focused than most of what I was looking for from this book, but still helpful nonetheless. Davis argues that evil can best be understood as a "field or network phenomenon," and in other places he compares it to a contagious virus. The underlying idea for all of these is that evil exists "out there," but each individual also has a certain susceptibility to evil, and that these things interact. Evil is contagious in the sense that someone doing evil is likely to push others towards doing their own evil in return, but contagion is a helpful metaphor, because individuals also have a moral immune system - if some psycho murders the family of another psycho, you can expect the beginning of endless blood feud, but if he does it to the family of a saint, maybe that saint fill find a better way to respond to this evil act than creating more evil. The "field" bit didn't help me much, as that's not a mode of thinking I engage in much over here in humanities land, but the idea of radiation struck me: if you're exposed to enough radiation, you become radioactive and can put others at risk, but how much you're exposed to, what precautions you take, and so forth can affect that. The network metaphor emphasizes that the number of links to evil might be as important as the intensity of any one link - having one shady friend is less likely to push you towards as much evil as becoming a made man in the mob.

The link with the rest of the material in the book is that doing "Shadow work," getting to know your personal Shadow and finding ways to healthily access the energies in it that you need (without turning those energies in the unhealthy directions they're likely to go if they come out unconsciously) improves your moral immune system. If you recognize that sometimes you get angry, and one of the things that anger can lead to is a desire to do violence, you'll be a lot more on the lookout for the signs that you're heading that way, and whether your conscious mind accepts that violence might be necessary, or if de-escalating might be the better strategy. If you acknowledge that you are an incarnate being with a sex drive, you can either seek out a healthy sexual relationship or find somewhere else to put that energy and take the necessary steps to acknowledge that's what you're doing, rather than finding yourself turned on by and seeking out hidden, darker ways to gratify those impulses. Even still, you might have the best moral immune system possible, but you still shouldn't go around licking metaphorical door handles or using metaphorical dirty needles - some people, movements, behaviors, places, and so forth might overwhelm your carefully-cultivated relationship with your darker self and push you to do bad things. So learn to recognize and stay away from those things, and try not to be a node/carrier/emitter of evil yourself, as far as you can.

A quick aside on a concept that Davis mentioned and resonated with some of my own prior explorations in this space: the "Golden Shadow." We've been focusing on bad stuff as most of what goes into the Shadow, which is true as far as it goes - nobody wants to be "bad" and so everybody tends to repress bad things, so most of what ends up in the Shadow is, in fact, bad. On the other hand, for a variety of twisty reasons, folks can end up repressing good stuff too - maybe your family or your peers thought that creativity was a waste of time and so you shoved down your desire to make art. Or maybe you grew up in a culture that prizes conformity and you've squashed your desire to stand out and do great things. Davis calls these hidden potentials for genius your "Golden Shadow," as getting in touch with them can be more straightforwardly rewarding than working out how to redirect the bad stuff to productive ends. Of course, some stuff is a little bit on the border - aggression is something that does need to be controlled, but you need some of it to be effective, and you if you repress the aggression that you don't directly use, it will end up in the Shadow. So, if you've been repressing your aggression, some of it will be straightforwardly useful to introduce into your life (we call that "assertiveness"), but some of it will need to be channeled in less straightforward, non-repressive ways (see the exercises below).

Most of the advice I've encountered for engaging in Shadow work basically just says either "pay attention to your projections" or "do active imagination where you talk to your Shadow," which are both very helpful, and maybe all your really need, but I still have found myself wishing for more options, so I was glad to find some here. The list below is not exhaustive, but these are the ones that jumped out at me as most immediately useful to my circumstances, or where I found an insight I hadn't encountered before, so I took note of them. If none of these resonate with you, check out the book for a fuller list (seriously, a full 1/6 of the book is these practices).

As with the exercises, another great bit of this book is the "Resources" section at the end. I always appreciate a good further reading bit, most of all when the writer goes to the work of telling you why he's recommending the stuff in it, and Davis does that, with lots of further works on the topics hit on in the book with brief descriptions of what their relation to the topic is and what you might get from them. This is another thing that makes this book more helpful than its short page count might suggest.

Overall, I found this book helpful, and if you're interested in Shadow work, you might as well. I was less interested in its ostensible purpose of connecting Shadow work with larger social and political questions (hence the "Red-Pilled Initiate" bit of the subtitle), but I didn't find that those detracted at all, and that is likely why the bit about evil as a network effect was included at all, which was a helpful concept. I'm thinking about getting Davis's prior book Shadow Tech: Cracking the Codes of Personal and Collective Darkness, since it seems to be more directly focused on personal work, but I'm also wondering if I got most of what I'd want out of that from Transforming Darkness. If you've read that one, I'd very much appreciate hearing your thoughts. Otherwise, let me know if you check this out and what you think of it.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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The big thought that gives life to the whole work is that of "thinking letters into your body," which Kolb seems to have learned from Krebs. I'll get more into how Kolb justifies this and what benefits he claims, but what was striking to me was that this seems to be the whole thing when it comes to "practical exercise recommended by the book." Specifically, Kolb asks, nay, implores you to "think the letters into your feet," by which he seems to mean something like hearing the sound the letters make in your mind's ear (in German, naturally, as the only tongue fully suited to teaching the world this holy and transformative secret) while trying to put your consciousness "in your feet." I use scare quotes here because I've read about (and tried) several exercises that tell you to put your consciousness "in" this or that part of your body, and this is something I find very hard to do, and I'm not totally sure what folks even mean when they say it. I suspect this is yet another case of my poor proprioception/somatization getting in the way of things that are perfectly straightforward and obvious to others. As I said, though, this seems to be the whole secret - spend as much time as you can (either while you work, or for a dedicated hour a day, if you do work that involves words or counting) "thinking the letters into your feet," and then let whatever happens to unfold from that happen. But don't worry - to do it right, you only need to start when you are seven years old and keep at it for thirty years straight to see the benefits! Now, yes, I'm being a bit unkind here, but if I set aside the snark, I have to admire the purity of the recommendation - Kolb has his one weird trick, and he wants you to understand how much good it could do you, and he really wants you to get practicing. In fact, almost all of the book is grounding why he believes this works and what good might come of it. He spends literally only a sentence or three on explaining how to do it.

So, why am I reading the occult advice of obscure 19th century German Freemasons? Well, as you likely know if you're reading this, I'm rather interested in the Germanish Runes. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the Runes underwent one of their revivals (I say "one of," since depending on how you want to count, you might consider the early modern work of the Dane Ole Worm the first Rune revival). Guido List was a major figure in this romantic revival, who created/adapted the "Armanen" Runes after an 11 month period of blindness and the visions he reported having during it. List and his Armanen framework were then a likely major influence on Edred Thorsson, who is arguably the most influential figure in the latest revival of interest in the Runes in the late 20th-early 21st centuries. So what does all this have to do with Kolb? Well, one of the practices of the Armanen Rune folks was "Runic Yoga," where you bent your body into the shape of the Runes, along with practices like singing the sound the Rune represents, visualizing it, and so forth. All of these practices look suspiciously like some of the "Letter Mysticism" practices of Krebs and his followers, which happen to have been in the same country and language as the Armanen revival a generation earlier or so. In other words, it looks rather likely that the earlier Christian letter mystics influenced the Romantic Wotanists that came after them, and KA pointed out that I might find it interesting to look into this likely influence, and so far, I have!

So, if you haven't gathered from the cast of my words above, Kolb comes across as… enthusiastic. I, of course, can't say how much of this was in the original German and how much is imparted by the translation, but it seems pretty baked into what he's saying. It reminds me of a man I met the other week. We were at a birthday party for one of my daughter's friends at a splash pad at a public park. An older Vietnamese gentleman walked up to me and asked if I was a parent. I figured he was one of the other kids' grandfathers and said "yes." Well, instead, he very much wanted to impress upon me the need to support a 28th amendment to the United States Constitution spelling out certain educational reforms that he proceeded to give in painstaking detail. Though it was a bit hard to tell through his accent and over the shrieks of kids running through fountains, it didn't seem like anything he was recommending was nuts - sure, reasonable folks might differ on whether it's the right policy or not, or whether it should be enacted at the federal level or not, but none of it was stuff that I'd be shocked to hear someone saying would improve educational outcomes. And yet, it was obvious that this guy was not normal - he was accosting strangers at a park about this. He had a pitch. He was determined to ignore my panicky looking this way and that for an excuse to exit the conversation (which my daughter eventually provided). There was a fixedness in his affect that was off-putting. Given all of this, it was surprising that what he was actually saying seemed to be fairly reasonable. Usually this whole behavioral package comes with more out-there claims - underground mind-control devices, secret messages in the order of advertisements aired, that sort of thing.

As I said, Kolb reminds me of this guy, and I don't think it's just because of recency (though, as I said, this just happened, so maybe). Now, the actual content of what he's espousing is easier to dismiss as coming from la-la land if you don't share his spiritual presuppositions (this work is Christian, if a very idiosyncratic flavor of Christianity), but as I said above, what he's actually asking you to do is to adopt a fairly straightforward and unstrenuous spiritual practice and give it some time to see if it enriches you spiritually. That's not so unreasonable. Instead, it's his conviction that this is the only way to salvation, that the benefits are tremendous, the costs of missing out catastrophic, and that so much scripture must actually mean do this practice (rather than what centuries of interpreters have thought it meant) that comes across as a little nutty.

The main reason I wanted to bring this up is because I've spent enough time with alternative spirituality at this point that I've developed a much more nuanced relationship with my "this guy's nuts" reaction than I had as a materialist. I now accept a lot of propositions about the world as likely true that I used to think were patently false. There are folks and even specific arguments that I used to dismiss as clearly out of touch with reality that I now take seriously. That experience has taught me to be suspicious of an initial reaction to someone or something as "clearly nuts." Of course, some folks and arguments are, in fact, nuts. I've just come to have much lower confidence in my initial assessment, and this book brought that to the fore again through a combination of Kolb's enthusiasm and the actual content of what he's putting forward being so outside of my own religious worldview. The response I've learned for such things is something like "don't knock it till you try it," at least if "trying it" doesn't have some other strong reason against it. The trouble with Kolb's approach is that "trying it" to his specifications is rather steep - an hour a day for 30 years! On the one hand, okay, maybe that's truly what it takes to reach the kind of enlightenment he's pitching - sometimes specific result require specific, hard practice. On the other, that's a steep enough cost for the direct method of "try it and see" that you get right back into territory where you have to rely on some heuristics to decide whether or not to start this course of practice.

So, spoiler alert, reading this book did not convince me that I should take up letter mysticism as presented, and if Kolb is right, I've made a very costly mistake, as he says that is the only way for Christian resurrection and heavenly life (hence the title). That being said, I did find a number of interesting ideas that I'd like to follow up on more, starting by going back to his teacher and reading Krebs's book to see if there are other interesting threads to follow. I'll share the others that grabbed me in roughly the order I wrote them down.

First, Kolb has a lovely metaphor to describe his conception of the relationship of spirit, ego, and body. He sees "spirit" as basically identical with God, and God in fairly Platonic terms - indivisible, immeasurable, the ultimate uncaused cause of all things, and so forth. Anyway, he sees the "ego," which I think he uses to mean the entire consciously felt sense of self, rather than the narrower meaning assigned by later thinkers like Freud, as arising from spirit interacting with the body. The metaphor he uses is that the body is like a recorder (the musical instrument), the spirit is like breath, and the ego is like the music that is produced. I would likely introduce some layers between the ultimate uncaused cause and whatever it is "playing" my body to produce my current personality, but I liked the musical metaphor quite a bit.

Kolb spends some time breaking down why things traditionally seen as important, or even essential, to religious practice and success are instead merely helpful, like morals and prayer. His argument is that living morally and praying can help to make you more receptive to the awakening of inner life that is the true goal of religion, but that they won't get you there by themselves.

The entire premise of letter mysticism is that words are somehow intrinsic to thought, which is identical to, or at least importantly similar to, the power of God, and so letters are quite literally the fundamental building blocks of divine power. That makes them the appropriate target of contemplation for coming to feel and understand the divine. This is fascinating! On the one hand, it's childishly simple to dismiss: letters are arbitrary symbols for the sounds of particular languages, which are themselves merely systems of arbitrary symbols useful for abstracting experience to a level that it can be conveniently conveyed to others, and furthermore are culturally and historically contingent, and besides, lots of cognition isn't mediated by words at all. On the other hand, the idea that the Word is somehow importantly linked to the higher/deeper truths of the cosmos pops up in more than one spiritual tradition and is certainly important to Kolb's (he takes discussions of the Logos rather literally, as you might expect). And on the gripping hand, for anyone who speaks a language, that language is an important facet of his consciousness, and focusing on its constituent parts might be a potent tool for manipulating said consciousness, which is, after all, the entire work of the mage. There's a lot of good food for bethinking here.

As I mentioned above, the main exercise advocated here is to stand up, think the sounds of the letters (aside: it seems that by "letters," Kolb might have meant something more like "the phonemes represented by the letters") and try to put your consciousness into your feet while you do so. If, in the process of doing this, you start noticing things rising up through your body, so much the better, but keep the focus on your feet. If you can more readily "place" your consciousness than I can, you might find this a more congenial exercise, but the bones of it seem simple enough, and might be reasonably adapted to another set of auditory symbols (like the Runes).

Another thing I liked in this book was his general attitude that the path to spiritual progress is not cleverness or deep learning, but rather doing the work - in this case, thinking letters into your feet, but it seems rather likely the lesson applies whatever the spiritual work might be. Paired with this is a general focus on receptivity, with the spiritual work being a tool of increasing receptivity. I've encountered this idea enough lately that I suspect synchronicity is drawing my attention to something I need to heed more. One example of how this pairs up with the earlier metaphor of spirit interacting with the body to produce the ego: Kolb sees "thinking" as asking questions and listening for what the spirit says in response. Good thinking, then, involves 1. being open enough to hear the spirit's answer, and 2. posing the right questions and going on asking new, different questions until you have heard everything your spirit has to offer. I rather like that.

Altogether, this book had rather a few good nuggets of insight or practical wisdom wrapped up in propositions I don't necessarily buy, delivered with an enthusiasm that could be off-putting if you didn't sense the author's sincere wish for the best for you. Very likely not for everyone, but if you're looking for some quirky takes on how to pursue the spiritual life, and especially if you would like some non-standard interpretation of Gospel verses (I didn't get much into that, since it's not especially interesting for me), you just might like it.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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---

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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So, first off, let's try to elaborate a little on what the challenge is. For most humans, in most times, "religion" wasn't really a thing. Your folk had beliefs and practices about the Gods, and that's just the way things were. It was only when cultures started bumping into each other and seeing that they did these things differently that the idea of "religion" as a category got hashed out, and only in fairly cosmopolitan cultures, like the Roman empire or today's West, that the idea of choosing your religion based on what seemed best to you was even remotely conceivable. So, the default for religious practice and belief is to learn what your folks and everyone around you does bit-by-bit, mostly absorbing it by osmosis as you celebrate holy days, bless your food before eating, and get told bedtime stories.

Today, though, we live in a very different world. Sure, many of us take on the religion of our fathers and mothers, and many of us find that wholly satisfying. On the other hand, if you are someone living today whose experiences draw you to the belief that there are many Gods, your options for worship are somewhat limited, and all have their issues. The only living polytheistic traditions still around are, unsurprisingly, deeply embedded within the cultures in which they grew. If you want to become a practicing Hindu and didn't grow up as one, that comes with a lot of cultural assumptions that you can pretty much only get by going and living in India for a while (I dunno, maybe living with a Hindu family in another country might do it too - I haven't tried). If you are instead drawn to the polytheistic beliefs of cultures that have since become Christian, you have a similar, but even more severe problem: those beliefs are also deeply embedded in their home cultures, but you can't go live in them, because they are either gone or transformed utterly (I was in Stockholm a couple months ago, and it wasn't exactly full of Vikings). All of which means, if you choose to worship multiple Gods from a culture without a living tradition of doing so, you're going to have to make some decisions, and almost certainly, you're going to have to make some stuff up/work things out by experimentation. So, how do you go about that without just playing pretend?

First off, this discussion brought up a distinction I didn't make in my earlier thoughts on authenticity between what we might call "personal" and "traditional" authenticity. Traditional authenticity is what I talked about in that post: does a tradition, belief, or practice come from where it says it does, and does that source have legitimacy. Personal authenticity is more like "to thine own self be true" - are your outer actions and statements consistent with your inner beliefs and perceptions. Almost by definition, if you're the kind of person who is seeking out an alternative spiritual practice, you're likely concerned with personal authenticity - if your inner experiences didn't conflict with what was obvious and readily available, you wouldn't be looking for something else. So, how does it affect building a modern spiritual practice?

Well, first off, I can only really speak for myself here, and I am, of course, still pretty new to this - I've only been worshiping seriously for about three years, maybe six if you count my earlier "it's all archetypes" experience. All of which is to say, salt the following appropriately. First off, my own practice greatly favors gnosis over either episteme or doxa. That's pretty heavily weighted toward personal authenticity already. Partly this is because I am almost perversely individualistic, but it's also part of how I deal with the problem of broken traditions laid out above. While it might be wonderful to have grown up in a culture with a strong and intact religious tradition that recognizes the power and beauty of the land, the many spirits that seem to inhabit it, and distinctly different divine presences, I didn't. So, since my own gnosis suggests that these things are religiously significant, I have to find something that embraces them.

Other than my own explicitly religious experiences, I have found one of my chief guides to be an aesthetic sense. Long before I was lighting candles and offering ale to the Germanish Gods, I found their stories extremely compelling. I couldn't really tell you why, they just grabbed me far more than the Greek and Roman myths of the Classics I studied in college (much as I love them, they never resonated the same). So, when I decided to give serious worship a try, the choice was obvious. Having grounded myself in what little we have of that religious tradition, certain things associated with it have also seemed aesthetically consistent - decorative knotwork for religious items, following Germanish rules for poetry in today's English, using as many words as I can that come from Germanish roots rather than Latin or Greek, that kind of thing. For this stuff, I don't have any kind of "logical" or authority-based argument - I don't go "if you read this verse of Voluspa, it clearly implies religious garb must have knotwork!" Sometimes, we have clues in the lore or historical record, but often, the best I can really do is "this feels right." Of course, I try to check such feelings with prayer and divination, and if I try something for awhile and it doesn't work, I change it up, but truly, "is it beautiful/interesting/compelling?" is often the best guide I have.

On the other hand, for some reasons I'll go into more below, I also don't come at things as a complete choose-your-own-adventure smorgasbord, the way some "eclectic neopagans" might. As a polytheist, I have no problem believing that the Gods from every culture are real and that worship of them is appropriate. On the other hand, specific pantheons have a certain coherence to them, their own "flavor" if that's not skirting too close to blasphemy. The view of the world embodied in the Germanish Gods and their myths is not the same as that of the Greeks, and those two are more alike than either is to that of the Chinese. At least for me, there is worth in mostly sticking to a single "religious idiom," rather than treating every God, myth, or practice as a potential component of my Rube Goldberg religion. Now, sure, I do use Revival Druidry as a framework for much of my practice and religious philosophy, and I have established some relationships with Gods and spirits that seem not to present themselves in the Germanish idiom, but mostly, when faced with a specific religious challenge or question, I first look to heathen lore, Gods, and practices, and that consistency gives a worthwhile counterweight to my individualist, eclectic tendencies.

I touched on this thread a bit in my thoughts on Stories of the Rose, but another source of tension in solving the problem of broken traditions is the robustness of organically evolved tradition versus the fragility of newly-made-up practices. No matter how careful you are, no matter how sensitive to spiritual matters, no matter how skilled at the relevant crafts, any prayer or ritual you make up just plain doesn't have hundreds or thousands of years and thousands or millions of practitioners working out the kinks and tweaking it until it really works. I gather from more experienced folks that someone with well-developed spiritual senses can come up with things that work a lot more reliably than someone who simply understands things intellectually, but even there, most "new" rituals or prayers draw heavily from things that have come before, because those things have a proven track record. To a degree, this gets into wider questions about rationality against experience, left brain against right brain, and legibility against procedural knowledge - all things I want to dive into more, but mostly out of scope for this post. The main point is just that nothing newly made up will have the same richness, depth, and track record of working as something that has been done by lots of people for a long time.

For me, this is the single best argument in favor of stricter reconstructionist approaches to ancient polytheistic practice. If you're not familiar, strict reconstructionists (usually if someone says they are "a reconstructionist" they mean they're pretty strict about it - I introduce the qualifier because I think the practice can be helpful, but shouldn't be pursued to excess) do everything they can to learn about how rituals and other practices were done in historical times, and then try to recreate them as precisely as possible. At it's extreme, this results in things like the Theodish dressing in period-accurate clothing, combing ancient texts and the latest archaeology for clues on how to perform rituals, and then speaking those rituals in Old English. The logic goes something like this: "our forebears had a living, intact tradition that we do not, so we should try to get back to that tradition as much as we can." Which is pretty compelling, as far as it goes, but obviously I don't find it quite as convincing as the good men and women of Ealdrice Theod and their ilk. While it's true that those practices were part of a whole, organic culture with a long background, they were part of a very different whole, organic culture from the one we find ourselves living in. Now, when it comes to Germanish belief (and, arguably, to some extent to Greek or Roman), you might say that we still have the same cultural DNA, and so it's not wholly outlandish, but as they say, the past is a foreign country, and our forebears lived very different lives than we do. Back then, sacrificing a pig or a cow was how you ate meat, not an occasional performance. If they spoke their rituals in Old English, they spoke in their mother tongue, with full and deep understanding of the meaning and nuance of every word. In other words, even if you get every single detail right, you're still not doing the same ritual in the same way - because you are not the same.

Which leaves us with the conundrum we stated up top: I have no organic tradition to practice, and yet I must practice. So, we have to be a bit artificial, by which I more mean "of artifice/conscious craft" than "fake" - we have to consciously make things the best we can, see how they work for us, and slowly, bit by bit, compare notes with other practitioners and see what works. Maybe one day, hundreds of years from now, there will be an organic, authentic heathenry (or whatever else) that the folk of North America practice unselfconsciously in the manner of their forebears. But we're not there yet, so in the meantime, if we want to honor the Gods and come to know them, we have to accept a bit of artificiality. For my part, I try to use the traditions of the past as a source of inspiration and guidance, an example of "this works/worked" so that I have a good starting point from which to craft my own idiosyncratic stuff. See my whole Heathen Rosary undertaking, for one example. Still, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't sometimes jealous of the deep, organic traditions of practice that Hindus, Shintoists, Buddhists, and Orthodox and Catholic Christians have.

One more tension that comes up for folks trying to find their way through alternative spirituality is the push-pull between doing what works for you and doing what a community asks of you. Here again, if you grow up in a living tradition that works for you, you're likely good: a Shintoist that is spiritually satisfied with the Kami can attend his local festivals, pray at the local shrine, and pray at his home kamidana ("Godshelf," which is a delightful word for a home altar). Doing all of these things will simultaneously feed his own soul and strengthen his bonds within the community that shares these practices. After emerging from a bracing misogi under a waterfall, he can chat about the experience with his neighbors over a cup of sake, strengthening both his religious feeling and his social connection. Not quite so for most polytheists in the West. If you want religion to be a strong part of building a community (or vice versa, for that matter), you have plenty of Christian options available, but many fewer for polytheism at all, much less specific traditions.

Besides the already considerable challenge of finding co-religionists at all, there's the further wrinkle that most folks called down these sorts of paths have their own, often highly idiosyncratic, ways of answering the kinds of questions we've been discussing thus far, meaning it is extremely unlikely you'll find a religious group that makes sense of the tradition you follow in just the way you do. Do you want to engage in reconstruction as strictly as the Theodish, but find yourself called to continental Saxon names, language, and forms? Too bad, the only still-living group you can find is all about Old English! Prefer a more personalized, gnosis-guided experience? Well, there's this kindred over here, but they're so inclusive about beliefs that they include folks who worship beings and engage in practices you don't want anything to do with. If you thought the fractiousness of protestantism with its "every man his own priest" was bad, buddy, wait until you meet modern Western polytheists!

Of course, the thought that you even should have a boutique set of religious beliefs and practices that is just how you like them is maybe a bit, hmmm, precious. If there's any weight to the organic side of things we talked about above, then maybe we ought to be a little more humble about our own notions and preferences and a little more willing to adopt what has worked for so many people for so much time. Maybe one of the points of religion is to iron out some of your idiosyncrasies that you'd be better off without. Community is not only about you feeling welcome and supported and content - it's about making yourself part of something bigger than yourself, supporting it, fitting yourself to it, rather than the other way around. These kind of thoughts do not come naturally to my highly individualistic self, but looking at what centuries of unfettered individualism has brought us to spiritually, I have to give some weight to the idea that some counterchecks on "expressing yourself" and "being true to yourself" might, in fact, be necessary.

Truly, out of the things we've talked over in this post, this is likely the one I struggle with the most. Trying to follow my own inner aesthetic sense and experiences of what has been spiritually meaningful tends to pull me in some very weird, very individual directions. On the other hand, I recognize the gap in my life left by a lack of religious community, and I know that if I want to fill that, I'll have to shape some of my beliefs and practices to what works for others, rather than only what works for myself. Maybe that's why I've yet to get in touch in person with any other heathens - I'm not (yet) ready to give up the freedom to do things my own way. That's actually a large part of why I have been following the path of Revival Druidry - I'm working my way through John Michael Greer's Druid Magic Handbook and The Dolmen Arch exactly as given, in order, and taking as long as it takes to do it right. It may not give me the in-person community that joining a religious group would, but it is helping me to learn the value in shaping myself to a tradition, rather than shaping a tradition to myself. So, I don't yet have a good answer here, but I'm exploring, and I'll share what I find as I find it.

All of this may sound a bit dire, but there's some good news: you're not actually alone in this. As you try to make sense of how to pray, what rituals to do, what myths to focus on, and so forth, even if you don't have any other humans to talk to about it, remember the point of all of this: the Gods. Ultimately, all of religion is about how to have the best possible relationship with your God(s), so whatever else you are drawing on, however else you are working things out, you can always just, ya know, ask. Now, admittedly, learning to tell the difference between your own whims and desires and what the Gods are trying to tell you when you pray can be hard, but I have found some advice from John Michael Greer very helpful: does the "answer" to your prayer challenge you in some way, especially in a way that on some level you know to be better? Or does it invite you to do more of what you wanted to do anyway or otherwise reinforce your preconceptions? If the former, it's likely a true answer. If the latter, chances are you're just talking to yourself. In the longer run, you can extrapolate this to "by their fruits ye shall know them" - do your practices leave you kinder, more patient, less neurotic, and more focused on "higher" things? Then you're likely on the right track. On the other hand, if you find yourself falling into the same patterns of behavior, or worse, spiraling into ever more self-destructive habits, well, maybe you need to make some changes.

Which brings us to a virtue that doesn't often get much weight in polytheistic circles: faith. In our culture, "faith" in a religious sense is most often taken to mean your earnest belief in the truth of certain assertions about things that have happened and/or the nature of reality ("he was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and the third day he rose again"). I have come to find "faith" important in my relationship to religion, but in a slightly different way (which, to be fair, is also included by most Christians in what they mean by "faith"). Instead of belief in certain fact claims, I have come to have faith in the validity of my own religious experiences, within certain guidelines. I could believe that my first religious experience was merely a weird hiccup of my neurochemistry brought about by a certain combination of behaviors, all confined to the material world, and I don't really fault anyone who interprets it in that light, but I have chosen to have faith that what seemed to happen really did happen: non-physical consciousnesses greater than me reached out and made contact that I might turn my life a better way. Since then, I have had to have faith that when I call upon a God or Goddess and ask for steering, the advice I get is good and wise, and not merely random chatter from my deep mind. It can be sometimes, and as someone as deeply embedded in our rational, materialistic age as anyone else, I sometimes have my doubts, but thus far, it seems very much to be worth it. It brings a wholeness that wasn't there before, reassurance about the deepest, hardest questions, and a firm answer when I go looking for meaning.

So, as hard as it may be, as many tensions as there definitely are, know that there are treasures down the path of religious belief, even if none of the obvious paths work for you, and even if your own path has to be hacked out of the jungle with a machete. And even if it feels lonely at times, remember the deepest promise of such a path: you are not alone.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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The first thing that this book makes very clear is that the Rosary as we have it evolved. It grew as bits and pieces were added, taken away, substituted, and otherwise experimented upon. You could say that it is emergent if you go in for that kind of language. Basically, a few threads that were important in European Christianity of the middle ages came together, and a way of weaving them together was found that worked for a large number of people. First, you had the practice of reciting the Psalter, all 150 psalms in a row. This was a devotional practice mainly among monks, because it required a lot of time and dedication, and either years of practice to memorize a whole book of hymns, or else being literate and having said book in front of you - either approach basically boiled down to "be a monk" in the middle ages. Another thread was the growing prominence of Marian devotions at this time. Bits and pieces of what would become the Ave Maria had been said for a long time, but they came to more prominence in Europe in the middle ages than in other parts of Christendom at other times (me, I suspect this is because Europeans were feeling the lack of Goddesses in their religion, but that's a whole other thing). A third thread was the developing practice of contemplative meditation and prayer of various kinds. Lastly, you had the use of prayer beads to keep track of prayers that were meant to be said in a specific number, which was apparently very old and very widespread (this book doesn't go into this thread as much as I wish it did, but the author is a historian, not an archaeologist or anthropologist, so it makes sense, her focus is on documents).

All of these threads likely originated among monastic communities, but the overall trend that wove these threads together was a thirst among lay worshipers for ways of practicing their religion outside of weekly mass. Naturally enough, they looked to what the religious professionals were doing, and began to draw inspiration from them, which brings us to the first thread that kicked all of this off - saying the psalter. As I mentioned, this would have presented some big challenges to a devout layman: the whole point of saying all 150 psalms in a row is that it takes a long time - it's meant to demonstrate devotion by being hard! That's well and good when demonstrating your devotion is your whole life, as a monk, but can be challenging when you need to bring the crops in or your family will starve. Also, as I said, if you aren't a monk, you likely can't say the psalms, because you can't read them and you can't memorize them. So, monks started recommending "lay psalters" of saying 150 of either the Pater Noster or the Ave Maria. The prayers are shorter and you only have to memorize the one (which you should have done as a good Christian already anyway). The prayer beads came in as a handy way to keep track of which of 150 repetitions you were on.

So far, so reasonable. The trouble is, saying 150 of the same prayer in a row is boring. Again, you might say that the hardship is part of the devotional act, but the market for religious practices that intentionally suck is fairly small. So folks started looking for ways to enliven the practice. One way was to break it up into chunks and to create some variation, such as into three groups of 50, and to say a different prayer in between each group. Another was where the contemplative meditation thread comes in. Various priests, mostly monks, began recommending that the "lay psalter" be paired with thinking about certain ideas, characteristics, or images from Christian teachings. One early approach that gained some popularity was to recite/think about a quality of Mary with each repetition of an Ave Maria. These qualities were originally keyed to the first line of each psalm, maintaining the link with the actual psalter, but the trouble was that the lay folks who were learning this didn't know the psalms to begin with, so it felt like a list of 150 arbitrary characteristics of Mary, in no particular order, with no particular sense. So folks went looking for other ideas that worked. One was to focus on three things, one for each third of the prayers: Mary's joys in Jesus's life, Mary's sorrows at his death, and Mary's triumph in his glorious resurrection. Another was to think about the events of Christ's life. What turned out to be the winning combination was to group the events of Christ's life into three groups of five, each with the themes above, and thus the Joyous Mysteries, the Sorrowful Mysteries, and the Glorious Mysteries.

All of which gets us to the Rosary as we have it today: you say some prayers at the beginning, and some at the end, but mostly you say 150 Ave Marias, with one Pater Noster in between each group of 10. For each 10 Aves, you think about one of five scenes from Jesus or Mary's life from each category of the mysteries, and after you get all the way around your beads, you move on to the next group of mysteries. One thing that made breaking it up this way helpful is that it created natural stopping points for folks who couldn't say the whole thing at once. It has become normal practice to work your way through one groups of mysteries a day. It's a practice that takes some time and dedication, thus helping to show devotion, but is flexible and engaging enough that normal humans can work it into their lives around all of their other responsibilities.

What helped all of this get figured out is that until the Rosary received papal sanction in its modern form much later, different folks tried different things and shared how it went. There were groups called confraternities that would teach you, books you could buy, popular songs you could hear, and so forth. All of which created a bubbling cauldron of experimentation where stuff that worked better for more folks spread, and what didn't died out. In other words, you had distinct traits with variation that were subjected to selective pressures. So, when I say the Rosary evolved, I'm not being metaphorical, it literally did.

For me, all of this is a bit discouraging, as I am trying to do the opposite - put together a whole practice from scratch on my own that is as compelling as the Christian Rosary. Very likely my task is impossible and the best I can hope for is to provide a few threads for a similar evolutionary process. What I am doing, though, is trying to keep as much of the shape of the Christian Rosary as I can, since something that seems incidental might have actually been important. Also, I'm doing analysis like this so that I understand as much as I can what makes the Christian Rosary work and apply the same principles to the heathen concepts and images I am bringing into the practice I'm crafting. We'll have to see how it goes.

Maybe the most interesting insight from the book is one of those that feels obvious in hindsight, but was interesting precisely because I hadn't thought of it: one of the major drivers for what variations stuck over those that didn't was the constraint of human memory. As we talked about above, monks are specialists who could devote a lot of time and effort to complex devotional practices, and if they couldn't memorize them, they could follow along with a book. Lay folks couldn't do this, and so variations that are easier to remember did better than those that are harder. For example, instead of presenting 15 mysteries as independent things, they are grouped into three thematic groups. This takes advantage of the well-known memory-strengthening technique of chunking - you take elements that have something in common and "chunk" them together under a label, and then you remember the label (this even works with non-thematically linked things, see phone and credit card numbers being in groups of 3-5 digits). Another way that part of the rosary got selected for what folks can remember was the shift from disconnected traits, characteristics, or events to narrative - instead of 150 characteristics of Mary, you have the life of Jesus. We are wired to remember stories, and especially stories about people. The three groups of five mysteries we have now combine these factors: the five mysteries in each group are chronological, the three groups are chronological, and the each group has a thematic coherence that makes it easier to remember which scenes from Jesus's life are in which group, and thus which comes next.

So, that's pretty cool. Luckily, this is something that I can much more readily copy, as heathen myths have just as much capacity for narrative coherence and memorable vividness, and I know enough about chunking and other ways to make things memorable to build those into what I'm working on. I don't have the life of one man/God to anchor things, which might make it more challenging, but here again, we'll see.

One of the things that first struck me about the Rosary was the way that it weaves together several lines of contrast: happiness against sorrow, manly against womanly, repetitive against various, and so forth. Way of the Rose goes into a lot of this rather well, I think, highlighting especially the interplay of life and death, mother and father, sin and mercy. Winston-Allen adds a new insight by pointing out that such interplay was a common appreciated motif in other bits of folkways at the time: song, poetry, and religious plays were all characterized by a "theme" and "counterpoint," and so it's not shocking that such a stylistic element would find it's way into the Rosary. What I do find striking, though, is how many of these "themes" and "counterpoints" we get crammed into one fairly small, seemingly simple practice, at every level. Small beads and large beads, Aves and Paternosters, joyful mysteries and sorrowful, and more. I strongly suspect that this dense interweaving of push-pull or back-and-forth elements is one of the keys to the strength of the Rosary, and I am seeking ways to embed the same in the practice I am putting together. Another finer point that Winston-Allen points out is that the Rosary's meditations ended up as 2/3 uplifting, and 1/3 sorrowful, and significantly, ends on one of the most uplifting scenes. So, while the contrast between joy and sorry provides a strong emotional punch, the overall practice is clearly weighted toward the good, which I think is likely another one of the reasons for the Rosary's sticking power: most of us aren't made for hairshirts, and we need to not only balance the happy and the sad, but to seek out enough happiness to compensate for the sad.

At times, Winston-Allen pointed out some things that weren't huge, but were interesting and surprising to me. One of those was the likely role played things besides the prayer itself in spreading the Rosary. The first of these was the printing of "picture texts," which had illustrations of scenes of Jesus's life. Specifically, these picture texts had three groups of five pictures, and those pictures are very close to what became the standard Rosary meditation themes - about 100 years before we have written evidence of these themes! I'm pretty sure this was Winston-Allen's main scholarly contribution in this text: she argues that the picture texts might well be the source of what are today known as the mysteries (well, other than the five "Luminous Mysteries" added by Pope John Paul II), and this has been overlooked because historians deal primarily in written texts. Whether or not the picture texts are where the 15 mysteries came from, we can say pretty confidently that they played a huge role in popularizing the Rosary. As the Rosary was coalescing from the various bits that went into it, the printing press was becoming more widespread, but literacy lagged behind. That meant that for a long time, there was a market for printed material that was mainly pictorial in nature, and if that pictorial pamphlet said it could save you from decades or centuries in purgatory, well, that was gonna be popular! Songs played a similar role, talking about the Rosary and how great it was in a way that many normal people could access.

Besides "texts" (in the widest literary critique sense), another factor that greatly contributed to the Rosary's spread and success was the confraternity created to promote it. If you're not familiar, confraternities are Christian (most often Catholic) voluntary organizations dedicated to some specific act or charity, usually with some kind of official church approval. Many became rather important in the late middle ages and Renaissance, and some remain important today (like the Confraternity of the Rosary). What made the Rosary Confraternity special and interesting was that 1. membership was free, 2. membership was open to anyone, and 3. at least early on, local chapters had a lot of flexibility. One further thing that I think must have loomed large at the time, but seems less interesting today, is that the confraternity prayed on behalf of all of its members, living or dead - which meant joining was a kind of "spiritual insurance" against suffering in purgatory. The flexibility I mentioned is especially interesting: early on, the confraternity did not tell all of its members that there was only one way to pray the Rosary - instead, different chapters offered different options, some more wide-open than others, and things like participation in public festivals were tweaked to suit local needs. It seems to me that having a coherent organization with a clear charter, leadership, and membership, that was nevertheless flexible and open-ended must have been a really powerful combination for spreading knowledge about and practice of the Rosary.

The last thing contributing to the Rosary's spread and popularity outside of the prayers and meditations and their spiritual effects might have been the beads themselves. Folks who prayed the Rosary regularly had a set of beads, sometimes very attractively made, that they might wear looped through a belt, wrapper around the wrist/arm, or even as a necklace. These beads would form an advertisement of their own to anyone who saw that did not already know about the Rosary. Further, given the spiritual significance of the beads, folks came to believe that the beads worked as a protective amulet against hostile spiritual forces (I'm inclined to believe they were mostly right). Whatever the reason, a set of Rosary beads served as an advertisement to those not yet praying it, and a reminder and strengthener to faith.

I had always wondered where all of the "Rose" imagery came from for the Rosary, and this book gives a fair amount of detail on that, so I was grateful. It seems there were two main threads, though these might have influenced one another, and so cleanly separating them may be foolish. First, the Song of Songs from the Old Testament was the most commented upon and referenced book of the Bible in the Middle Ages, which I found somewhat surprising. In it, the narrator (Solomon, presumably), compares his betrothed to a walled garden, emphasizing both the delights within, and the keeping out of anyone else - a obvious metaphor for chastity and sexual fulfillment afterward, in the appropriate context. On the other hand, non-religious poetry of the time also made great use of the "rose garden" as a metaphor for the erotic delights women held within their power to grant to their suitors. All of which means that language about roses and rose gardens was laden with all kinds of symbolic weight for virginity, sexuality, the feminine virtue of selectively withholding sexuality, and so forth. Further complicating things is the fact that erotic imagery was often used in medieval religious writing, especially by mystics, to describe the intensity and intimacy of certain spiritual states, and the line between "secular" and "religious" poetry was very, very blurry - which means you can have a song that makes a lot of erotic references and might mean in a symbolic religious way, a frankly sexual secular way, or even worse, both, or "whichever one gets it printed" - it was a messy and complicated time for symbolism. Obviously, sex has a lot of power and resonance in the human psyche, as does the refraining from it and the outcomes of it, and Mary somehow combines all three (well, not explicitly the "sex" part, but the boatloads of erotic or quasi-erotic imagery applied in songs and poems about her imply that it was in there somewhere).

One of the main things I think was going on here was medieval Christianity struggling with the facts of life and aspects of the world that polytheist societies have always made the purview of Goddesses. Virginity, sexuality, and maternity are very important and powerful forces in the lives of anyone who isn't an ascetic, and most societies find steering and meaning in these weighty topics among Goddesses, but that option is closed to Christianity. And so, I get the impression that medieval Christians felt the lack of feminine divinity in their official theology, and found it in Mary. Please note that I'm not saying that Mary was worshiped as a Goddess, nor that prayers about these feminine divine energies were misdirected when sent to the saint Mary, nor that this was all material hairless apes coping with their psychology with no spiritual component. Instead, I believe that feminine divine energies are a real part of life and the world, and that the first few centuries of Christianity didn't have a very good way of handling and incorporating those energies, and Marian devotion was a way to meet that mostly unfilled need.

One of the important strands of this feminine divine energy was mercy, as opposed to the harsher, more masculine virtue of justice, and it seems that the Rosary leaned into this whole heartedly. Other than the above-mentioned emphasis on the Joyful and Glorious mysteries, over the sorrowful, there was one specific tweak that really showed that the Rosary was being prayed by those seeking mercy more than those glorifying justice. Specifically, early version of the picture texts and related works of art had the last of the 15 mysteries as the last judgment: Christ returning to earth and setting apart the saved and the damned. Obviously, this is a slightly important event in Christian theology, and a logical end-point to a narrative that is otherwise primarily about the life of Christ. And yet, in most of the picture texts, and in the other texts that seem to have continued that tradition, including what became the official Rosary, the last mystery became not the last judgment, but instead Mary's ascension into heaven and crowning there. All of which suggests that those praying the Rosary found it spiritually fulfilling not as a tool for keeping strict score of punishments deserved, but rather as an earnest asking for and celebration of divine mercy for sins committed.

For my own work, it's easy to tap into the divine energy that Goddesses bring to the table, because I do worship Goddesses. I can pray to them explicitly, so that makes some things easier in setting up the prayer practice. Even so, the very contrast between the Rosary and what you usually see from Catholic worship is perhaps instructive, and my own inspiration to pursue this path has been driven by a Goddess, so for me, if anything, the challenge will be in finding the right balance between masculine and feminine, rather than in giving weight to the feminine at all.

This one is likely not that important, but I hadn't realized that most of the early development of the bits that got assembled into the Rosary took place in German-speaking lands, and much of that early development was in the vernacular. Partly I'm sure this was Faustian religion asserting itself in its heartland, but given that I am developing a "rosary" meant to be compatible with the beliefs that come from those lands before Christianity, I wonder if there were not cultural and/or folkloric reasons for a spiritual practice like this to resonate so strongly and to find itself birthed there. On the other hand, given its quick spread and ongoing popularity in non-Germanic tongues and cultures, maybe it was just something about Catholic belief that made it resonate so much. Of course, part of that might be that Mary really did and does love and promote this particular devotion, which might render any material explanations moot, and make analogies with prayers to other divine beings less relevant. At any rate, I feel called to work out this practice, and so I'll keep at it until I have something that works.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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• The Seed of Yggdrasill - Overall Rundown - You Are Here
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 1 - Introduction and the Books of Old
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 2 - Creation, Cosmos, and the Ruling Powers
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 3 - The Maiden with the Mead
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 4 - Retrieving the Soul of the Gods
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 5 - The Loss of the Golden Age in Old Norse Myth
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 6 - Ragnarok and the New Age
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 7 - Death and Resurrection
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 8 - The Way of the Wand Witch
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 9 - The Priestess and the King
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 10 - The Wise Man's Path
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 11 - The Trials of Thorr
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 12 - The One and the Many and Epilogue

Before I dive into what this book says, it might help to ground what kind of book it is at all. Looking back over the chapter-by-chapter posts, I see that I never really said that clearly: I just kind of reckoned if you were reading my blog or reading these reviews, you had some idea of what you were in for.

So, what is The Seed of Yggdrasill by Maria Kvilhaug? It is her attempt to explore the spiritual and even esoteric meanings behind the Old Norse myths, with the main sources being the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, but also pulling in bits and scraps from other works, like the Heimskringla, the works of Saxo Grammaticus, and The Sagas of the Icelanders. The bulk of the book focuses not on relating the stories found in these works or plotting out the relationships of the figures in those stories, but instead on what these stories and figures might represent psychologically and spiritually and what esoteric insights someone might gain by considering the stories in such an allegorical light.

Though Kvilhaug spends some time laying out what the sources are and what can be found in them, this book is not very well-suited to those new to the Norse myths: it is long, dense, and wide-ranging. Both it and this review use specialist vocabulary like kenning and heiti assuming you know they mean, and throw around Old Norse words without especially good translations, like jotun, which is usually translated "giant," but seems to mean something more like "semi-divine being associated with the forces of nature that often has hostile interactions with the Gods," or wight, which is an Old English word for "alive being," which used to be used as broadly as we might "being" today, but these days tends to get used to mean something like a spirit: a non-physical conscious being, usually one of less power than the Gods, but not always. So, if you don't have a baseline understanding of the Norse myths and the language folks tend to use when discussing it, this book is unlikely to be a good starting point, and my discussion of it below might sail right over your head, as it assumes an audience who might be interested in and find useful Kvilhaug's book.

Kvilhaug has a pretty idiosyncratic take on the Norse myths that informs everything she has to say about them. She believes that the Eddic and skaldic poems from heathen times were consciously crafted metaphorical allegories meant to get across mostly-ineffable pantheistic spiritual truths. That's a lot of sometimes-fuzzy words, so let's break down what we mean, here.

The groundmost thing to understand about Kvilhaug's understanding and analysis is that she believes in the truth of a kind of "pantheism," and she thinks that the heathen poets did too. Her flavor of pantheism holds that everything in all of creation is truly a manifestation of an single underlying divine substance/soul/being - Odhinn, you, me, your dog, this table I'm typing on, all of it is just as much a "part of the divine" as anything else. She says the she is agnostic about how much weight to give to the distinctness of "different" Gods and Goddesses, but it seems clear to me that she sees them as masks or roles for the same underlying Godhead/divinity/soul.

Since she sees the distinctness of the Gods as basically an illusion, she believes that it is less important which God plays a role in a myth than what characteristics that God has. She thinks that those roles were chosen consciously by the skalds that put these poems together, as a metaphor to express a spiritual truth that is hard to put into words. In other words, it's not that the skalds "really" believed that a large fellow named Thjazi turned into an eagle and grabbed a magical, youthful lady named Idhunn, nor even that they grew up hearing that story from their grandmas, and so told it in their own way, but rather that they sat down and did something like "I want to craft a poem about how the immortal soul we all share is cut off from us by mortality and the fear thereof, ah, yes, Idhunn and Thjazi would be a good way to get that across." We know that metaphor, allusion, disguise, and alternate names were all vital parts of Old Norse poetics, and Kvilhaug believes that this thread runs to the very identities of the Gods and the plots of the stories told about Them.

The upshot of all of this is that Kvilhaug looks for similarities between stories and particular mythic figures to find ways that they are "the same," and then treats the different names and situations as ways of getting at the same underlying truth from different angles. To use one of the less controversial examples, in some tales Odhinn is called "the All Father," and in others he is called "Frenzy." Kvilhaug would argue that both of these are pieces of the truth about "spirit," which is more fundamentally what Odhinn represents in these myths. More controversially, she would also say that Skadhi, Hel, Ran, and a few other Goddesses/Giantesses all represent death, and are thus "the same Goddess," but which name and characteristics the poet uses will be based on what he wants to emphasize: Ran for drowning, Skadhi for a death in the wilds, and Hel for plain, old death at home. One perhaps surprising outgrowth of her approach is that she is rather unconcerned with the timing and provenance of the poems. She has no problem analyzing Solarliodh (pretty confidently attributed to a Christian writer ~1200 CE) or Hrafnagaldur Odhins (suspected of also being done by an antiquarian, but there's more debate) in the exact same manner she does the unquestionably old and authentically heathen poems.

How you react to this, and how much weight you give it, will likely have much to do with your own understanding of the nature of the Gods. If you believe that the different God are distinct in some meaningful way besides the effect they have on us in the stories told about us, you will likely find her interpretations thought-provoking at best, and muddled at worst. If you share her pantheistic views, or for any other reason see the myths as primarily metaphors for the inner workings of the soul, then you might find her approach deeply insightful and useful.

Given Kvilhaug's goals and approach, this book doesn't seem well suited to someone just starting with the Norse myths. Luckily, there are several good options there (Ellis-Davidson, Lindow, Abram, Turville-Peters if you can afford it). Instead, this book is pretty much only helpful if you want to think deeply about the myths and the kinds of symbolic or even esoteric meanings they might have. It is a wonderful book if you plan to bethink (meditate) on the myths. Whether you believe her conclusions are "right" or not, they are always thought-provoking and will invite you to explore some aspects of the Gods and their tales that you might otherwise not have thought about, so I can strongly recommend it for anyone who uses the heathen lore as a part of esoteric spiritual lore, with a few caveats (see the rest of this rundown for those).

Notwithstanding some of my issues with this book, it does have a lot of great insights and interesting takes. Here are a few of my favorites.

"Worst" is maybe an overly strong word, as overall I found a lot to like about the book, but if you haven't gathered by now, there was also a lot that I was none too thrilled by.

I didn't put this as one of the "worst bits," since I'm truly not sure if it's on me or on her, but I still don't know what she means by calling Idhunn the "soul of the Gods." I mean, I kinda-sorta have a better idea now that I get that she uses "soul" to mean "the unifying divine force/substance/reality that all things share" and that she sees all characters in the myths as fundamentally metaphors rather than "people" with some kind of ontological, objective reality. Maybe that truly is all she means: the story of Idhunn is a story of how we as incarnated beings have lost touch with the reality of our connection to the underlying and unifying divinity of the cosmos, and to make understanding that easier, that divinity is represented as a Goddess, rather than a "force" or "substance" or whatever else. I somewhat balk at this, as it seems fundamentally unsatisfying to me, but then, that might just once again be my lack of agreement with Kvilhaug's metaphysics. That being said, I'm not even sure that's what she means, despite having read a chapter in this book and a whole 'nother book by her on this very topic, and that's frustrating, because Idun is very important to my own beliefs and practices. Once again, if you have thoughts on how to sort this out, I'd love to hear from you.

Altogether, I left this book perhaps even more frustrated than when I started it - it truly has some wonderful insights and great scholarship. Kvilhaug's core mission to translate names to their literal meanings should be the default in studying these myths, and the fact that name meanings are treated as an etymological curiosity that, at best, might shed some light on when/how a figure came to be worshiped, is, frankly, ridiculous. Not translating the names leaves so much meaning on the table. So, truly, my deep thanks to Ms. Kvilhaug for the work she has put into this analysis. What makes this frustrating is that these wonderful insights are buried in a sprawling, rambly book without an index. And the very fact that she defaults to translating names means that you can't always look up a God or hero or object by his/its name using a search function, if you have an electronic copy (which I bought to supplement my paperback because the lack of an index was making me pull out my hair).

In an ideal world, I would love to see something like Rudolf Simek's foundational Dictionary of Northern Mythology, but with Kvilhaug's translations of names and fanatical eye for parallels between figures and tales. If I could look up Gunnlodh, see Kvilhaug's translation of the name, and a list of everywhere She appears in the myths, along with a "See Also" section that points to other entries, that would be worth its weight in gold. Especially helpful would be if she discussed where she differs from other scholars in translating the name, and why she favors her take. All that's a pretty tall order, but I'd still be thrilled with just a compiled list of names with her translations, in alpahbetical order for easy look-up. Maybe not the sexiest work of scholarship, but dang would that be helpful.

Other than a reference work of that sort, the thing I'd next most like to see from Kvilhaug would be one or more poems, translated by her, with interleaved commentary, stanza-by-stanza. Maybe asking for the whole Poetic Edda would be a bit much, but hey, a guy can dream. She regularly makes use of this approach with snippets from poems, where she embeds the poem, her translation, and her commentary in a wider analysis, both in this book and in her others, but again, it would be really helpful to a serious student of the lore to be able to read, say, Voluspa, with her name meanings and commentary, rather than having to hunt through her books for every place she brings up the poem. One of the reasons I'd love to see this is that following the poem closely provides the kind of structure and focus that Kvilhaug benefits from and seems to have trouble imposing on herself.

Altogether, there are some truly surprising and, I think, worthwhile insights in this book for any serious student of the Germanish lore, but it's not as easy to find as I'd like. This book is not well suited to pulling off the shelf, flipping to a section, and reading a paragraph or three to get a key idea. Even most of the sections are hard to read as stand-alone bits, unless you're already familiar with much else of what Kvilhaug is up to. As it is, I'd say the chapter is the smallest unit of the work you can read on its own and hope to walk away from with some understanding. Hopefully my chapter guides and this rundown help with that somewhat as well. Unluckily, if you truly want to get most of the insights out of this book, you'll likely have to read it for yourself, especially since much of its worth lies in the links it makes between disparate Gods, tales, and works, and your own associations and knowledge will shape which of those you find most interesting and helpful. If you do dive in, I'd love to hear your thoughts, most of all where they differ from mine.

Happy mining!

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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• The Seed of Yggdrasill - Overall Rundown
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 1 - Introduction and the Books of Old
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 2 - Creation, Cosmos, and the Ruling Powers
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 3 - The Maiden with the Mead
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 4 - Retrieving the Soul of the Gods
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 5 - The Loss of the Golden Age in Old Norse Myth
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 6 - Ragnarok and the New Age
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 7 - Death and Resurrection
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 8 - The Way of the Wand Witch
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 9 - The Priestess and the King
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 10 - The Wise Man's Path
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 11 - The Trials of Thorr
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 12 - The One and the Many and Epilogue - You Are Here

We've made it! I know I've harped a bit much about the length of this book and how it's been a slog at times, but in my defense, I started reading this book in July of last year, so that's about half a year of working my way through this book. All of which is to say, I'm glad to have made it through. I'll write up the last chapter and Epilogue here, and I'm thinking about doing one more post with overall thoughts on the book as a kind of capstone to the series. Let's take a look at how Kvilhaug closes out her book.

All throughout the book, Kvilhaug has been talked about "pantheism," but she's been a bit murky about what she exactly means by that, which has been frustrating, because "pantheism" comes in a lot of unalike flavors that can have some very different theological implications. At last, here at the end, though, Kvilhaug lays out what she means:

Pantheism is a concept that may be understood in different ways, so to clarify what I mean by the term. It is basically the idea that one unifying deity or universal soul lays at the core of all deities, a one within the many, or a many within the one. The concept also includes divine immanence, the idea that the divine unity is immanent in "creation," "nature," or "the universe," not outside of and apart from it. In many Pantheist traditions, the divine is the soul of existence itself, as a whole, and thus we are all aspects of the ultimate divine soul.

- Kvilhaug, M. (2020). p. 551

In the rest of the chapter, she expands further on this. Though she says that she acknowledges the reality of difference between different people and different Gods, it becomes pretty clear that she thinks it's more true in some important sense that we are parts of "the same thing," the universal soul/Godhead/pantheistic root stuff. This has a few implications, some of which we'll talk about in a tick, but maybe the biggest one is that she believes any and every path to contemplation of or searching for the divine will end up leading to the same place, and some paths seem to be more direct routes than others, so if you figure all this out, you can skip tedious steps like worshiping the Gods as separate beings rather than as particular manifestations of something you already have within yourself. As early on in the book, Kvilhaug again gives some lip service to the idea that different religious approaches are all valid, but manages to give off the impression that anyone who doesn't take her approach is less sophisticated or hasn't gotten as close to the truth, so that's fun. To be clear, I don't think Kvilhaug's beliefs or approach are untenable or preposterous, I just think that her certainty that her way is the right way is kind of annoying.

Kvilhaug gets back into the idea of Germanish "mystery cults" like those known from the classical world and goes further with the idea than when she talked about it before. One of the main jumping off points she uses for her discussion is a curious remark by Tacitus: he says that the Suebi, one of the Germanish confederations of tribes around in his time (1st century CE), worship "Isis." Kvilhaug does a pretty good job of talking about the various things this might mean, assuming he's not just wrong, which seems unlikely for an otherwise rather credible observer. First, she goes through the likelihood that some of the Germans back then literally worshiped an Egyptian Goddess. This is not as crazy a possibility as it might at first glance seem: by the 1st century CE, a mystery cult devoted to the Hellenistic version of Isis was one of the most popular forms of religious devotion in the Roman Empire. Even at this early date, the Germans must have had plenty of cultural contact with the Romans - it wasn't all cattle raids and obliterated legions - so, some of them might have picked up some religious practices from their more civilized neighbors to the south.

Though not implausible, Kvilhaug asserts, and I agree, that it is even more likely that when Tacitus said "Isis," he very likely meant a Goddess that seemed enough like what an educated Roman knew about Isis that he figured the Goddess the Germans were worshiping was the same one. This was, in fact, the norm for Roman writers: to use the familiar name of a Roman God or Goddess for whichever of the local Gods or Goddesses seemed most alike: for example, it seems very likely that when the Romans talked about German worship of "Mercury," they meant an earlier version of Odhinn, most likely because they heard something like "he is the God of poetry, speaking well, and magic, and he travels around a lot" and thought "sounds like Mercury to us." Kvilhaug goes on to argue that Tacitus's choice of Isis rather than, say, Juno or Venus or Minerva, or another more homegrown Roman Goddess, is an indirect indicator that the Goddess worshiped by the Germans was a "Great Goddess" (more on that in the next bit), or at least a Goddess with many areas of influence, including sovereignty of some kind. She also finds it significant that Tacitus chose the Goddess worshiped in a mystery cult - one reason he might have picked her is that he recognized something in the worship of the Suebi that looked like a mystery cult.

Kvilhaug goes on to argue that the famous cult center at Uppsala might have functioned as the site of mystery initiations like Eluesis in Greece. I don't think the case is decisive, but it is certainly an intriguing possibility. We know that Uppsala was famous throughout the Old Norse world and drew worshipers from all over, much as Eleusis was and did in the Mediterranean. We know that Uppsala was richly endowed with gold and other ornaments, as was Eleusis. Uppsala held a regular festival (every nine years) as did Eluesis (yearly). There's even a hint in Saxo Grammaticus that there was some kind of stage performance at Uppsala, and Eleusis likely staged plays as part of the Lesser Mysteries. There are also some interesting mythological parallels between some of the tales of the Gods we know to have been worshiped at Uppsala (Odhinn, Freyr, and Thorr) and some of the mystery cults we know about from the classical world, but those were a bigger focus in the earlier section of the book.

As I said, I think Kvilhaug makes some interesting points here, and perhaps offers some avenues for further exploration. I'm not quite as sure that there was a "Mystery Cult" of the Nordic world in heathen times as it seems Kvilhaug is, but that may be a bit of playing around with definitions. I think it is nearly beyond doubt that there existed some kind of esoteric religious practice, very likely including some kind of initiation, during most, or more likely all, of heathen times. If nothing else, it seems very likely that religious specialists of various kinds, like the volur, must have had some kind of practice, training, and initiation to become recognized in their roles. It would also be consistent with what we know of other polytheistic religions for their to be some amount of more involved practice or special rituals for more enthusiastic members of the laity (such as the mysteries that are the main topic of this section, but also things like pilgrimages to significant shrines for purification in Shinto or meditative and prayer practices in Buddhism). Should we consider such initiatory and/or esoteric practices "mystery cults?" That's harder to say. To me, that implies a level of regularity, continuity, and organization that it's a lot harder to prove, especially for a mystery cult. So, I'm not saying Kvilhaug is wrong that there was an Old Norse mystery school of some sort, just that I'm less confident than she is that it's a slam dunk.

Earlier in the book, Kvilhaug talked about Freyja as a "Great Goddess," a theory put forth by some scholars (some that she named: Britt Mari Nasstrom, Folke Strom, and Anne Holtsmark). Basically, the theory goes that in some religions, and most especially in those of a pantheistic bent, you tend to see one deity revered as the best representation of the universal immanent soul/divinity/godhead, and that often that deity is a Goddess. Further, in the Nordic countries, that Goddess was Freyja, and all of the other Goddesses are just hypostases or other aspects of Her. Here, Kvilhaug revisits this argument, but takes it a bit farther given the explicit pantheism that is the focus of this chapter. She says that if all Gods and Goddesses are just manifestations of the same universal soul, then of course all Goddesses are one Goddesses, but also, they're all one God, depending on the myth. She further elaborates on the point she has made before that Heimdallr is the "Great World," or the embodiment of all of the cosmos, and in some of His myths serves as the universal divine that all other Gods (And Goddesses and Men and Women and everything else) are just emanations of. Odhinn also seems to sometimes fill the role of "all divinity present in all things." I think mostly you'll be nodding along with this if you buy Kvilhaug's assertions about pantheism, and you'll find it speculative or hand-wavey or otherwise useless if you don't.

Okay, this far into the book, I've gotten used to some pretty out-there comparisons and tie-ins and the like: dwarves as space aliens, Thorr as the literal magnetosphere, Cybele and Ishtar as influences on Norse Goddesses, but I was still not expecting to see the Norse myths compared to Carlos Castaneda at all. If you're not familiar, Castaneda wrote a series of books while studying for his anthropology Ph.D. that became rather popular. In these, he describes learning about spiritual matters from a Yaqui (a Mexican Indian tribe) "man of knowledge" named don Juan Matus. Apparently, in one of these books, The Fire from Within, Castaneda tells about don Juan describing the visions of the "Old Toltec seers" involving a huge spiritual force/entity that is "like an eagle" that is the source of all consciousness, and from which "streams" or "emanations" of force or awareness flow, but which also eats the awareness of souls when they die, enhancing it's own knowledge and consciousness through the experience thus consumed. Kvilhaug compares this with the prominent role played by eagles and Gods/jotnar in eagle shape in the Norse myths, especially Hraesvelgr, "Corpse Swallower," the eagle who sits at the top of the World Tree, from whose flapping wings come all winds, and who eats the dead (and might be the same as Thjazi and/or Suttung). I'm not gonna lie: the parallels are at least interesting, if not downright striking, not least because they seem to come from such disparate sources.

There's something to know when considering this comparison, though. After Castaneda's books became very popular, some folks came out expressing doubts that his accounts were accurate, or even that don Juan was a real person. The works feature very little that is verifiably Yaqui in language or culture, there's no outside corroboration of don Juan or Castaneda's interactions with him, and there are certain inconsistencies in the stories as given that would be odd for careful ethnographic work. All of which is to say that some folks think Castaneda's a stone-cold fake. John Michael Greer, whom I respect greatly on all matters occult and esoteric, agrees that Castaneda's works are likely best thought of as fiction, but fiction that nevertheless includes some very deep spiritual insights. If such allegations are true, or close to true, it also renders the "proof" of Old Norse and indigenous Mexican beliefs describing similar spiritual realities far less impressive. Even still, I've never encountered any mention of Castaneda having any familiarity with Norse myth, so it'd be pretty strange if he had consciously incorporated anything from it as part of making something up. If Kvilhaug is wrong that these are truly uncrossed parallel visions of a deeper spiritual reality, the most likely explanation to me is that Castaneda was exposed to enough "adjacent" cultural material to Old Norse myth that a vision he had himself featured an eagle in a similar role. But it's also possible that she's onto something here, and it certainly makes for great food for bethinking.

I mentioned above that Kvilhaug's belief that the pantheistic truth of the universe can be approached multiple ways has further implications in the chapter, and the biggest one might be that she sees the myths as merely metaphorical expressions of the ineffable truth of pantheism. Specifically, she believes that the poems of the Edda were works of "fiction" crafted by their writers with conscious metaphorical intent. In other words, she thinks the Eddic poems bear a similar relationship to pantheistic truth as The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe bears to the gospel. She sees the Eddic and Skaldic poets as initiates into the pantheist-flavored mysteries she discusses who used the raw material of their culture's folkways and lore to consciously try to convey the deep truths they had experienced in metaphorical language. On the one hand, this helps make sense of Kvilhaug's tendency to equate darn-near everything (more on that in the next bit) - she feels like they're all just intentionally chosen symbols anyway, so it doesn't much matter which one is used, except as it is affected by things like poetic, narrative, or aesthetic considerations. Since all religious insights end up pointing to the same end eventually, it's helpful to compare notes between two different paths to triangulate where it seems they're both pointing to. Hell, this interpretative framework being asserted is even consistent with Kvilhaug's pantheistic chauvinism - if the pantheistic unity of all spiritual insights is true, and if these poets were folks who had deeply grasped this, what else could they write besides conscious metaphors of ineffable truths?

My main beef here is that this isn't really how myths work, and Kvilhaug has shown a lot of the evidence that they don't throughout this book. Multiple times, she gives examples of the surprising longevity of mythic themes and figures - the Bronze Age carvings showing a sun Goddess and what looks like a God with a hammer, Tacitus's account of a Goddess of plenty paraded in a cart, just like Frey's statue in late heathen times, and others. One of the reasons myths are so long-lasting is because they are important to their culture: there's a right way to tell one and a wrong way. Different storytellers might try out different variations, but only within certain bounds. You might be able to get away with changing how Thor killed a particular jotun, but if you said He didn't, or that He was a coward, or a pacifist, everyone would just say "that's not how the story goes!" My point is that within a culture where myths are still a vital part of its religious life, and not just one piece of cultural heritage among others, the elements of those myths are not simple raw materials that can be repurposed to whatever end an individual author wants.

To be fair, I don't think Kvilhaug is saying that the skalds were picking Gods or Goddesses willy-nilly, with no regard for what They were known to be like. I think, instead, that she was saying the old stories had always had hints of the pantheism she believes the skalds wanted to convey, and those skalds picked stories and emphasized elements from them that highlighted those hints. Sure, at times in the ancient world, we had self-conscious works using mythological elements like Ovid's Metamorphoses, or more earnest, but still clearly very intentional, works like The Golden Ass by Apuleius, but these came in societies at a very different place in their development than the Iron Age and early Medieval Nordic countries. Even if Kvilhaug is right that there were explicit mystery cults in the north back then, I am skeptical that their adherents would be crafting explicitly allegorical works out of the raw material of organic myths.

It is maybe fitting that once Kvilhaug (finally) reveals the full shape of her interpretative framework of the myths she makes it clearer than ever before why she has been so ready to find similarities between different Gods, Goddesses, jotnar, stories, places, and things: she literally believes they are all "really" the same thing. Urdhr is Brynhild is Idhunn is Frigg is Freyja is Odhinn is Heimdall is Ymir is Mimir is Thjazi is… You get the idea. And no, I'm not exaggerating for comedic effect here. When making the comparison between different eagle myths we talked about above, she goes on to say that the myth of an eagle that is the source of all winds and is the "corpse devourer" is the same myth as the roaring mill (Hvergelmir) in the underworld that receives all souls but is also the source of all streams. And both of those are the same as Urdharbrunnar, the Well of Origin/Fate. If Freyja is the "Great Goddess" that is the "true" nature behind the many masks of the other Goddesses, Norns, Valkyries, and others, well, then, Odhinn the Great God is the same thing, only seen for its masculine attributes rather than feminine. Since all of these figures are just symbols pointing at one, single thing behind them, any differences are wholly arbitrary, or at best, aesthetic or contingent on what aspect of that single thing the storyteller wants to emphasize today, in this one story. I have to give Kvilhaug credit for being consistent on this matter, and following the implications of her beliefs through to their logical conclusions, but if you don't share her starting premise, it's a frustrating experience to see the rich and exciting world of manifold Gods, Goddesses, elves, dwarves, jotnar, trolls, and so forth all thrown into a blender and turned into homogeneous slop.

The systems of spiritual teaching I am currently exploring teach that, yes, all of reality is a manifestation of a single source, and so, in some sense, we are all made of the same "stuff" and are parts of the same "whole," as Kvilhaug asserts. The systems I follow, though, lay far more emphasis than Kvilhaug seems to on how different manifestations truly do differ in meaningful ways. You and I and Odhinn may all be emanations of "the One," but to say that it is "more true" or "more important" that we are "the same" than that we are "different" seems reductive to the point that it might as well be false. Now, might it be an important part of spiritual insight and growth to see that we are "the same" in ways that are not immediately obvious? Quite possibly, yes! But to take that and say "therefore, differences are an unimportant illusion that can be dispensed with" strikes me as springing from a desire to make a big, complicated world easier to understand.

Look at how utterly confusing and messy the natural world is. On the one hand, you could just say "well, all of life is just an assortment of arrangements of carbon atoms with a few others brought along." Okay, sure, technically right, I guess, but hell, look at how utterly messy and confusing those arrangements of carbon are. Look at just your own gut - we have such a poor understanding of how digestion works, how it interacts with everything else going on in our body, how it interacts with the billions of other critters that live inside our body, and so forth. That's one piece of the natural world that is right here! We haven't even touched the fungal and microbial ecosystems in the soil under forests. Or the undiscovered species of insects in the rainforests. Or what the hell is going on at the vents at the bottom of the ocean. If the world that is available to our bodily senses is made out of such fractal complexity, why would we expect the world beyond those senses, which is supposed to be inhabited by beings greater, smarter, and far older than us, to be any simpler? Or for attractive simplifying assumptions like "they're all really just emanations of the same universal soul" to be any more helpful than "those are all really just arrangements of carbon atoms"?

Maybe I'll change my mind on this as I go further in my spiritual exploration, but for now, I am deeply suspicious of any metaphysical scheme that tries to wrap things up in a nice, neat, easy-for-humans-to-understand package. We're clever apes with moderately developed sparks of something divine within us, and there's a whole lot more of Being than there is of us.

Given that in other parts of the book, Kvilhaug has talked about how working out the deeper meanings of the myths is like a detective story, I think one reason she might have held off until the last chapter to lay her metaphysical/theological cards on the table was to "make her case." Now, there's a place for narrative non-fiction, where the thing being explored is treated kind of like a mystery that is gradually uncovered chapter by chapter as new evidence is brought in and the implications are gradually, tantalizingly made clear. From what I remember about reading Fingerprints of the Gods back in college, it did an excellent job of this, hinting and teasing at the final "reveal" while making its case, but not entirely giving the game away until the end. If something like that is what Kvilhaug was going for, well, the poor organization I've lamented in almost all of these reviews has betrayed her, because she spoiled herself throughout the whole book, repeatedly. I think the book would have been much stronger if she had just come out at the beginning and said "I think the Old Norse myths are works of metaphorical literature intentionally crafted to convey the pantheistic spiritual insights of a mystery religion similar to those found in the classical world and elsewhere, I'll spend the rest of the book proving it." Which is, you know, the standard approach in academic writing, which you might expect someone who holds a Masters degree to gravitate toward. Finally having her put these things so explicitly made a lot of the rest of the book click into place more clearly. Maybe it wouldn't have done so without reading the rest of the book, I dunno - if you happen to read all of these reviews before reading the book and decide to start with the last chapter and then read the rest, please let me know how that works out.

For me, this is a much stronger criticism than "it's a bit repetitive at times" or "wow, I wish you had gone to the trouble to make an index" or even "you scatter important insights about the same topic across multiple chapters." All of those are structural issues, but this is a foundational issue - the rest of the structure is built on shaky groundwork, so no wonder it's harder to follow than it ought to be. Kvilhaug ends the book with a description of another personal spiritual experience (and again, it's pretty well done for that kind of thing), one that granted her a key insight into the pantheism she has come to believe is at the core of Norse Myth, and together with the Epilogue, it seems clear that she thinks this provides a nice, inspirational send-off, encouraging the reader to begin his own exploration of the pantheistic truth hidden within the myths, with her insights as his guide. Instead, it just felt like another idiosyncratic take consistent with what has been said over-and-over throughout the book, but never all that clearly, and presented as the authoritative truth, despite some token protestations of intellectual humility. It was a somewhat disappointing, but not all that surprising, ending to a very uneven book - genuinely worthwhile insights mired in a confused, repetitive structure, and crammed into one true framework of interpretation.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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• The Seed of Yggdrasill - Overall Rundown
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 1 - Introduction and the Books of Old
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 2 - Creation, Cosmos, and the Ruling Powers
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 3 - The Maiden with the Mead
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 4 - Retrieving the Soul of the Gods
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 5 - The Loss of the Golden Age in Old Norse Myth
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 6 - Ragnarok and the New Age
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 7 - Death and Resurrection
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 8 - The Way of the Wand Witch
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 9 - The Priestess and the King
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 10 - The Wise Man's Path
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 11 - The Trials of Thorr - You Are Here
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 12 - The One and the Many and Epilogue

This chapter might be one of the best in the book. Not because it has the deepest insights or the newest ways of thinking about the myths - it's all pretty much in line with what she's been saying throughout. Rather, this chapter might suffer the least from the complaints I've had for most of the rest of the book - it's straightforward, not particularly repetitive (while still appropriately referring back to points already discussed), and weaves together evidence from multiple poems into a coherent message. The chapter also has a core point, explores that point, but doesn't wander off on too many tangents, so hooray! Once again, glimpses like this of what this whole book could have been, say if Kvilhaug had hired an editor, are frustrating, but I'll take good stuff where I can get it.

Kvilhaug's main point for this chapter is, as I said, pretty straightforward: in (at least most) Eddic poems, Thor stands in as a human initiate being confronted by spiritual challenges. Specifically, Thor stands for a strong, materially successful man, someone on top of the world in this life, who may have less insight into the spiritual world. What's immediately appealing about this theory is that it explains why one of the most respected, widely worshiped Gods of the elder heathens would be shown as such a buffoon in so many of the myths about him. One of the preferred scholarly explanations has never been very satisfying to me, at least not as the whole explanation: Thor was the God of the common man, whereas Odin was the God of poets and lords, so the poetry we have, which was composed by poets for lords, favors the high class God over the low class God. Now, clearly, there's likely something to this. Odin is the God of kings and poets, magicians and wanderers. His myths don't feature much in the way of being a good, solid family man or a pillar of the community. Thor on the other hand, is a devoted husband and father, utterly reliable in warding Asgard from jotuns and trolls, and unfailingly brave. There's a lot here for more "down to earth" folks to find admirable.

Still, the thought that different groups of society each had "their own" God and treated the others with ridicule and contempt doesn't really jive with what we know about polytheistic societies. Yes, groups and individuals often have one or more Gods that they are closer to and give more worship to than others, but the idea of putting down Gods with whom you don't have much of a relationship seems like a projection from monotheistic norms. Sure, you got the occasional denigration of the Gods of enemies, but by far the norm was to treat all Gods, foreign and domestic, with at least distant cordiality and respect. These are, after all, powerful eternal beings that know and can do far more than you, so why risk it?

The other favored explanation for Thor's embarrassment in many of the Eddic poems is some combination of Christian influence and/or more common folktales shaping the poems, rather than some presumed older, more serious "religious" mythology. Again, while not impossible (remember, even the very oldest Eddic poems were written down, and likely composed, rather late in heathen times), and possibly part of the picture, this strikes me as not the best explanation either. Whatever else they are, the Eddic poems are works of highly-crafted poetry. The "it's just folktales" argument also goes directly against the idea that these were composed by the high class poets opposed to the common folk in the earlier theory. As for the Christian influence argument, I think Kvilhaug's arguments from the past chapter on the decidedly heathen initiatory elements in many of the poems is pretty strong. We also have tales of later Christian poets explicitly mocking the Gods (like one guy calling Freyja "a bitch," for which he was banished), and the Eddic poems don't seem to do this (except maybe Lokasenna).

Anyhow, since I've never found these explanations very convincing, Kvilhaug's comes as a welcome alternative. Thor's seeming "bumbling" and the various humiliations he suffers are not attacks, rather they are instruction in his initiation, meant to impart lessons to the audience. This is a far more satisfying answer. So, how do these often comical scenes work as steps of an initiation? Let's explore.

Kvilhaug points out that the Thor we see in the Eddic poetry is in many ways the stereotypical viking warrior: macho, proud, strong, brave, and ready to solve all problems with violence, to the point of being hot-headed. Notice that often, this is exactly what the Gods need to get out of one scrape or another - Thor shows up to run off Loki or the jotun who's causing trouble, or just kill him. In a few poems, though, like Harbardhsljodh, Thrymskvidha, and Hymiskvidha, Thor is made fun of, shown up, or forced to engage in shameful behavior. Harbardhsljodh is basically an extended ridiculing of Thor by Odin in disguise, meeting every boast of Thor's about His strength and prowess in battle with put downs and counter-brags about handiness with women. Besides Lokasenna, this is one of the harder poems to square with devout, worshiping heathens that revered both Gods. Again in Thrymskvidha, Thor has His hammer stolen out from under His nose and ends up having to dress as a bride and all but consummate a wedding to a jotun. In Hymiskvidha, Thor isn't humiliated quite so much, but He does have to heed the crafty advice of His/Tyr's mother (I've seen both interpretations) rather than take His preferred direct approach, and Hymir thwarts Him catching the Midgard Serpent. In all of these, Thor's default of "smash it with Mjolnir and sort it out afterward!" is somehow shown not to be the way, and in all cases, the right path somehow involved women.

Kvilhaug makes good use of a more-or-less Jungian scheme of what masculine/feminine beings and traits are doing in myth that she introduced way back in chapter 1 when talking through this stuff. She also makes some interesting comparisons to the trope from martial arts movies of the young, talented hot head who has to discover that being an arrogant jerk that can kick everybody's ass isn't the path to true wisdom or power (she does an extended run down of Fearless, starring Jet Li, to make this point). I thought her analysis of what's going on in Harbardhsljodh made especially good use of her paradigm, pointing out that Odin's bragging about getting with the ladies might have been less about His being all-time greatest player and more about His achievement of the spiritual accomplishments that bring about union with the "Lady with the Mead," as described in earlier chapters. Likewise, His making fun of Thor for fighting women is likely less about Him being a chickpuncher and more about Him failing the test to confront the ugly ogress appropriately so that she transforms into the shining maiden, again, as a path to spiritual enlightenment.

Similarly, Thor dressing up as a bride in Thrymskvidha may be more than a funny story about the mighty God being made a fool of. It might represent the need to embrace the feminine parts of His personality to overcome certain obstacles and reach greater wisdom and power. Kvilhaug argues that both of these stories (and arguably, also the story of Utgardhsloki given by Snorri) are about humiliation as a tool for breaking down the pride of the ego, and I think she's likely onto something. In Hymiskvidha, Thor has finally learned His lesson and readily acquiesces to the wisdom of His/Tyr's mother and so achieves His goals with minimal fuss (and when the jotnar decide to attack Him anyway, He gets to flex His still mighty fighting skills). The idea that we all have both masculine and feminine parts within us, but that many of us have trouble getting in touch with the part that doesn't match our bodily sex will be familiar to anyone who has read much Jung at all, and again, I think Kvilhaug makes good use of this framework for thinking here. She goes a bit overboard with bringing in modern gender theory and politics, but that's not really necessary to her wider point, which I think is pretty sound.

Kvilhaug closes the chapter with something a bit on the odd side, but that I appreciated: an account of one of her own spiritual experiences that has informed how she understands Thor. These kinds of things can easily veer either into "too personal to mean anything to anyone else" or else "grandiose claims about unique insight into the nature of reality." Kvilhaug dodges both of these pitfalls admirably. She is careful to stress the subjective nature of what occurred, acknowledges that she can make no claims as to whether it was "all in her head" or in contact with something outside of herself, and all of the mundane factors that may have contributed to it. For my part, I'm grateful for a writer to share this kind of very personal experience, as it helps cast some light on the arguments she makes elsewhere, but again, she's careful not to be weirdly dogmatic or proselytizing about it or the like.

As I said, this was a very solid chapter, and I wish we had gotten more like this. So, as we come to the final step in our journey, let's see how the last chapter goes!

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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To meet this boast, I gave myself 5 "misses," where I didn't get anything up on time, as long as I made it up within the next week, and 5 "placeholder" posts, where I posted something without much substantive content, but on time. Here's how that worked out. For the sake of this rule, I am counting "after midnight but before I went to bed" as being "still Sunday."

Missed the Deadline: 3 (but never by more than 1 day, if that means anything!)
Placeholder Posted: 2
Missed the Deadline, and Made Up For It With a Placeholder: 0

Overall, this suggests I was a bit generous with the wiggle room I allowed myself. Also, looking at where I used placeholders, as well as where I was late, it was mostly holidays of one kind or another. This wouldn't have been a problem if not for my "Just In Time" writing and posting, where almost every post was written over the weekend that it got posted. Overall, I think the placeholders were a better option than flat-out missing a week, and I should have fallen back to that more often (which was the whole point of having it as an option). Instead, I found myself with a post 1/2 or 2/3 written and then not being able to wrap it up by Sunday evening. I had hoped for a getting into a better rhythm, especially one with more of a break between writing and editing, so that I could give editing more of the attention it deserves. It's tough finding the right balance between "just focus on getting something finished and out there every week" and "edit your posts for lasting value and quality." The good news is that I've gotten to the point where writing a blog post feels like a normal part of my workload and life on a weekly basis, so I think I'll try to keep that up.

After last year's boast, I did not put any particular constraint on my reading this year, but I did try to make it a priority. One way I did that was to write book reviews, bringing together my weekly blogging and my desire to spend time reading. Another way was to recommit to reading fiction regularly (ideally, at least about ten minutes before bed every night). Part of how I made that more likely was to let myself read whatever fiction I was interested in or excited about, whereas in the past I've sometimes tried to alternate between "lighter" and "weightier" fiction. I also didn't read as many comics this year, though that was less out of some intention, and more that I didn't discover as many comics as I have in years past. One thing that continued to pull against reading more books was continuing to read a lot of blogs. There's a lot of good stuff on substack, and I've been keeping up with more of it than I did in the past, but I'm wondering if I ought to put some stricter limits on what or how much stuff from blogs I read - not because I think it's "bad," but simply the cruel implacability of opportunity cost - an hour spent reading a long-form article is an hour not spent reading a chapter in a book.

Though it's a vanity metric, "number of books read" is at least helpful to me for spotting major trends in how I spend my time on the input side of things. A huge spike in "books read" might mean I read a lot of graphic novels, which I can finish in an evening. A big dip might be because I was reading big, fat doorstops like Spengler or reading a crap ton of blog posts instead, or maybe both. So, how did this year stack up? Unless I tear through a novella or some graphic novels, it looks like I'm finishing the year with 42 (heh) books, 32 of which were not graphic novels. This is way higher than last year's 17 books, but much closer to 2022's 46, some of which I discussed in my lookback on reading only books by the dead I linked a moment ago. I should also point out that I have a handful of books, maybe 3-5 that are "in process" - I've been reading them, am actively planning on continuing to do so, but I've only been reading in bits and pieces, or at certain times, like The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, which I bring with me when I need to wait on an appointment, or for my daughter to do her dance class. This habit is likely unhelpful, and I should unify my will on one reading project at a time. You'll find proponents for both "only one book at a time, always" as well as "dip in and out of as many books as you want, it's great!" with the latter being seen in its most extreme form as incremental reading. Given how strongly I am drawn by "ooh, shiny new ideas!" as well as the amount of variety I'm already getting from my hyper-customized magazine that is substack, I likely need to lean more heavily toward the focus end of things.

At some point last year, I started keeping an analog zettelkasten, and by some measures, I've kept up with that. I say "by some measures," because I haven't been as consistent with it as I'd like. I've done a very good job of taking notes on what I'm reading on "bib cards" (you make a card with bibliographic information on the book or article, then take reading notes on the back of it), an okay job on writing cards to go into my zettelkasten, but a kind of terrible job on "filing" or "installing" those cards - giving them an index number and writing it down in my key. The little use I have made of this set up keeps me convinced I ought to stick with it, but I've yet to develop the core habit of writing and installing "main cards" as I go. By all accounts, this gets easier as your key/index gets more robust, as adding key entries is one of the hurdles, but I haven't pushed past that just yet. We'll see how things go in 2024.

I've been pretty consistent with my spiritual work, doing a daily banishing ritual, discursive meditation, and divination of one kind or another. There's been a handful of days where I had to do a placeholder (like only doing 5 minutes of breathing for my meditation, or a shorter ritual), and another handful where I missed one or more of the practices all together. Even still, I scryed each of the stations of the Wheel of Life and each of the fews of the Ogham and have worked my way into the fourth grade of the Dolmen Arch, nearing the end of the "Lesser Mysteries." I also worked my way up to the master level of the Modern Order of Essenes and began work in the Universal Gnostic Church seminary on my way to ordination in that rather quirky religious body. I plan on keeping up with the same going into next year - I can't do any advanced ceremonial magic until my younger daughter is three, so I won't be exploring that end of the Druid Magic Handbook in the coming year, but I have plenty to keep me busy with study, meditation, and a weekly scrying.

If you haven't seen at the top of the page or bottom each new post, I'm starting a mailing list for updates to the blog. Personally, I like getting email updates for new blog posts (I subscribe to a bunch of substacks), so I decided I ought to extend the same courtesy to you, gentle reader. I've been holding off on doing this for not wanting to use a corporate tool like mailchimp and not knowing an open source option, but I decided to stop using that as an excuse and just go low tech. For now, that means that to get on the mailing list, you just send me an email saying so, and I put your email address on a list. Each week, when a post goes out, I'll copy and paste it into an email and send it to everyone on the list. Presumably I'll find a better way of handling it as we go, but for now, I wanted to get a minimally viable product going.

The other thing for the year is I'm setting myself an ambitious goal: I'm going to finish crafting the Heathen Rosary and write a book about it. I don't yet know what all will go into that book, besides the prayers and how to say them, but this feels like an important step for me: my boasts for the last two years have been very "process" oriented - only read books by dead guys, crank out a blog post weekly. I think it will do me some good to have something more concrete to go after, and I've been meaning to write a book for years, so here we go.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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• The Seed of Yggdrasill - Overall Rundown
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 1 - Introduction and the Books of Old
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 2 - Creation, Cosmos, and the Ruling Powers
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 3 - The Maiden with the Mead
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 4 - Retrieving the Soul of the Gods
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 5 - The Loss of the Golden Age in Old Norse Myth
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 6 - Ragnarok and the New Age
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 7 - Death and Resurrection
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 8 - The Way of the Wand Witch
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 9 - The Priestess and the King
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 10 - The Wise Man's Path - You Are Here
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 11 - The Trials of Thorr
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 12 - The One and the Many and Epilogue

Still another short one, before a medium penultimate chapter and a long final chapter. Still, the end of the tunnel is in sight! I know I keep harping on the same things, but they all seem linked together, and as I go through the book, they become more of a problem. Better organization and editing would have meant less redundancy, as well as shorter length. The good insights (which, again, are definitely here) could shine out all the more clearly were that the case. Ah well, let's talk about the male path of initiation now that we've talked about the female path and the sacred marriage.

If you have spent any time with the Heathen lore at all, you have come across the tale of Odhinn hanging himself upon the World Tree, Yggdrasill, a sacrifice of himself to himself, by which he won the runes and maybe even his very godhood, as relayed in Havamal. One thing that's curious about this tale, though, is that it is not told of Odhinn in Snorri's Prose Edda. Maybe the defining story of the king of the Gods, and Snorri just left it out? Curious. Kvilhaug has made this point before, but she makes it more fully here - maybe Snorri left it out because that story was too radioactive to 13th century Icelandic Christians. Too Heathen. Too magical. Too much stepping on Christ's exclusive claim to resurrection. It's always difficult to argue that the absence of evidence is evidence, but given how many clues we have that Snorri was familiar with most of the specific poems of the Poetic Edda, the idea that he just flat didn't know Havamal seems odd. As happens often, I find Kvilhaug's confidence in her theory a bit much, but in this case, I think she's very likely on to something. At any rate, the reason she puts so much weight on this myth in this chapter is to make the claim that it provides the pattern for a possibly real-life initiation ritual, at least for high-status, spiritually important folks like kings, shamans, and esoteric seekers. Ordeal is a well-known path to altered states of consciousness, and is well-attested among the circumpolar folks who had shamans. Specifically, ordeal by some kind of hanging is known in some of these groups, so that's, at a minimum, suggestive. And fasting is a human universal. Now, nine days and nine nights with no food and water? I tend to suspect that's a length of time to prove His godly superiority, as the rule of thumb I learned in the Army is "three minutes without air, three hours without heat, three days without water, three weeks without food." Still, the core idea that some combination of fasting and ordeal was used by actual spiritual specialists in the Viking world seems quite likely to me, and the idea that Havamal reflects that seems just about as likely.

How much Christian influence there is in the versions of the myths we have is hotly debated, both among scholars and practicing Heathens. The written versions we have were written down by Christians, and in some cases, transmitted through Christians before being written down. Some of our sources, like Saxo Grammaticus, hated the old Heathen ways and went out of their way to put them down and make them look bad (Saxo's main approach was to euhemerize the old Gods into kings and wizards of elder times and then tell the most unflattering stories about them as proof of how wicked they were). Some, like the unknown scribes who copied down the poems of the Poetic Edda and added a few prose bits to introduce and stitch together the poems seem to have been happy to just say "here's the old stuff, they believed different things back then, because they didn't know any better." Others, like Snorri, walked some kind of middle ground, retelling the stories in his own words, and in a way calculated not to alarm Church authorities, but that made it clear he did not believe any of this unChristian nonsense. Further complicating matters is the policy that the Church used at the time of co-opting local holy sites, practices, and even (to some degree) beliefs, but with updated, Christian meanings, as a method of conversion - so we know that pre-Christian stuff in Germanish-speaking lands and elsewhere got re-painted by Christians (the Celtic lands got this good and hard, as a reading of the Mabinogion or any Irish legends will show pretty quickly). All of which is to say that it's not crazy at all for modern folks to ask "okay, how much Christian influence might there be in the lore as we have it now?" and it's not easy to answer that non-crazy question.

The two tales that might get the most debate about Christian influence, though, are of Odhin's self-sacrifice upon Yggdrasill, and the "final" battle of Ragnarok. We'll leave aside Ragnarok for now, as this chapter focuses on Odhin's self-sacrifice. If you haven't heard it before, or if it's not clear to you, here's the argument for Christian influence: Odhinn hangs himself upon a tree, willingly, wounded by a spear, where he dies and comes back to life with a spiritual gift for all of mankind (the Runes). A "tree" was one of the preferred ways to talk about the Cross at the time in the Germanish-speaking world (see the Old English Dream of the Rood). "Hanging" isn't exactly being crucified, but it's not that different either (especially because the Old Norse leaves it a bit ambiguous whether Odhinn was hanged or hung - a noose around the neck, or suspended in some other way?). The spear wound mirrors that said to have been given to Christ by Longinus. In the Heliand, a continental Saxon retelling of the Gospels, used as a conversion text, the spiritual truths that Christ teaches are called Runes. All of which is to say that the pro-Christian influence argument is not baselessly making stuff up - it's a plausible inference to make.

Kvilhaug, though, lays out one of the best takedowns of the Christian-influence theory (for this myth, anyway) that I've seen. This is one of those places where her contrariness and apparent lack of sympathy for (if not to say possible hostility toward) Christianity come in handy. She goes through each element of the myth and identifies its Heathen precedent and long pedigree. Hanging and strangulation as forms of sacrifice are attested archaeologically from before the time of Christ. The idea of a World Tree, and an ordeal upon it, has very strong and deep shamanic and/or Indo-European roots. The spear was Odhin's signature weapon, and again, that seems to be very old. And while the Havamal is a bit ambivalent about whether the Runes it speaks of are the system of writing, the association of writing, magic, and spiritual truths/secrets ("Rune" comes from a word that means "secret") is also very old. All of which is to say, everything in the Havamal tale is at least plausibly drawn from pre-Christian tradition. Kvilhaug goes so far as to basically say this is a slam dunk that it was not influenced by Christianity, but I think that's going a bit far on the evidence. I'd say she makes an excellent case that the Christian influence is not obvious or necessary for the tales to be the way they are. On the other hand, there's almost no way to say "yep, no Christian influence here" absent some kind of pre-Christian written evidence. This whole area is one where I'd really like to see a deep, well-informed analysis by someone without any axes to grind. Christian influence doesn't leave Heathen material lacking spiritual significance, and the persistence of Heathen elements doesn't imply a lack of piety on the part of Germanish-speaking Christians.

Though it's a bit repetitive from what Kvilhaug told us back in chapter 3 about "The Maiden with the Mead," we get the most clearly-spelled-out analysis of the initiation myth structure that she relies on that I've yet seen here in this chapter. Would I prefer she had just laid this out back in chapter 3? Yes. Am I happy to have it anyway? Of course. This kind of explicit "here are the steps, each step has a name, here's an example of each step happening" stuff is exactly what I want more of from Kvilhaug. This is helpful! She has a clear analytical framework that has done her a lot of good in understanding a wide range of tales - why not share that tool with us as well? Again, here, she does, so I'm grateful for that, but it's after she has spent chapters and chapters talking about stories with this framework obviously influencing what she's saying, but without making it as clear and explicit as she dos here. I just want some better organization! I'll likely have more to say on this when I write up my thoughts on the book as a whole, but once again, it's clear to me that what I really want from Kvilhaug is a well-organized and impeccably-cited reference work - something like Simek's Dictionary of Northern Mythology, but with her fanatical emphasis on the raw, plain meaning of names and conviction that most myths are blueprints for real-life rituals of one kind or another. That would be so useful. And rad. Alas, that does not seem to be where her strengths or energy lie, so I'll have to settle for her sharing very useful insights in long, rambly, repetitive prose. Le sigh.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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---

• The Seed of Yggdrasill 1 - Introduction and the Books of Old
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 2 - Creation, Cosmos, and the Ruling Powers
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 3 - The Maiden with the Mead
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 4 - Retrieving the Soul of the Gods
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 5 - The Loss of the Golden Age in Old Norse Myth
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 6 - Ragnarok and the New Age
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 7 - Death and Resurrection
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 8 - The Way of the Wand Witch
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 9 - The Priestess and the King - You Are Here
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 10 - The Wise Man's Path
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 11 - The Trials of Thorr
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 12 - The One and the Many and Epilogue

This one's another short chapter, and once again is a bit repetitive and is a transcription of Youtube videos, so it's not the most helpful chapter. Still, there's a few interesting tidbits, and we're pushing through, so let's get to it.

This whole chapter suffers somewhat from Kvilhaug's (I believe) mistaken take on history. For one, she comes back to the "pre-Indo-European culture was a bunch of peaceful matriarchs" Maria Gimbujtas-inspired stuff which is almost certainly very wrong. What's frustrating is that she makes some claims to support this interpretation that might be very interesting to investigate, but doesn't give any sources: for example, she claims that ancient DNA samples show that the women in this pre-Bronze Age culture stayed local, while it was the men who came from elsewhere, based on burials. This very well could indicate matrilineal traditions, without necessarily being a "matriarchy," but given how fast and loose she's played with historical/archaeological evidence elsewhere, I'm not wholly convinced. Secondly, she seeks to redeem some of Snorri's euhemerized history of the Aesir - namely, that they came from Troy in Asia (Minor), which is where their name comes from. As I've said before, I'm all for giving ancient writers the benefit of the doubt when they describe things that seem to go against our current understanding of historiography, but Kvilhaug draws on an Anatolian-origin and cultural diffusion model of the spread of Indo-European folk and tongues in Europe, both of which I believe to be badly flawed. There's a great overview of the evidence for the origin and spread of the Indo-Europeans here, and to be fair, the Anatolian origin theory seems like the second most likely one to me. On the other hand "cultural diffusion" is right out - the Indo-Europeans replaced most of the "First Farmers" and Hunter Gatherers in a big way, as the ancient and modern DNA evidence shows.

Anyway, Kvilhaug asserts that maybe the Nordic Bronze Age (likely the archaeological culture associated with the Proto-Germanic tongue and folk) came from Turkey, which suggests contact with Mesopotamia, which means the archaeological and mythological evidence for "sacred marriages" in Nordic lands may have been a direct transmission from the very well-attested tradition of sacred marriage in Mesopotamia. As I've implied, I'm not so convinced of this. Instead, one of two options seems more likely to me: 1. the concept of a "sacred marriage" is just baked into human psychology, it's a deep enough archetype that it'll pop up independently around the world, or 2. if there is a common origin for this mythic/ritual complex, it's way old, and is a common ancestor to Mesopotamian and Norse sources. There's also the interesting, but highly speculative, theory that early contact with Proto-Indo-Europeans influenced Mesopotamian myth, not the other way around (I had a source for this, and I can't find it right now, which is immensely frustrating. Short version is that the "cut up a proto-God to make the world" myth is well-attested in comparative Indo-European myth, and then shows up in the Babylonian Enuma Elish for some reason). Anyhow, I find Kvilhaug's speculations that the Norse were somehow literally continuing the Ishtar/Inanna cult not very convincing at all.

What I found more interesting in this chapter is Kvilhaug's pointing out that the version of Odhinn winning the Mead of Poetry given in Havamal differs quite a bit from Snorri's prose version. Snorri's more familiar version (presumably because it's spelled out in more detail) has Odhinn sneak into the mountain where Suttungr has hidden the Mead under the guardianship of his daughter, Gunnlodh. Odhinn spends three nights with her in exchange for three drinks of the mead, which he uses to drink up all of it and then escapes in the shape of an eagle. The version in Havamal, though, has Odhinn demonstrate his eloquence and power via spell-songs to Suttungr and then swear a ring-oath, presumably of marriage to Gunnlodh. It's told in the allusive form of poetry, so it's hard to know everything for certain, but the two versions definitely have different vibes. Kvilhaug connects the Havamal version with the "sacred marriage" theme of the chapter, which is potentially interesting, even if her speculations about where that theme came from prove to be wrong. Kvilhaug thinks that the Havamal version, being older and written by Heathens, is the "correct" version, but I suspect it's more complicated than that, as it usually is with mythology. I suspect that both versions have something to teach us about Odhinn, Gunnlodh, and the Mead. One consistent element, though, is that Odhinn leaves, which is interesting. Kvilhaug believes that this symbolizes how the spirit of mankind has become separated from the source of divine inspiration and so has to seek it. That seems reasonable, at least as an interpretation, if not the interpretation, but it's not exactly consistent with how else she's interpreted this myth elsewhere. Again, though, consistency isn't exactly a requirement in getting meaning out of myths, so maybe the point's moot.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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• The Seed of Yggdrasill - Overall Rundown
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 1 - Introduction and the Books of Old
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 2 - Creation, Cosmos, and the Ruling Powers
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 3 - The Maiden with the Mead
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 4 - Retrieving the Soul of the Gods
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 5 - The Loss of the Golden Age in Old Norse Myth
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 6 - Ragnarok and the New Age
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 7 - Death and Resurrection
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 8 - The Way of the Wand Witch - You Are Here
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 9 - The Priestess and the King
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 10 - The Wise Man's Path
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 11 - The Trials of Thorr
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 12 - The One and the Many and Epilogue

This was one of the shortest chapters yet, which worked out nicely, as I'm typing this on an unexpectedly long layover for international travel, and I'm not sure how much more time I'll be able to devote to a post this weekend. Also, much like the last chapter, this one deals with material that Kvilhaug has gone into earlier in the book, but I'd say she does a better job here of not repeating herself and referring you back to those earlier chapters. In this case, Kvilhaug expands on the role played by magical tutelary women by focusing on their depictions as seidhr workers - witches.

We start off with a bit of an overview of both the mythological instances of Goddesses and other (semi) divine beings being shown as seidhr women, as well as some of the history of real-life prophetesses. Overall, this bit is pretty good, especially for providing references of where volur (plural of volva) show up, but some of Kvilhaug's chip-on-the shoulder about Christian persecution of pagans and women comes in, a bit stronger than I think is necessarily warranted (again, it's not that she's totally wrong, it's just that she bangs on it a bit more than I think is needed). She makes the argument, I think credibly, that for the most part, "witches" (a term she uses in a way I infer is meant to "reclaim" the term, as Wiccans have tried to do) were not seen as dangerous outcasts, but rather as honored and important members not only of society, but its ruling elite. One of the more interesting parts was the exception she uses to prove the rule. The Goths expelled their "witches" not long after moving to the area around the Black Sea on accusations of "dark magic" of some kind (I was not clear from her text if this happened before or after their conversion to Christianity). Centuries later, though, when the Goths were driven west by the invading Huns, they said that the Huns were descended from those exiled women, who had bred a race of devils - so this was not some minor footnote of a historical event, it was something remembered for centuries and associated with the greatest calamity to befall their folk.

Kvilhaug has argued earlier in the book that the Poetic Edda is a coherent whole, not a random collection of unrelated poems, but in this chapter, she says that the thread that gives them coherence is precisely that they trace a path of initiation, the Old Norse mystery religion she talked about in the last chapter. The idea that the heroic poems had such a unifying thread was interesting and exciting enough, but the thought that the whole Poetic Edda can be read in such a way is very interesting and exciting, if it turns out to work. I'll have to do a lot more reading and bethinking of my own to really make my own call. Of smaller implication, but even more interesting for being something I don't think I've encountered before, Kvilhaug also argues that the Voluspa stands as a summary of the entire rest of the Poetic Edda (and, by the argument in this chapter, thus of the entire Old Norse Mystery Religion). Now, there's no doubt that the Voluspa is the most central work of Heathen cosmology, but casting it as a microcosm of the Poetic Edda's macrocosm is very intriguing - again, I'll have to give some real time to bethinking on this.

Forgive me for being a bit flippant with the header here, I couldn't resist the reference to the silly anime genre, but this bit was actually really interesting and useful. Besides the examples we've already seen of Valkyries and Goddesses taking care of their favored male followers/consorts/initiates in the Poetic Edda, Kvilhaug takes us through a lot of examples of warriors getting trained by "otherworldly" women of various stripes from the fornaldarsogur, the subset of the Icelandic sagas that is less dramatized history and more folklore and fairy tales. In these tales, the woman sometimes "merely" knows how to do magic, but other times is a valkyrie or giantess, but in all of them that Kvilhaug surveys, a young warrior spends some amount of time with one of these women, sometimes as a prisoner, sometimes as a lover, sometimes as both (there's a very Odyssey vibe to some of these), and during this time is taught some kind of secret wisdom - spells, the special way to defeat an otherwise invulnerable foe, or how to avoid a deadly or inglorious fate. In almost all cases, the warrior must demonstrate courage and steadfastness, and is rewarded with some combination of magical and temporal power and the favors of the woman or her daughter. As I said, there are apparently a lot of examples of these in the stories, and it seems worth tracking down and reading these references for more insight and bethinking material.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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• The Seed of Yggdrasill - Overall Rundown
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 1 - Introduction and the Books of Old
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 2 - Creation, Cosmos, and the Ruling Powers
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 3 - The Maiden with the Mead
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 4 - Retrieving the Soul of the Gods
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 5 - The Loss of the Golden Age in Old Norse Myth
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 6 - Ragnarok and the New Age
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 7 - Death and Resurrection - You Are Here
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 8 - The Way of the Wand Witch
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 9 - The Priestess and the King
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 10 - The Wise Man's Path
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 11 - The Trials of Thorr
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 12 - The One and the Many and Epilogue

This chapter mostly covered topics that have come up before, so my thoughts might be briefer than they otherwise would be, especially given the weighty nature of what this chapter covers: death and rebirth. The very short version is that Kvilhaug argues that the Old Norse believed that at least some souls reincarnated, and that souls faced different fates after death depending on what wisdom they did (or didn't) develop during life, and that wisdom comes from encounters with one or more Gods or Goddesses, which are manifestations of an underlying unified divinity. Want to dig in more? Let's get to it.

I've long been curious what to make of Elves in the Germanic lore, and Kvilhaug helps shed some more light on them, but not so much for me to be fully satisfied. Where does this confusion come from? We have lots of references to "elves" as some kind of group of conscious beings, but the kind of conscious being referred to seems to vary rather a lot. A dead king buried in a mound became known as "The Elf of Geirstad." A Christian traveler was barred from entering a farm because they were giving sacrifice to "elves." The God Frey is said to live in Alfheim, the home/land/world of Elves, is called a Lord of Elves, and sometimes seems to be called an Elf himself. And that's without even getting into the fact that Snorri talks about both "light" and "dark" elves, and that "dark elves" may or may not be the same thing as the dvergr, dwarves. Further complicating things, as with everywhere else, later Germanic folklore is full of beings that get up to mischief and have various interactions with humans, like the fae of Celtic lands, and some of the names of these beings are etymologically linked with Elves (like, you know, the word "elf").

Kvilhaug's interpretation is, as you might imagine, a bit dependent on her metaphysical/theological presuppositions, my reservations about which I've shared, but I think it has some merit. She sees "elf" as a label for a soul that has transcended reincarnation to live eternally outside of materiality. As such, Gods are elves, enlightened dead humans are elves, and presumably, any other conscious spirit sufficiently in touch with the divine is an elf. This does a good job of sidestepping the Gygaxian desire to divide all beings into neat mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive categories based on different names. Kvilhaug plays to her strengths here, being willing to see overlap and fluid borders where others look to make them as firm as possible. That being said, this also brings up the downside of her approach: the utility of "elf" as a label depends on her interpretation of souls reincarnating, reaching spiritual enlightenment, and moving on to some other kind of existence being the view of the afterlife the Old Norse had. If you don't buy that theory, then her solution to the elf puzzle isn't so helpful.

Synchronistically enough, as I was about to start writing this post, I read this short post by readoldthings over on Dreamwidth. He includes a short passage from the Odyssey about the Naiads and nymphs and references an analysis of it by Plotinus. His interpretation is that the nymphs are nature spirits and seem to be the same kind of being as the Fae in Celtic lands. What's most interesting for this discussion is that Plotinus argues that Homer is saying that these nature spirits are, in fact, souls between human incarnations. I had never encountered this idea before, and it's a remarkable piece of comparative evidence to set next to beliefs in the Fae, Elves, and other ambiguous (to us) spiritual beings.

By this point in the book, Kvilhaug has made no secret of her interpretation of the lore as indicating that the heathens of elder times believed in reincarnation, at least sometimes, at least for some folks. When I first encountered the idea that there might be reincarnation in the Germanish lore, I was pretty skeptical - I had only ever heard of reincarnation as a Hindu and Buddhist belief, or as a modern New Agey one that got it from those older sources. Since then, though, I've encountered a lot of evidence that has caused me to change those beliefs. I now suspect that a belief in reincarnation likely goes back at least to the Proto-Indo-Europeans, and that some elements of those beliefs likely lingered in the various folks whose religions and tongues came from them well into historical times - sometimes very obviously, as in India, sometimes in ways that were obvious to ancients but aren't well known today (Pythagoras and his followers taught the transmigration of souls, multiple Roman writers commented that the Celts believed in reincarnation, and so forth), and sometimes in tiny little snippets like we find in the Germanish lore.

In the Germanish lore, one of the most direct pieces of evidence is unfortunately also one of the less credible: in the Codex Regius, the first-found and still most important manuscript of most of what we today call the Poetic Edda, there's a prose snippet between two poems, given by the Christians who wrote it down, saying that "back then before they knew about Christ, they believed that folks can be reborn." Mark that I said less credible, and not "not credible at all." Those Christian monks were much closer to the beliefs of elder times than we are today, and my general starting place is to assume that the writers of long ago actually knew what they were talking about unless we have strong reason to believe otherwise - a kind of historiographic Chesterton's fence, if you will. But it's not as direct as Socrates/Plato saying "okay, here's exactly how reincarnation works, I got it from a guy who talked to a guy who died and was revived and saw it all happen" at the end of the Republic. Instead, you have scattered references that the old Norse seem to have believed that at least something from someone who died could come back later. Kvilhaug leans towards the maximalist end of interpretation here, but I think she makes a pretty good case. Specifically, she argues that many of the human heroes in the Poetic Edda, especially both Helgis, should be seen as a series of incarnations of the same soul. That being said, she goes more into that particular analysis more in earlier chapters. At any rate, since reincarnation is consistent with the teachings I currently work with, I find this approach reasonable, interesting, and useful.

Kvilhaug spends some time going through various descriptions of the underworld, most of which is pretty familiar, but she does point out two things that I think are interesting and possibly worth looking more into. The first is that the earlier descriptions of Hel's realm include more positive elements, unlike the better-known stereotype of Valhalla as a raucous good time and Hel as dreary wasteland, which is found more in later sources. Now, the idea of the underworld as dark, dreary, and generally unpleasant is very old and very widespread (at least among Indo-European folks), so it's not like Hel wasn't those things in the older sources, but it was apparently also a place with warm, inviting neighborhoods. I'm not sure what it means that the later heathens seem to have felt that any warm and inviting afterlife destinations were somehow not Hel, if earlier ones thought otherwise, but it might be worth thinking about and looking more into.

The second thing Kvilhaug points out that I think I might want to look into more deeply is that whenever someone living visits the underworld, there is a loud, "resounding" sound. Kvilhaug argues that this is a characteristic of a shamanic spiritual journey of some kind. As I've talked about in earlier posts, I've long been curious about the (maybe) shamanic elements in Germanish lore and practices, so finding more potential comparative elements always grabs my attention. But wait a tick, what the heck are living guys doing in the underworld? In just about every case, it's to learn some kind of secret wisdom. Again, Kvilhaug covered all of this in more detail in earlier chapters, such as the Maiden with the Mead, but it's interesting to mark that when the living go to the underworld for this knowledge, they're still obviously different from the souls that show up because they're dead.

This is one section where I was hoping for a bit more of Kvilhaug's gathering up of examples to make a point - she does give examples, but at times just says things like "lots of skaldic poems use this imagery." Anyway, I'll pull the same trick here and say that Kvilhaug shares that often in Old Norse poetry, death was described as a woman welcoming the dying man as a lover. This is one place where I'm not sure about the comparative mythology, whether among the Indo-Europeans or elsewhere. Given the nearly equally deep significance of love/sex and death to human life, psychology, and spirituality, finding them combined in Old Norse belief is, well, suggestive, if nothing stronger. This feels like another of those areas that warrants further reading and bethinking.

Okay, I'm getting a bit cutesy with my header titles, but I couldn't resist. If you've spent any time with the Germanish lore at all, you've run into the thought that there is more than one "world" or heimr. The most commonly found count of those worlds is nine. What Kvilhaug lays out nice and clear is that there are actually multiple accounts given of how many worlds there are and what their names are, just among Old Norse works, without even touching other Germanish sources (such as the "seven worlds" of the Nine Herbs Charm in Old English). Grimnismal gives twelve "heavens," in nine of which "death rules," which Kvilhaug finds highly significant, especially since the three worlds where death does not rule are said to hold "elves," which she uses as evidence for her interpretation discussed above that "elves" are beings that have achieved immortality. Snorri describes ten "heavens," where, again, Kvilhaug sees the tenth as holding immortal "light elves," distinct from the beings in the other nine worlds. The variety here is interesting for a few reasons. For one, it's a good reminder not to be overly doctrinaire in how we interpret the lore and what it might mean for our beliefs and practice - many of us were raised in religious traditions that put great weight on the strict accuracy of texts, and it can be hard to shake the desire to figure out what the "real" meaning of a set of religiously-significant texts "really is." Another reason its helpful is the exact opposite of dogmatic certainty: multiple versions, with different numbers, names, and characteristics provides multiple sets of symbolism that can be meditated on, adapted to rituals, and compared with other sets of symbolism (10 worlds would be super handy if you're trying to map things to the Sephiroth, for example, or twelve could be handy if you want to have four trinities, and so forth).

In one of the more interesting things from this chapter for me, Kvilhaug does bring in some comparative material and talks about classical mystery cults, specifically the Eleusinian Mysteries and the cult of Isis. (Quick Aside: "cult" here has none of the modern negative connotation. In academic literature, "cult" is used to mean any specific body of practice and belief, often to stress the fact that participation in a specific cult was not necessarily exclusive - going and doing the Eleusinian mysteries didn't make you an "Eleusinian" who couldn't do "regular" Greek religion anymore.) She talks about how Apuleius's Golden Ass, an allegorical tale of initiation dressed up as a fantastic, even slightly silly, fable, has many striking parallels with the path of initiation she's described being held in Norse poems in earlier chapters. I found this comparison fascinating, not least because I want to do a deeper dive on the Eleusinian Mysteries and their central myth of Hades carrying away Persephone to make Her His bride and compare it to Thjazi carrying away Idhunn for unspecified reasons (but I suspect they're the same). Where this section fell a bit short for me, though, was another greatest hit from this book: Kvilhaug goes further than I would like in identification of divine beings, stating that Isis was the Goddess behind all Goddesses, and making the argument that Freyja played a similar role for the Norse. Despite that, what's most interesting here is her contention that maybe the Norse, or at least some of them, had literal mystery cults where folks went, had a spiritually significant experience, and came away with a different view on life and the afterlife, and this might be hinted at in the poetry that has survived. This is another of those places where I think what we can explicitly prove by the records is far, far tinier than what we can reasonably infer by knowing about humans, history, culture, and religion, so I think she's very likely right.

Toward the end of the chapter, Kvilhaug has one of her weaker sections, despite a potentially interesting idea. The potentially interesting idea is that the image of Valhalla as a place where warriors fight every day, feast every night, and heal/resurrect to do it all over again the next day might be a metaphor for reincarnation, which is an endlessly repeated struggle until you figure out what you need to to move past it. What makes it weak is that it's fairly muddled, and in many places it contradicts things she's said, like giving Valhalla as an example of the eternal afterlife achieved by souls that have learned what they need to get away from reincarnation and claim their spiritual bride. It's also tainted by a bit of the snobbery we've talked about elsewhere, though here I think it's a bit more forgivable. Basically, Kvilhaug recognizes that most folks who have even heard of Valhalla picture something fairly cartoonish: burly manly men fighting all day and then drinking, feasting, and swiving all night. Is that a bit simplistic and focused on the bodily appetites for a profound spiritual reward? Very likely so, yes. On the other hand, I don't think Valhalla is described that way on accident, nor do I think it was a cynical psyop by Viking kings to get their men to fight harder. There is something deeply appealing about that cartoonish afterlife for the kind of man who wants to go do dangerous things and cares more about living gloriously than living for a long time. The reason I'm fairly sympathetic to Kvilhaug is that I think her dismissal of that image mostly comes from taking the myths seriously and wanting others to do so, and she figures that if folks think "Viking religion was all about fighting and getting drunk, hell yeah!" then they might not notice the deeper stuff she has spent her adult life digging into and sharing with others. So, that's admirable enough, right? On the other hand, I think there's something there that Kvilhaug is missing in her haste to defend the spiritual profundity of these myths and maintain her self-image as a good, modern feminist - some reason that these profound myths painted a very vivid, appealing image of fighting for real, but without hatred or consequence, eating and drinking without cost, and being welcomed by women who were as fierce and formidable as they were welcoming and attractive. My own guess, at this point, is that it's meant to point to the attractions behind the attraction, the goal behind the goal - whatever it is we should truly want cannot be described, for it is beyond the experience of this life. The closest we can come is to imagine what we most intensely want in this life, but then make it even better by removing the drawbacks that are inherent in whatever we want in this material existence. But I dunno, I need to bethink on it more.

Overall, there were several things I found interesting and helpful in this chapter, but the amount of meat on the bone is getting a little light compared to earlier chapters. Much of what was most relevant or interesting had already been said in more detail in earlier chapters, but was also not simply a reference saying "go back and read chapter 3 for more on this." In other words, this chapter once again drove home how badly I wish Kvilhaug had made the effort, or secured the effort of someone else, to better organize and streamline the material in this book. It keeps on making good points and finding worthwhile links between things, but it does so in a scattered, sometimes repetitive way. By this point, I've mostly come to accept this, but I also am feeling more and more acutely "wait, I'm not done with this book yet?"

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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In the first article linked above, Tree of Woe has a wonderfully elegant definition of strategy that I really like: "The art of decision-making in conditions of uncertainty." It's short, to the point, and captures the most important bits: making decisions and uncertainty. Many definitions of strategy are crafted for one field (military, political, business, and so forth), and fall down a bit when taken out of that field. This one has the advantage of working well across all fields where you might think of things as "strategic."

Even so, this is a topic near and dear to my heart, so a few years ago, I came up with my own definition. I take its similarity to Tree of Woe's as an indication that I got something right, but I wanted to share it to highlight the differences and why I think they're worth thinking about. So, here's my definition of strategy: "coordinating the efforts of lower-order means to achieve higher-order ends in the face of uncertainty." Notice the common focus on uncertainty (Tree of Woe's first article has a great framework for thinking about different sources of uncertainty) - if you know exactly how things are going to go, it might be hard, but it's planning, not strategy. On the other hand, my definition specifies a little more what kind of decisions are being made, making it a bit narrower, but I think focusing a bit more on "strategic" decision-making versus other kinds.

For starters, let's look at the first word: "coordinating." The word "strategy" comes from the ancient Greek Strategos, which means "general [of an army]," and so means "doing the stuff that generals do." Notice it is not doing the stuff that a fire team leader does, or a lieutenant - from the beginning, the word strategy has been applied when a certain amount of complexity is involved in the thing you are making decisions for. I may face uncertainty about what will happen with my finances in the next year, but is it "strategic" to save money? I'd argue not by itself, because it's just me making a decision about my actions. Now, if I'm the CFO of a corporation trying to improve its financial situation for the next year, that is strategic, because I'm coordinating efforts across a large organization.

Okay, so strategy is about coordinating, but what are we coordinating? That brings us to our next point: "the efforts of lower-order means to achieve higher-order ends." I'm not thrilled with how wordy this is, but for now, that's the best I can do to get the idea across succinctly. Remember the bit about "doing what a general does?" Not only does that imply a large/complex organization to be coordinated, it also implies a certain "level" of outcome intended. When I decide what route to take to get to work in the morning, I face all kinds of uncertainty, but it would be a bit silly to call that decision "strategic," because the outcome is just whether I'm a few minutes late to work. On the other hand, if I'm deciding what route a patrol should take through enemy territory to successfully blow up a bridge before a crucial supply convoy can get over it, that's strategic, because the outcome has a wider effect than its immediate surroundings. I put this piece into my definition because I wanted a way to meaningfully distinguish between tactics and strategy, which this gives us: tactics are what you do to ensure effects at the same level, strategy is what you do to affect higher-order things. Good tactics will often be informed by the strategic context, like when Lieutenant Winters of Band of Brothers fame took out that German artillery emplacement at Brecour Manor - he knew that the artillery hindered units landing at Utah beach from coming inland and establishing a more secure beachhead, and so understood the significance of what he was doing, but all of his decisions that June morning were focused on the immediate goal of defeating the German artillery emplacement.

So, I thought up the above definition while I was a consultant, and I've been pretty happy with it since. At the same time, I observed that the preference for "violence of action" the Army had drilled into me wasn't always appropriate in the business world. This was maybe easier for me to notice than some others because the preference for violence of action doesn't come especially naturally to me: in strategy games, my favorite tactic is to "turtle" behind a wall of impenetrable defenses until I have overwhelming force. In real life, I like to gather information, ponder, and "wait and see" as much as I can. That being said, I was an airborne infantryman, and there, violence of action is not only expected, it's who you are, so I internalized it pretty well, despite it not coming naturally. This combo allowed me to notice both how useful violence of action can be, but also that there are times where it's not the best way to go. For a long time, this was vague and intuitive - I could recognize when to be aggressive and when to be contemplative, but I couldn't tell you in a general way what was different about those situations.

And then I encountered the idea of satisficing versus maximizing. We're all familiar with maximizing: it's getting the most of out of a situation that you possibly can. If you want to be an olympic athlete or a rock star, you likely are doing everything to maximize your craft - every extra rep, every tweak to your psychology, every opportunity to test and prove your talent, you're going to take. If you find a good investment, you want to put as much money into that as you can afford, because the more you put in, the more the payoff. Peter Thiel doesn't want to have just a bit of a monopoly, he wants the whole thing.

Satisficing, on the other hand, is when there is a certain threshold with which you will have satisfaction (see the link there?), and beyond that doesn't make a big difference. If you want to have a fancy dinner, once you're in Michelin Star territory, you're likely getting something fancy and delicious, and finding a place with a second Star isn't going to be as big a jump up as finding a place with a Star at all. Or if you find a job in a place you want to live that pays enough for your lifestyle and goals, you might just take it instead of spending weeks or months looking for a job that pays a bit more. Many, many situations in life work like this, and once you're consciously aware of it, you can apply it to save time and effort where you might otherwise spin your wheels. My favorite go-to example: have you ever been with a group of friends trying to decide where to order dinner from? Have you ever spent way too long trying to figure this out? Well, satisficing to the rescue: in this situation, your goal is not to maximize food enjoyment, your goal is to satisfy your group's need for a decent meal while you enjoy spending time together. That means that any restaurant that everyone is at least fine with will work. So, when you get into the start of what looks likely to be an endless round of "I dunno, what do you want?" just jump in with "let's get pizza!" If anyone objects, they'll say so, and you can throw out another suggestion. But often, just having a definite choice put out there will get everyone else to say "okay, works for me."

The technical difference between when you want to maximize and when you want to satisfice comes down to the expected payoff of the action. Not everything is amenable to being quantified and graphed, of course, but for the sake of clarity, it's helpful to go there for these examples. In situations where there is a linear payoff (I sell one more widget, I get $5 more dollars) or an exponential payoff (going from 3rd to 2nd in marketshare makes me 50% richer, going from 2nd to 1st makes me 150% richer), you want to maximize if you can - more effort brings more payoff, so it makes sense to put in as much effort as you can that isn't held back by other constraints. On the other hand, very many situations have diminishing marginal returns: the first one gives you a huge payoff, the second a decent payoff, the third meh, and so on. Imagine you're starving. The first cheeseburger will literally save your life and likely be the most delicious meal you've ever had. The second cheeseburger might get you to feeling stuffed, which might be a nice contrast. The third will make you sick. These are situations where you want to satisfice - maybe just eat that first cheeseburger and move on with your life.

Now we know that some situations call for maximizing, and some for satisficing. It turns out that's the key to what produces the preference for violence of action in the military - almost every military situation has a threshold that must be reached and diminishing marginal returns for doing better than that threshold. If the enemy stops fighting, it doesn't really matter how many more soldiers you kill (okay, it might in the long run, but you see my point). If you take a solid defensible position, it doesn't really matter if it's the best defensible position. Not only are most military situations ones where a satisficing approach brings about good results, much of the uncertainty in military situations is brought about by the enemy's choice. If the opposing general would just stop deciding things, you could easily work out the best approach. But alas, he won't. This means that not only will you get diminishing returns from figuring out the best plan once you've come up with a fine plan, but in the time you spend evaluating options and coming up with the best approach, the other side is changing the game. So, your perfect plan might end up applying to a situation that no longer holds. This is the other reason the military has such a strong preference for violence of action - taking the initiative literally shapes the situation both sides are making decisions about, and it shapes it in a way that is hopefully to your advantage. Put these things together, and it's clear why do something that makes sense has so strongly dominated "figure out the best thing to do."

What's interesting is that Boyd's OODA loop provides a way of thinking about this. Briefly, OODA stands for "Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act." Boyd recognized that each phase was dynamic and involved taking in information from the situation and other side, but as it's presented usually, folks way over-simplify. So, observe is about understanding what's happening around you. Orient is judging the significance of those things. Decide is picking a course of action, and Act is taking that course of action. The phase with the most relevance for our discussion is Orient. Working out whether a situation takes maximizing or satisficing is an orienting decision. Likewise, the reason taking the initiative is generally preferred in military situations is that it allows you to shape what's happening, which forces your opponent to orient. So, once again, understanding when "getting the gist of things" orients you well enough versus when you should know all of the ins and outs tells you when to maximize and when to satisfice. Point being, in many situations, going with the satisfice option makes good sense, but overall, it's helpful to notice when you ought to shoot for maximizing.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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The heart of the book is a set of five calisthenic exercises known as "The Five Rites," though originally billed as the "Five Tibetan Rites." These were published by Peter Kelder in 1939 as a path to youthful vitality and long life brought over from the mysterious Orient (Tibet, obviously). As you might have guessed, this appears to be entirely made up, and Tibet was selected because it at the time it was even harder to verify what came from there than it was to verify what came from India, or China, or other fashionable centers of ancient wisdom. Sure, two of the Rites very likely made their way into American practice via Hatha Yoga and Sun Salutations (these were different schools at the time), so there was some Eastern origin to some of the exercises, but Greer does a good job of laying out the immediate predecessors to this form of the exercises, and where those likely came from. The short version is that European and American occultists of the late 19th and early 20th century were gleefully experimenting with all kinds of physical and breathing exercises, and at the same time, the little shreds of lore and practice that were coming over from India and the rest of Asia held a lot of cachet. Put these together and American practitioners slapped one Asian label or another on anything that they could. The prolific William Walker Atkinson was an especial fan of this, and it looks like he first published versions of four of the rites in one of his "Indian" branded books (under the pen name "Yogi Ramacharaka"). Kelder's little pamphlet, with the clear fingerprints of its publisher, Harry J. Gardener, all over its writing, took these four exercises, added another exercise likely derived from the spiritualist movement, and packaged them as a sequence - something like an American sun salutation. Along the way, via tweaking, experimentation, and variation, these developed into a respectable workout that can be done quickly, taught through the written word (important to the booming occult correspondence course industry at the time), and is compatible with other alternative spiritual pursuits (like doing magic). If you are interested in trying this yourself, see the last section below.

So, as someone who's been doing the Five Rites off and on for a year or two, the background on where the exercises came from was interesting, but not really earthshaking. On the other hand, the strands Greer traces on the internal/energetic/"woo" side of the Five Rites are utterly fascinating. The investigation serves as an introduction/overview of the occult scene of the late 19th and early 20th century, focusing on America, but with necessary forays into Europe and Asia. So, if you'd like a quick tour of the weird world of alternative spirituality at the turn of the last century, you can do worse than this book.

The titular "secret" is a set of practices that Greer has reconstructed from the various strands that he discovered went into producing the Five Rites. The Rites themselves form one part of that practice, but it also includes visualization, meditation, and behavioral recommendations (for example, make sure to bathe once daily with tepid water, neither hot nor cold). This seems to be potentially compatible with other spiritual practices, but is best practiced at a different time of day from any others, and might conflict if the other spiritual practices feature a lot of visualization of movement of energy in the subtle bodies. Following these practices is meant to provide a safe, fairly certain path to a similar spiritual awakening to what certain schools of Yoga can produce (like the modern, Westernized flavor of Kundalini Yoga). I just read the book and haven't given it a try, and I'm not sure that I will with my other spiritual practices, so I can't comment on the efficacy, but I trust Greer on such things. The procedure outlined seems more rigorous than a very basic spiritual practice, but not so rigorous as a full-on course of magical study - at its maximum, it seems like you could complete all of the recommended practices in roughly half an hour. So, if that's appealing, consider checking it out!

I learned about the Five Rites from JMG on one of his sites, likely in a "Magic Monday" thread, something like, oh, a year and a half, two years ago? For some time I did this daily, but also supplemented with weight lifting and Indian Clubs. When I started noticing numbness in my forearms and hands (and when I started getting busier, if we're being wholly honest here), I cut back on much I was doing from 21 reps every day to 9 reps of each exercise twice a week. Later, I dropped even that very easy standard of practice and did a whole lot of nothing for awhile, the Daily Dozen (which share some William Walker Atkinson DNA with the Five Rites, it turns out!) for a bit, and more nothing for a while. For the last few months, I've gotten back to more-or-less consistently doing the Five Rites, but I'm very slowly working my number of reps back up (I'm at 11, as of today). I say all this so that you can calibrate your reaction to my comments below appropriately.

I've never been what you'd call an "enthusiastic exerciser." I like how I feel when I work out regularly, but I have never really gotten to the point that other folks tell me they experience where I actually like working out, or they actively miss it when they skip it. I believe them that this is a thing normal humans experience, but not really me, at least so far. Anyway, one of the things I most like about the Five Rites it that even from this decidedly lazy starting point, the Five Rites are pretty easy to build into a habit. They're quick, they don't require a massive, painful effort like lifting heavy, and they don't get you sucking wind the way a hard run or bike does. In other words, all of the immediately unpleasant things that will leave you feeling better later and in the long run, it minimizes. Instead, the usual state for me to finish a session of the Five Rites is with a slightly elevated heart rate, breathing a bit heavier than usual, and feeling slightly amped, ready for more. This is far more motivating for me than kicking my ass on a Tabata ride on my 80s Aerodyne bike or picking up as much weight as I can without throwing my back out. Also, I tend to feel "energized," in a non-woo, totally physical way after the Five Rites - if I'm tired, it's a pick me up, if I'm unmotivated, I'm ready to tackle some stuff afterward. Physically, I've lost some stubborn weight without trying that hard about my diet, so I'm not complaining there either.

I also have not felt as fit and strong from just the Five Rites as I have when I've had a more comprehensive fitness plan. I suspect that to be where I want to be, I do need to have some hard runs or bike rides and some heavy weight lifting, which is too bad for a lazy jerk like me. On the other hand, if I'm trying to maintain, or if I want something I can do every day, even days where I can't "really" work out, the Five Rites are really good, at least for me. At maximum, it takes about 10 minutes to do it, and you end feeling jazzed rather than wiped. You can even do them in formal-ish clothes in the office, if you have some fairly private space. So, setting aside completely any esoteric benefits, I'm a pretty big fan of the Five Rites as daily "baseline" exercise routine, but as always, what works for me might not be so hot for you.

Alright, so maybe now you're saying "I want to give this a shot!" Below I give my description of the five exercises. You can also follow the link above to the original pamphlet with its full instructions. The book recommends starting with three repetitions of each, and adding 2 more repetitions once that becomes easy (after about a week, minimum). Once you get to 21 reps, that's it, don't add any more. If you've been doing 21 reps of each exercise for awhile and feel good, you can add a second session (say, one in the morning, and another in the evening). If you do this, start over again at 3 reps for the second session, and build up 2 reps at a time, week by week, until you get to 21. Add repetitions at the rate of your worst exercise - if you can do 9 of four of the rites easily, but one of them is still a struggle, don't add any more repetitions yet - wait until that last rite is easy too. Do each repetition slow and steady, don't rush or try to "bang it out." I do three long, slow breaths between each exercise.

If you're a generally fit person, this may sound way too easy, but trust me, it's worth taking it slow. For one, these exercises make a lot of use of fiddly little stabilizer muscles, especially in your core. If you go hard to start with, you're asking to pull or strain one of those, which is not only no fun, it will also keep you from doing these or other exercises for a while. Secondly, remember that bit about internal alchemy above? Well, that means that these exercises are meant to stimulate systems in your body, including your endocrine glands (and that's not even touching the possible effects on your non-physical subtle bodies, if you go in for that stuff). If you do too much too fast, you can over-stimulate these glands and end up with some weird and unpleasant results.

Basically, if you start doing the Five Rites and you feel like you're not getting enough of a workout, instead of pushing your progress with the Rites, go do something else in addition - pull ups, lifting weights, going for a run, whatever works.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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• The Seed of Yggdrasill - Overall Rundown
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 1 - Introduction and the Books of Old
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 2 - Creation, Cosmos, and the Ruling Powers
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 3 - The Maiden with the Mead
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 4 - Retrieving the Soul of the Gods
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 5 - The Loss of the Golden Age in Old Norse Myth
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 6 - Ragnarok and the New Age - You Are Here
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 7 - Death and Resurrection
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 8 - The Way of the Wand Witch
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 9 - The Priestess and the King
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 10 - The Wise Man's Path
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 11 - The Trials of Thorr
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 12 - The One and the Many and Epilogue

This chapter was not quite as coherent as I might have hoped. As you might expect, this chapter draws together a lot of the threads Kvilhaug has talked about in previous chapters, but unfortunately, it's not as much of a culmination of those threads as I'd like to see. That's long been one of the most interesting things about the Norse lore - there's a clear narrative arc to it, even in the raw form of the poems given in the Poetic Edda. Loki's tricks grow more and more spiteful, more often hurting than helping the other gods. Baldr is killed, Loki is bound, and we pass into tales of human heroes and valkyries rather than gods and goddesses. Things are building, and what they are building to is Ragnarok. Folks argue about whether Ragnarok is just a re-skinned Christian apocalypse, or to what degree Abrahamic eschatology influenced whatever tales might have been there, but to me, it seems integral to the heathen worldview - it's baked in right there at Voluspa, it's referenced throughout the Eddic poems, and it presents neither a satisfying "good guys win, bad guys lose" narrative, nor a true "ending" at all, but rather a complicated, nuanced destruction and rebirth. I think there's much to learn here, and Kvilhaug helps us to suss out some of what that might be.

One of the most interesting parts of the narrative that leads up to Ragnarok is how the Gods seemingly lay the foundation for this doom of Their own doing. To get the wall built around Asgard, They break Their oath to the giant craftsman. To avenge Baldr's death, kin kills kin. At one time or another, the Tods break all of the inviolable rules that They are the very guarantors of - oathbreaking, kinslaying, rape, murder, and so forth. In each case, it seems to be needed, it seems to be justified, and yet, it is still, in some sense, crooked. Maybe the only way to chain Fenris was for Tyr to pledge His hand as collateral that They weren't really tying Him up. Maybe the only way to make things right after Baldr was killed was for Hodhr to be killed, and maybe only another son of Odhinn could do it. The point is that whatever the reason, however good it was, breaking the fundamental laws of the cosmos makes the cosmos less stable. Those laws are meant to be inviolable for a reason - violating them makes them harder to uphold, and they're load-bearing elements of reality. Kvilhaug makes the good point that it is likely overly simplistic to read the tales of Ragnarok literally as "this is what's going to happen to the physical sphere of rock and sea and magma that you live on," and that it is more likely mostly about a/the spiritual apocalypse - whether on an individual level or societal. I agree that this is likely a far more productive way of looking at things, and gives a nice lens for the less-than-admirable deeds of the Gods that help lead to Ragnarok: we each of us do the best we can, but compromises and tradeoffs are made, and maybe even for the best, but they lay the groundwork for what will get us down the line.

So, as we've heard before, Kvilhaug sees many of the male god trinities that show up in Norse myth as variations of the trio of "Mind, Passion, and Spirit." No surprise, she sees this all over the Ragnarok myth as well. Her basic idea is that a lot of myths are about how Mind and Passion, if left to their own devices, are dangerous and liable to abuse, but that they can be harmoniously managed when Spirit is present and put in charge. Two insights I found especially helpful here: 1. These trinities often also have a key interaction with a goddess of fate and/or a dark ogress, with the right relation being a harmonious marriage of Spirit to that goddess, and 2. in stories where two brothers or friends are given, it can be helpful to see them as Mind and Passion, and the third figure who reconciles or otherwise makes them harmonious as Spirit.

Building on the insight that Ragnarok might best be understood in a spiritual, rather than documentary, sense is the thought that the "answer" to Ragnarok is initiation. This comes across most clearly in Hynluljodh, where Freyja's favorite Ottar has his seeking and gaining of initiatory knowledge marred by repeated references to these fiery and chaotic end times. Freyja stands firm in asserting that the precious mead and the help of the gods will see him through all of that. If Ragnarok is as much about a spiritual or personal dissolution and descent into chaos as it is about the physical world literally coming to an end, it makes sense that having found the kind of knowledge that will allow you to transcend greed and fear and death will let you ride out that catastrophe. In some sense, this is even more hopeful than the "mere" promise that initiation will allow someone to overcome the cycle of oblivion in death and rebirth into the non-heroic human condition.

Though much weight is often put on the finality of Ragnarok, every mention of it we have also talks about the renewal that will come after. Some folks have said this is a Christian softening of the harsh end of all things, even the gods, that the dour northmen foresaw, but I don't find this argument all that compelling. The renewal after Ragnarok is not presented as the advent of some singular messianic figure, nor is it inconsistent with a cyclical view of the cosmos. In fact, one of the most interesting things about the renewal after Ragnarok is the idea that some of the awfulness that led to Ragnarok, most of all the killing of Baldr and the vengeance on Hodhr for doing so, might have somehow been necessary for the rebirth that follows. If the myths leading up to Ragnarok spell out the inevitable compromises and corruptions that lead to things falling apart, these myths tell of the promise that things could be better, but only with the right changes in human consciousness and conditions. Kvilhaug brings in her idea of trinities by saying that Baldr is the new representative of Spirit, whereas His brothers Vali and Hodhr, now cleansed of their negative feelings and short-sightedness, are Mind and Passion. She also introduces some interesting numerological speculation that I'll have to look into more closely as I dive deeper into these myths.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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• The Seed of Yggdrasill - Overall Rundown
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 1 - Introduction and the Books of Old
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 2 - Creation, Cosmos, and the Ruling Powers
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 3 - The Maiden with the Mead
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 4 - Retrieving the Soul of the Gods
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 5 - The Loss of the Golden Age in Old Norse Myth - You Are Here
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 6 - Ragnarok and the New Age
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 7 - Death and Resurrection
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 8 - The Way of the Wand Witch
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 9 - The Priestess and the King
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 10 - The Wise Man's Path
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 11 - The Trials of Thorr
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 12 - The One and the Many and Epilogue

This chapter shows Kvilhaug going along with some of her best and worst tendencies. On the downside, she tries to tie some of the myths to historical events, but does so on the basis of shallow and outdated understandings. More positively, this chapter has a clear theme, and all of her analysis is through that lens and comes back to it, such that even when I think some of the myths cited are a bit of a stretch to bring up when discussing golden ages and their loss, they are at least clearly related to the other things she discusses in the chapter, and the far-flung references to other works has a focus that makes them more comprehensible. I'm also glad to be writing up this chapter because it's our last really long chapter before the final one, clocking in at 74 pages. From here on out, other than the last chapter, none are longer than about half that, which makes getting these reviews out on a regular basis much easier!

Kvilhaug opens the chapter with some more speculation about what historical events might be reflected in the myths, and again, it comes across as some of her weaker stuff. As I might have mentioned in a previous chapter, at the time of writing, Kvilhaug seems to have fully bought Marija Gimbutas's theory that Europe had a mostly-peaceful matriarchal culture before the mean patriarchal Indo-Europeans rolled up and took over. For an excellent discussion of how Gimbutas was light years ahead of her field in working out where the Indo-Europeans came from, but totally wrong about what they displaced, check out this great post. For a very thorough take on what we know about Europe for the past 12,000 years or so, this makes a great overview. Anyway, the point is, the folks who settled Europe before the Indo-Europeans likely weren't all that peaceful or all that matriarchal either. It's possible their religion(s) gave greater weight to female deities than the Indo-European ones, based on the amount of female statuary, but we really don't know. There likely are some echoes of this and/or earlier meetings between the Indo-Europeans and neighboring peoples found in mythology and historicized mythology of the various Indo-European peoples (like the Aesir-Vanir War, the Rape of the Sabine Women, and so forth), but note that none of these stories are associated with a golden age that got wrecked - they're all associated with different groups of people and/or divine beings having a war and eventually settling it with a truce that united them and established much of how society was ordered. Anyway, the point of all this is that I think it's generally not that helpful to try to find the "real" golden age behind a golden age myth. The idea that things used to be better, and now we live in a crappier world is very common mythologically, and likely has as much to do with individuals aging and normal civilizational decay as it does with accurate historical memories.

Kvilhaug also engages in one of her other less-than-helpful tendencies in this chapter when she starts talking about the influence of Christianity and its own story of a lost "golden age" in Eden (spoiler alert - it's all bad). Did you realize that it's standard Christian teaching that the Fall was only about sex? Me neither, because no one serious actually thinks or teaches that. Maybe that's the version that gets trotted out by lukewarm Norwegian mostly-secular Christians trying to check a few religious boxes or something, but it was yet another occasion where Kvilhaug seems to attack a caricature of Christianity rather than engaging with the very many ways you can respect what the religion is doing without agreeing with it. It's also a bit muddled why she even brings up Eden here - she doesn't make a very strong case that the "lost golden age" Norse myths are late, Christian-influenced stories that are just retelling the Eden myth, nor does she especially say that the Golden Age myths were cast in a grossly deceptive light by being written down by Christians shaped by ideas of Eden and original sin. There's a lot of complicated and potentially useful stuff to sort through in the role of Christianity in shaping or influencing the lore that we have, since all of the written versions passed through Christian hands to get to us, even if they were composed in a heathen age. Instead, she just seems to sort of vaguely be talking about how different religions and cultures have "golden age" myths, but the Norse ones are better than the Christian one, because Christianity is bad and hates sex. Or something. It's not a great look, and it doesn't add much to the chapter.

Okay, the first Norse myth discussed is definitely a golden age myth. King Frodhi ("Wise") presided over an age so peaceful and prosperous that a maiden could walk unescorted the breadth of the country without being troubled and a gold ring could lie right there out in the open without anyone picking it up. He achieved this through a wondrous mill that could grind out whatever you wanted, turned by two giantesses - Fenja (usually translated as "of the heath," but Kvilhaug prefers "the Achiever") and Menja (usually translated as "of the Necklace," maybe associated with Freyja's famous Brisingamen, but again, Kvilhaug has her own preference, here for "the Rememberer"). From her preferred translations, and the fact that turning this mill cranks out what happens in the world, Kvilhaug equates the giantesses with Urdhr and Verdhandi. At any rate, at some point, Frodhi grows greedy and has the giantesses grind out gold, and he goes to sleep and orders them to keep going without rest. As they grow resentful at their mistreatment, they grind out all kinds of bad stuff, and the golden age ends. Kvilhaug argues, and I think with good support, that the point here is that as long as wisdom is in charge, primal forces can be turned to good ends, but if we lose wisdom, those primal forces cause all kinds of hardship and bad news. This is a clear myth of "you had a good thing going and screwed it up, and now everything sucks," so it's a good place to start a discussion of golden ages and their loss.

Okay, so next up Kvilhaug talks about the myth of chaining Fenris. While much of her analysis is helpful, I think including this myth in a chapter on "golden ages" is a bit shaky. Her standpoint is that up to this point, things seem to have gone pretty well for the Aesir, but then Loki's kids show up and seem to introduce/embody problems. Fenris's name most likely means "greed," which is not shocking, as wolves are often associated with greed/hunger in Norse myth, so the wolf very likely is as well. Kvilhaug's take is that Tyr represents war, and that he loses his hand to Greed, because war too easily escalates due to greed, at great cost. I think there's some merit to this, but my own meditations have led me to believe that Tyr, as the God of organized, societally-sanctioned war, losing his hand to the wolf is the cost of war - you feed some of your young to the wolf, and they never become men, householders, because the tribe/city/society needed to pay that cost, or at least thought it did. Anyhow, there's lots more here to meditate on - the wolf is bound by seemingly insubstantial things, Tyr is the God of keeping oaths and he essentially offers a false guarantee, Fenris is not dangerous yet, but we know He kills Odhinn at Ragnarok - there's a lot of useful, interesting stuff happening here, but I'm not sure how much of it is usefully analyzed as "right after" the presumably idyllic age described in other poems.

When we get to Kvasir, though, we're again clearly dealing with a time when things were good and then someone went and messed it up by getting greedy. We have two different versions of where Kvasir came from, oddly enough both from sources written by Snorri - in the Ynglinga Saga, he is simply one of the Vanir hostages given to the Aesir as part of the peace deal to end their war. The version given in the Prose Edda is more interesting, though. At the end of the Aesir-Vanir war, both sides came together to seal the peace deal in various ways including the hostage exchange given in the other version (though with slightly different hostages), but one of those ways is a bit funky. All of the Aesir and Vanir spit into the same vat, mix that spit with some berries, and from this divine mush form Kvasir, who proves to be the wisest man in the whole world (presumably because he partakes of the wisdom of all of the other divine beings). Kvasir wanders the world, giving out his wisdom to anyone who wants it, for free even! But then a couple of dwarves, Fjalar and Galar, whose names probably have something to do with noise and/or yelling (like many of the primeval giants we've encountered before), have the bright idea that instead of just having Kvasir over for a beer and asking him whatever they want to know, they should instead kill him, drain his blood, and use it to brew some mead that will grant eloquence and wisdom to whoever drinks it. Cool plan, guys. So, they do it, and they put the mead in three containers: Son (maybe "blood," or maybe "reconciliation"), Bodhn ("Vessel/Container"), and Odhroerir ("Stirrer of Odhr," odhr is something like inspiration or the ecstatic state, it's the root of Odhin's name, he is "The odhr master.") Continuing to be complete psychos, these dwarves next invite over a giant, Gilling, and his wife, take Gilling on a nice boat ride, and then tip over the boat to drown him. Coming back on shore, his wife is understandably upset, starts wailing, and these guys are apparently less of a fan of lamentations than Conan, so they kill her too. Unfortunately for them, their son Suttung ("Heavy with Drink") hears about this, rolls up on the murderous dwarves, and puts them out on a reef that gets covered at high tide. With the water creeping higher and higher, the dwarves offer him something, anything to save their lives, and he's all "well, whatcha got?" Water up to their necks, they offer him the mead in a panic, and he's like, "yeah, okay, that'll work." Snorri says that they were thus reconciled, but I like to think of Suttung as just letting them drown anyway.

Anyway, Suttung hides the mead in Hnitbjorg ("The Clashing Mountain" is the usual translation, maybe like the cliffs that smash together that the Argonauts had to get through), and sets his daughter Gunnlodh ("Invitation to Battle") to watch over the mead. At this point, we're pretty clearly out of the golden age of Kvasir going around being a bro to all and sundry, as his wisdom is now locked up under a magic mountain and guarded by a giant family. What's interesting about this myth, though, is that it's not only about the golden age and its loss, but also about its (partial) restitution. Odhin decides to go get the Mead, and so he spends a summer mowing hay for Suttung's brother (after tricking his previous thralls into killing themselves with a whetstone), and then the brother agrees to help him get the mead, first by asking Suttung (no go), then by drilling a hole in the mountain for Odin to literally snake his way in, but I guess he feels bad about screwing over his brother or something, because he tries to trick Odin, first by not drilling all the way through, and then by straight up trying to go all Saw on him with the drill, but Odin gets into the mountain anyway. Gunnlodh likes the looks of Odin and agrees to give him a taste of the mead if he'll spend three nights with her (in the version referenced in Havamal, there's an implication that Odin swore an oath to her, maybe a marriage oath, but that's not in the Prose Edda version). When she goes to give him three sips, he uses one big sip per container and ends up with all of the mead inside him! He turns into an eagle and hightails it back to Asgard, but Suttung spots him, turns into an eagle himself and takes off in hot pursuit (hmmm, another giant-turned-eagle chase). We don't hear what happened to Suttung, or if Odin just lost him, or what, but along the way, Odin leaked out some of the mead (from which end it came out will depend on how you interpret the passage), and this nasty, second-rate mead is where crappy poetry comes from. The good stuff, though, Odin spits out into three containers in Asgard, and it becomes available to those he chooses to grace with it, granting poetic fluency, which is also wisdom and memory and inspiration and all that.

Kvilhaug's take on this myth sequence is, surprise, that some of the figures are actually the same as Gods/Giants from other stories! She equates Suttung with her favorite giant, Aegir (which is slightly weird, as the primary source for most of this story is a section of Skalkskaparmal being told to Aegir, but hey). She points to the association with mead, being the father of the Maiden with the Mead, and so forth. More interesting to me is her assertion that Kvasir might be another name for Heimdall, which at first struck me as totally out of left field, but she presents some interesting evidence. First, in Thrymskvidha, stanza 15, Heimdall is called one of the Vanir and said to possess great wisdom, and though He isn't mentioned in any of the stories about the hostage exchange, He is seen living and acting amongst the Aesir, implying he might have been one of the hostages. Secondly, and more interestingly, in Gudhrunarkvidha onnur, stanza 23, the "precious mead" is said to be imbued with/made to grow by "the power of earth," "the cool cold sea," and "the Blood of Reconciliation/Atonement," and in Hyndluljodh, stanza 38, Heimdall is said to be imbued with/made to grow by "the power of earth," "the cool cold sea," and "the blood of reconciliation/atonement" - now isn't that something? I wouldn't say it's open and shut, especially since Kvilhaug reads a lot into Heimdall that others don't (she translates His name "Great World," and sees Him as the personification of all of Being), but at a minimum, it's awfully rich food for bethinking (meditating) on.

Though it might be a bit cutesy, Kvilhaug approaches the myth of Baldr's death as a murder mystery, which turns out to actually be pretty compelling. Now, this is another myth where the "golden age" is not so much spelled out as implied - since Baldr is so extraordinarily great, things must have been great when he was around. It seems bit shaky to me, but again, it doesn't much take away from the analysis of this myth, just the broader theme Kvilhaug is trying to demonstrate with a bunch of "Golden Age" stories (this is the last time I'm going to hammer on this, because I think that the myths of Kvasir and Frodhi are likely the only ones that are really golden age myths). Anyhow, so the point is, the story of Baldr seems fairly straightforward: Baldr has some bad dreams about dying, everyone freaks out, his mom, the queen of the gods, goes around and gets everything^* to swear an oath not to harm Him, so everything's good. The gods, being rowdy viking gods, celebrate this by hurling weapons at Baldr and finding it awesomely hilarious when nothing happens. Loki sees all this and hates it, and wonders if it's really as foolproof as it seems. So He turns into a woman, goes to visit Frigg, and asks her if she really got an oath from everything, and she admits, well, no, the mistletoe seemed too small and harmless, so I didn't ask it. Meanwhile, blind Hodh doesn't get to play the reindeer games, and Loki finds him sitting sadly on the sidelines. Loki says he'll be a pal and help Hodh shoot a dart, and he has just the one. Well, surprise, the dart is mistletoe, and now Hodh has killed the most beloved god, and Loki has bounced.

Even from this short telling, you can see that whose "fault" it might be is a bit tangled. Loki had the intent, secured the murder weapon, and even guided Hodh's hand. On the other hand, Hodh is the one who let the dart fly. Where things start getting even weirder, though, is when you consider that Odhin, the god who has sought out the most hidden wisdom, went and consulted a ghost volva about Baldr's dreams, and then as Baldr lies dead on his funeral pyre, Odhin whispers a secret in his ear. And, oh, also, later, after Ragnarok, you know, that thing that Odhin is more concerned about than anything and that will kill Him? Yeah, after that, Baldr comes back to the reborn world. So maybe the Crafty One knew what was coming and had some role in it. But wait, it gets even trickier! Frigg, the (extremely) protective mother can even be considered a suspect! In the Lokasenna (basically Loki trash-talking all of the other gods), Loki brags to Frigg that he got Her beloved son killed. Another Goddess, trying to calm things down (everybody tries, Loki keeps escalating, until eventually Thor shows up and threatens Him enough that He leaves), responds by saying that Frigg sometimes sits on Odhin's high throne, the Hlidhskjalf, and can see just as far and clearly as Him, and further, that She knows all fate, but speaks it not. What a strange juxtaposition! And remember, it was Frigg who so "carelessly" revealed the only thing that could kill Baldr, after going to all of that work to protect him. All of this points to the idea that Baldr's death might not have been (only) the awful tragedy it is usually presented as, but a necessary step in the eventual preservation and rejuvenation of the world.

Where Kvilhaug mostly gets the "golden age" vibe from this myth is in translating the names. She gives Baldr's name as "Bold" (one of a few credible etymologies that many other scholars also buy), and so sees Him as the embodiment of courage. His wife Nanna Neprsdottir's name she translates as "Understanding, daughter of the Ring," and for this story at least, she translates the odhr in Odhin's name as "Spirit" and Frigg's name as "Love" (it is definitely related to the word "Love," but it's a title that came to mean "Lady," and most translations render it "Beloved"). His home, Breidablik, she translates as "Broad Vision." In other words, Baldr is the kind of courage you get from deep understanding and broad vision, and as long as that courage is nurtured and respected, it is a source of happiness, and is in fact quite resilient. Kvilhaug translates Hodhr as "Strife" or "Aggression," which is apparently a bit more speculative than some of the other names. If we go with it, though, that means that this understanding, loving, fair courage can be disrupted by "blind strife" or "blind aggression" - just as we see hatred and greed as negative qualities that heroes have to surpass to earn a valkyrie bride. As usual, I think that Kvilhaug comes off as a little too sure she has the one and only answer to the "puzzle" of the myth, but I do think that this particular proposed "solution" is incredibly fruitful and will help cast light on a lot of other linked myths.

This is not quite its own tale, and it certainly isn't about the loss of a golden age, but more what is done after it. It's also weird because it's a rather ugly tale, and our most complete version of it comes from Saxo Grammaticus, who had a far more hostile take on his heathen ancestors than Snorri did, and whose euhemerized tellings of mythic stories often show the god-substitute characters in very poor lights. We can't totally toss these stories out, though, because there are hints and snippets in the authentically heathen lore, like the Eddic and Skaldic poems, that point to some of these same stories. All of which is to say that this myth is on even shakier ground as something that was known and believed by heathens back in the day, and so any religious thinking informed by it should take that into account.

Okay, so Baldr has been killed, technically by Hodh, so now Hodh owes a blood debt to Baldr's kin, and Baldr's kin have an obligation to hunt down Hodh until and unless he comes up with a suitable wergild ("man-gold" - the price paid to the kin of someone killed, which was the civilized answer to endless tit-for-tat blood feuds, Hatfield and McCoy style). When Odhin consulted with the dead seeress about Baldr's seemingly unavoidable death, he asked about vengeance, and he was told he would have to father a new son on a woman/giantess named Rind (Kvilhaug translates as "The Rejecter"). That son will be named Vali, which Kvilhaug links with the same word in Valholl ("Hall of the Chosen"), and so translates as "The Choice." We know that Rind was Vali's mother, and that Vali succeeds in avenging Baldr, and that He is another of the Gods who will survive Ragnarok and be a part of the new order afterward. But pretty much all we know about Rind, or the circumstances of Odhin fathering Vali on her, come from Saxo's telling, which is, well, not very nice. Odhin heads to Rind's folk (here given as Ruthenians, roughly Ukrainian/Polish, which might stand for "foreign, but known to us," which might indicate giants in the non-euhemerized version of the myth Saxo was building on), and he makes his suit, offering first his own greatness, and then when that fails, money. Rind turns him down and says he's too old. He then strikes her with a thorn that makes her fall ill and mad/confused. Odhin changes himself into a healer woman and comes to help. He tells her attendants that she'll have to take some medicine that is so bitter, she'll try to toss it away, so they have to tie her down. And, uh, leave them alone to administer the medicine, of course. With the poor girl tied down, Odhin rapes her and impregnates her with Vali.

As I said, an ugly story with a weirdly mixed provenance. Kvilhaug does a good job of laying out some reasons that this distasteful detail may have been part of actual heathen myths and not just a slander thought up by Saxo, and then proceeds to interpret it in the way she has been doing with all the other myths so far. Her take is that "Spirit" (remember, a tricky, fuzzy concept, odhr, that has connotations of altered states of consciousness, ecstasis, and frenzy) can come upon even the most arduous rejecter of things spiritual and create the choice to act bravely and wisely in the world. I'm not sure I wholly buy her take, but it's not unreasonable, and if we accept that in myth, one way of looking at sexual union and its products is as a metaphor for forces/concepts/archetypes coming together and creating an outcome, then whether that coming together was consensual or one-sided might have further metaphoric import. I'm reminded of the myth of the conception of Erechtheus, the first king of the Athenians. Hephaestus tried to force Himself on Athena, but by the time He caught Her, He was too worked up and spilled His seed on Her thigh. She wiped this off, and threw it on the ground, and from the ground sprung the baby Erechtheus. I'll save getting into the specifics (though Neal Stephenson does a nice job in a scene in Cryptonomicon), but the point is that it was important mythically for Erechtheus to, in some sense, be the son of Hephaestus and Athena and the Earth (at the site of Athens, specifically). It was also important, mythically, for Athena to remain a virgin, and for Hephaestus's unlooked-for yearning to be the driving force. The myth rather neatly conveys all of this in a vivid, easy-to-understand way. So maybe the story of Odhin and Rind is pulling some similar conceptual freight - but I haven't worked it out yet.

Okay, I said I wouldn't hammer on "was it really a golden age?" anymore, so I'll just point out that what Kvilhaug identifies as a golden age in the story of Volund is nine years of three couples being happily married - so a fairly short, and fairly domestic golden age, but perhaps there's some useful wisdom in contemplating "golden ages" from such a standpoint, after all. Volund is the figure known throughout the Germanic world by various names: Velent, Wieland, Veland, and in English, Wayland the Smith. This section was actually one of the most useful for me in the chapter, as Kvilhaug brings in sources from outside the Eddas and makes some comparisons/equations that are very thought-provoking, if nothing else. For example, in a late Danish medieval version of the story, Velent goes to learn smithing from Mimir, who is a "Hun." As we saw with the Ruthenians above, foreign folks, especially to the east, often seem to stand in for giants in later versions of tales that were de-mythologized. Kvilhaug's etymology for Volund looks straightforward as she presents it, and it has interesting implications if right, but apparently most scholars regard the etymology of the name as obscure and hard to figure out, so her very straightforward reading might be missing something (or maybe the scholars are looking for too complicated an answer!). Anyhow, she takes the first part from Ve, meaning "sacred enclosure," which is not as crazy as it might look at first from my writing, because the "o" in Volund has an umlaut, and so is closer to an "e" than it first appears, and she says the second is just lundr meaning "Grove."

There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in the various versions of the Germanic smith legends, often involving dwarves, betrayal, intentional laming, child murder, and worse (yes, worse). I'm not going to give a pithy summary, because this is one of the tales I don't even know as well in the Edda version as others we've covered, and I certainly don't know the other versions and references and such. Instead, I'll focus on what I think are the potentially most interesting, but also most speculative, parts of Kvilhaug's analysis. First, Volund is presented with two brothers. She equates this triad with Odhin-Vili-Ve (there's that "Ve" again!), the three brothers who killed Ymir and made the world, and/or with Odhin, Hoenir, Lodhur, who made the first men, and since she's all about the fluid identity of gods, she sees all of these triads as three-part manifestations of Odhin (which is not such a crazy interpretation - even staid, non-pantheist harder polytheist types often see at least the first three as all manifestations of Odhin). She compares their actions setting up a nice, cozy homestead in a valley by a lake with the acts of primal creation described in earlier myths. Now, here's where it gets even more interesting, potentially. The three brothers find three valkyries bathing at the lake and make them their wives (from how the story goes, it seems like They were into it, just not as much as the dudes). The live together happily for nine years, and then the women are like "valkyries gotta valkyrie," and go off to fight battles and choose warriors and stuff. Two of the brothers go after them, but Volund stays and just starts making gold rings every day. Anyway, what's interesting about Kvilhaug's analysis here is that she equates the three valkyries with the three Norns - Urdhr, Verdhandi, and Skuld. She then proceeds to match each valkyrie (based on the name) with each Norn. Now that each of the brothers has been identified with an aspect of Odhin/one of His brothers and each of the valkyries identified with one of the Norns, we see Odhin and his brothers/aspects married to the Norns, and we know which aspect is married to which Norn! Now, I don't know that I buy that these identifications are "true" in some objective sense, but the potential insights that come from these sorts of interlocking associations is precisely where Kvilhaug's approach shines.

For this bit, Kvilhaug brings together the story, told in Ynglinga Saga, where Odhin left the Aesir for some time, and so his brothers Vili and Ve both married Frigg while He was away, with the story of Freyja looking for Her lost husband Odh. She uses this to layout the case for seeing Odhin and Odh as the same god (remember, Odhinn is just "Master of Odh" and Odhr is "Odh," so this one's pretty straightforward) and Frigg and Freyja as the same Goddess (less straightforward, but not crazy - Frigg and Freyja both derive from the same proto-Germanic root, a title that just means "Lady.") This is actually the case of "these different gods are actually the same" I think is one of the intellectually strongest - I was thoroughly convinced of it back when I was a materialist heathen, and I still find the arguments compelling. That being said, at least for my practical religious life, I got clear instructions to worship Freyja and Frigg separately, as two distinct goddesses, so that's what I do. Anyway, Kvilhaug says both of these are stories about what happens when you lose touch with spirit/the divine, which seems fine as far as it goes. What I found most helpful is her suggestion about where the heck did Odhin/Odh go anyway? I don't think I've ever run into anyone speculating on that before, just accepting that the Wanderer's gonna wander. She links this with his visit to Vafthrudhnir for a wisdom competition (as told in Vafthrudhnismal). Kvilhaug sees Vafthrudhnir ("Powerful Head Veil," she says, but again, other scholars differ) as representing the forces of illusion that hide the true nature of Being from us (think Buddhist maya), and so as long as your spirit is caught up contending with illusion, it's not doing it's job of running your soul. If nothing else, an interesting way to approach these myths, with lots to think about.

We've seen lots of related discussion on these tales in the chapter on the Maiden with the Mead, so there's not a ton of new stuff here. The emphasis is on how there are multiple stories where a valkyrie (who, remember, Kvilhaug sees as a personalized fate goddess of a warrior/initiate, who is Herself a manifestation of Fate Herself) is put to sleep by Odhinn, seemingly as some kind of punishment for something She has done, but perhaps for sneakier reasons, like for Her to be the proper motivation for a hero to achieve what he needs to achieve to become worthy of Valholl, and thus of Odhin's plans for him. As always, there's some good discussion of names and references to other tales and gods, sometimes unexpected ones, but this is one of those sections that's a bit repetitive.

Kvilhaug seems to have been ahead of the curve here a bit. In the last few years, since Iain McGilchrist has finished his two-volume magnum opus The Matter with Things (see here for a great intro for such a big, gnarly topic, though be warned it is through the lens of political implications, which may not be to your taste), Left-Brain/Right-Brain stuff has been all over the place (at least, all over the kind of stuff I read online and in books). Kvilhaug speculates that what gets coded as "feminine" in Norse myth might be representative of right-brain thinking, whereas "masculine" is left-brain. I think there might be something to this, but I also think gender is its own whole thing, deeply embedded in our thought and experience in a different way than our two ways of processing things with our brain. Where I'm left is thinking it might be very interesting to systematically go through various myths and analyze them as if this is true, and see what pops out. Especially after I've had a chance to read more McGilchrist.

Altogether, I think that bringing these myths together and looking for their parallels was a helpful exercise, and there are some real parallels to them. That being said, as I made abundantly clear throughout, I think the idea of a "golden age" and its loss is not necessarily the thread that holds all of these together, but instead, something a bit more abstract and general, which is the theme of losing, seeking, and/or finding something vital. All of these myths truly do point to aspects of the human condition that are/can be lost, and to the great spiritual rewards that come from living in proper relationship with them, but not all of them paint this desirable thing as something that was once universally known and is now universally missing unless we actively seek it. Instead, these stories run the gamut from true, universal golden age of the past that has been lost (like Frodhi's age of peace) to highly individual paths of seeking and initiation, like the heroes with their valkyries.

Once again, we run into my chief complaint with Kvilhaug and her particular perennialist/pantheist take on things: her overly strong tendency to see everything as the same, one thing. Rather than several stories about seeking something felt as a deep yearning for something lost, all of these stories must be about the golden age, and all of the characters must really be the same character. It strikes me as overly neat for a world as big, complex, and messy as we know this one to be - why would spiritual matters be much simpler? Maybe I ought to stop even pointing this out, since it's pretty well established by this point how Kvilhaug sees these things, and that I don't agree, but I thought I'd bring it up here, because it's not only a case of "all of these Goddesses are really just one Goddess," it's also "all of these stories are really just one story," which, weirdly, strikes me as even more reductive than melting every character together. Even if every God is one God, there can still be different stories about Him, right? If you dissolve the differences between all of the stories too, what are you left with? One undifferentiated Being doing one, undifferentiated thing, always? In the Neoplatonic Druid philosophy I've read, that's literally the state of Being between creations, the "cosmic night" that comes between the "cosmic days" of manifest Becoming that are everything we have known and can know in our present states.

Anyhow, as I've said before, Kvilhaug's instinct to look for similarities, look for connections, look for hidden parallels is a good and useful one, but here, as elsewhere, she takes it past the point where I find it helpful.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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• The Seed of Yggdrasill - Overall Rundown
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 1 - Introduction and the Books of Old
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 2 - Creation, Cosmos, and the Ruling Powers
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 3 - The Maiden with the Mead
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 4 - Retrieving the Soul of the Gods - You Are Here
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 5 - The Loss of the Golden Age in Old Norse Myth
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 6 - Ragnarok and the New Age
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 7 - Death and Resurrection
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 8 - The Way of the Wand Witch
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 9 - The Priestess and the King
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 10 - The Wise Man's Path
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 11 - The Trials of Thorr
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 12 - The One and the Many and Epilogue

This chapter has a fair amount of overlap with Kvilhaug's book The Goddess Idhunn in Poetry and Myth, which I read and took extensive notes on, so I was able to go through this one a bit quicker. It's also much shorter than most of the earlier chapters, so this will likely be a quicker write-up than some in the series so far. Right up front, I have to say that I don't really understand Kvilhaug's central conclusion: that Idhunn is the "Soul of the Gods." I'll get into that as we go, but I thought I should highlight that whatever else follows might be tainted by an overall sense of confusion.

Kvilhaug relies on three works (the first two more than the third) for her analysis of the Idhunn myth, with good reason: these are the only texts we have that talk about Idhunn! I'll start with the middle text, which is Snorri's Prose Edda. As discussed before, Snorri's masterwork is both a (literal?) Godssend as well as somewhat complicated to deal with thanks to the religious landscape when he wrote. On the one hand, he gives us the most straightforward telling of the Idhunn myth, one without which interpretation of the Haustlong would be rather murky at best, and the Hrafnagaldr Odhins would be utterly opaque. In fact, so readily interpretable is Snorri, that some scholars have accused him of making up much of the myth and modeling it more along classical lines (like the apples of the Hesperides, and so forth). Kvilhaug argues, and I agree, that the rather old (early 10th century) skaldic poem Haustlong shows enough detail that much of what Snorri relates about the tale must be at least as old as that poem. Importantly, that poem was composed by an actually heathen skald, known for his learning and wisdom, for an actually heathen audience, in an act that was fundamentally religious in a heathen way.

Quick aside: here's what I mean. The well-known skald, Thodholfr or Hvinir was given a princely gift: a shield painted with scenes from two myths: Loki's betrayal of Idhunn and her abduction by Thjazi (more below), and Thor's fight against the strongest of tall the jotnar, Hrungnir. Back then, amongst the nordic folk, giving a gift was a fundamentally religious act. You took some of your stored up luck, wealth, and good name, and you put it into a physical object, and then you gave that physical object to someone else, thus giving them that portion of your luck, wealth, and good name, because it was a grand and noble thing to do, and the Gods smiled upon it, and sometimes added some of their own luck, wealth, and good name to those of gift-giver and/or receiver. Now, if you were given such a wonderful gift and were yourself religious (as we have no reason to believe someone so skilled in the holy art of skaldship would not be), your immediate response is "I am in this man's debt! How do I give him some of my luck, wealth, good name, and so forth, hopefully with some of the Gods' to boot, to demonstrate that I am just as awesome and sensitive to the ways of Gods and men as he is?" Well, if your name is Thodholfr of Hvinir, the way you do that is by busting out your top-notch skald skills to compose a poem about your sweet gift as its own sweet gift in return. This is an A+ heathen move, by the way. Thodholfr 1. honored and magnified the gift he was given, and thus the name and reputation of the man who gave it to him, by telling everyone, even folks over a thousand years later what a great gift it was, 2. gave back a gift of comparable (or maybe even better?) artistry, by setting his well-skilled hand to crafting a poem, and 3. did all of this in the divine art of poetry about the Gods Themselves, making everything appropriate religiously.

Anyway, the point here is that we have a very old (by written Germanish standards) poem, a medium-old prose retelling by a known scholarly badass, but with his Christian conflicts, and a poem of indeterminate age that is all kinds of weird and mixed up. As we talked about back in the first post in this series, Hrafnagaldr Odhins is a poem that was included in the Poetic Edda for a long time, eventually got kicked out for being "not authentic enough," and now enjoys a mixed status, where some scholars believe it to be from the same time as other Eddic poems, others seeing it as the later recreation of an antiquarian. I'm with Kvilhaug in seeing it as useful enough from a heathen religious perspective to give it serious attention. One interesting (but likely impossible to answer) question is: does the Hrafnagaldr Odhins have nowhere-else seen kennings for Idhunn given by Snorri because the author read Snorri and forced them in there, or because Snorri knew this poem and used it to compile his list of kennings?

The overall takeaway is that Snorri's prose telling of the myth of the abduction of Idhunn is our clearest understanding of the story, the version told in fits and starts of allusive verse in the Haustlong is very compatible with that, which suggest the story was genuinely old, and then the Hrafnagaldr Odhins adds some further wrinkles that you may or may not take seriously depending on when you date that poem and how committed to reconstructionism you are.

Okay, so, let's take a moment to tell the story at the heart of these different versions discussed above. Odhinn, Hoenir, and Loki are traveling around, and they get hungry, and they find a herd of oxen, so they kill one of the oxen and start cooking it in a big "earth oven" (likely picture a pit-barbecue type situation, like at a luau). They keep checking, though, and the ox won't cook. They look up, and there's a "not small" (typical Norse understatement for "frickin' huge") eagle sitting in a tree looking down at them intently. Loki starts to think the eagle has something to do with it and is like "what's up, bird? Why are you messing with our dinner?!" So, the eagle is like "well, I'm hungry too. Promise me my choice of the finished meat and I'll let it cook." The three Gods agree, and sure enough, finally the ox cooks reasonably quickly. When it's time to let the eagle take his share, yoink! He takes the whole dang ox! Loki is starving and won't have none of this, so he starts wailing on the eagle with a stick. Unfortunately for him, the stick "sticks" to the eagle, who starts flying off with the ox in its claws, and Loki hanging on to the stick, unable to let go. The eagle flies low, smashing Loki into stuff along the way, and Loki, fearing for his life, begs the eagle to tell what will make him stop. The eagle says that Loki must bring him the goddess Idhunn, keeper of the apples that keep the Gods young. Loki agrees, and after he gets back to Asgard, proceeds to trick Idhunn outside the walls by saying he found some new apples that remind him or her special ones, and the eagle, revealed to be the jotun Thjazi, snatches up Idhunn and takes her back to his hall in Thrymheim. The Gods begin to grow old, and knowing where to look when trouble shows up, they confront Loki. He admits what He did, and promises to get Her back, but to do so, He'll need to borrow Freyja's falcon-shape, which she agrees to. So He turns into a falcon, flies to Thrymheim, finds Idhunn there and Thjazi out, turns her into a nut, and then flies home with Her in His falcon claws. However, Thjazi gets back just as they're leaving, again turns into an eagle, and chases after. Back in Asgard, the Gods are keeping up a sharp watch, and they see this chase coming their way, so they pile up a bunch of wood and prepare to light a huge bonfire. Right as Loki gets back, Thjazi hot on his tail, they fire up the wood, and roast Thjazi to death. Well, it turns out Thjazi has a daughter, Skadhi, and she comes seeking restitution for her murdered father. The Aesir and Vanir are a bit ashamed of the whole business, and offer to let Her marry one of the Aesir. She agrees, but only if She gets to pick which one, and if someone amongst Them can make Her laugh (with the smell of her roasted father still lingering in the air, that's a tall order). The Aesir agree, but stipulate that she must pick her husband by his feet, and She says "fine, whatever." Seeing the most handsome feet, she thinks that must be Baldr, who she wants to marry (handsomest and kindest of all the Gods, primo husband material), but it turns out that's Njordhr, whose feet are so nice because He is (among other things) the God of the sea, and stands with his feet in the waves all day, which I guess is a hell of an exfoliant or something. As for the laughing, Loki tries everything, until finally, in desperation, he ties a rope to a goat's horns, and the other end to his, ahem, manhood, and when the goat yanks him off his feet yelping, he falls into Skadhi's lap and she bursts out laughing to see him humiliated so.

Great story, right? Admittedly a bit different than the version in D'aulaires' Norse Myth that I read my daughter earlier today, but even that version was interesting. Well, let's dive into some of what we can take from it besides the entertainment value.

Maybe the single biggest contribution Kvilhaug made to my understanding of this myth is the idea that Thjazi very likely is death personified. "Jotun," the word usually translated "giant," likely means something like "devourer," and many/most jotnar are associated with primal worldly or cosmic powers, rawer and more dangerous than those wielded by the Gods, but sources of wisdom and strength nonetheless. "Thjazi," means something like "Slave-Binder," which is a pretty great name for Death (especially if you happen to be an Iron Maiden fan). But where does she get this? Well, for one thing, though eagles sometimes carry the symbolic meaning of "majestic, proud bird, royalty of the air" that you see in other cultures, in Norse culture, the eagle is also seen as another eater of the dead, like crows and ravens. Also, eagles are often associated with "winds," such as the eagle Hraesvelgr ("Corpse Swallower"), who is the source of all winds in the cosmos, and Kvilhaug argues that wind is a symbol for death, and "windless" or "wind-shielded" are used to indicate deathlessness. I find all of this plausible, but on the wind = death bit, I really wish she was more clear if that's her own interpretation, commonly accepted among scholars, one guy's theory from way back, or what. Anyway, this is a place where I think Kvilhaug's penchant for equating figures actually helps a great deal - she believes that Hraesvelgr, the otherwise unnamed eagle who sits in Yggdrasill, and Thjazi are all one and the same, and all of them are manifestations of Death. One really interesting thread I have not yet been able to satisfactorily track down, though, is that if you go with the theory that Thjazi is Death, then what you have is Death kidnapping a Goddess and the divine order being thrown into disarray because of it until She is brought back - which makes me think of Hades and Persephone. What's really interesting about this potential parallel is that the Hades-Persephone myth was the central myth of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which purportedly granted its initiates some kind of relief from the typically not-great fate after death, and in this Norse myth, the Goddess taken is explicitly linked with immortality. That gets my comparative myth knickers all in a twist with implications, but again, I haven't been able to follow this up in the depth I'd like to one day.

One of Kvilhaug's recurring points, discussed in the previous chapter, is the frequent appearance of a pair made up of a shining, beautiful Goddess and an Ogress. The shining Goddess is always beautiful, linked with knowledge and initiation and immortality, whereas the ogress is often (but not always) hideous, knows great and terrible secrets, and is linked with death and obliteration. The most dramatic example is Hel, where the two halves are literally united in one person. Kvilhaug, rolling the way she does, believes all of these examples are just manifestations of the same pair of light and dark divine femininity, and thinks Hel is maybe the "truest" expression. I don't know if I go that far, but it is certainly an important pattern, and Kvilhaug points to Idhunn and Skadhi as one such pair. Skadhi's name means something like "injury," and She is a fierce Goddess of skiing and hunting and the like, so she likely can be seen as the death that's waiting for you out in the wilderness when you push a little too hard and end up with a broken ankle at the bottom of a ravine. Kvilhaug points out how Idhunn basically stops being part of the story the moment Skadhi comes on, and says this indicates they were two sides of the same coin. I'm not totally convinced, but I think it's a very interesting line of thinking, especially when you look at everything else that happens with Skadhi - she marries into the Aesir, her marriage to Njordh is not great, as He's a beach guy and She's a mountain chick (to over simplify), and according to some traditions, She ends up having a baby with Odhinn who becomes the start of the Norwegian royal line.

One idea of Kvilhaug's I found especially intriguing in this regard is that the ogress has the great and powerful secret knowledge, but it is the maiden's job to help the seeker remember it, with the mead and all that that we talked about last time. As I said there, a thought that has been stuck in my head is putting together Kvilhaug's interpretation with my current understanding of how the spiritual path works. I am working my way through traditions that hold that we reincarnate countless times, and that most of what we think of as our "identity" can be called the "personality" - the set of habits of thought, behavior, emotion, and so forth that make you the exact person you are in this incarnation. These traditions teach, though, that our personality is temporary and not that important. Rather, what persists from life to life is our individuality - this is our truest and highest self, it carries the character developed by karma from life to life, and the main goal of spiritual practice is to get more in touch with it and less enthralled to our personality. Between lives, all of this is clear, as we process what just happened in our last life and incorporate its lessons into our individuality, but then as we sink back into incarnation, it's a bit like drifting off to sleep. One metaphor from these traditions is that your personality is the dream your individuality is having for the length of this incarnation.

Okay, so let's put these two ideas together. As we've seen, the Norse myths place a great emphasis on "memory," and especially memory of divine wisdom, often gained through an initiatory act, dangerous quest, or with the help of a spiritual helper. Our current example is the pattern of a seeker asking a dangerous and scary ogress for knowledge about the world, which She has, and which is useful, but just knowing it seems not to be enough. The maiden who helps him to "remember" is a key part of the process. I wonder if what might be happening here is a description of a spiritual process by which useful divine wisdom is learned, and then made a part of the individuality, and the person is prepared to "come back to" the individuality more and more readily. I certainly don't have anything other than intellectual, bookish speculation, but it strikes me as worth meditating on more!

Another interesting wrinkle to the story of Idhunn's abduction as we have it is the amount of "shamanic" stuff that turns up in it. As I think I mentioned in an earlier post, this is an area of inquiry into Norse myth and religion that I think is very much worth looking into, but has some issues. First off, the reason for promise. The folks who lived or live on the fringes of the arctic circle (sometimes called "circumpolar") have certain broad cultural similarities. How much of that is due to similar environment, borrowing from each other, or common ancestry is a topic of much debate, so for now, let's just take as a premise "their cultures have certain similarities." One of those widely-seen similarities is the practice of something that got labeled in the late 19th or early 20th century "shamanism," due to the word for it in the tongue of one of these folk groups in Siberia, as filtered through Russian. Without going too much into what these practices are, various ethnologists of the 19th and 20th century noticed that they were not only similar among the circumpolar group, but that many practices of indigenous folks around the world (especially North and South America) looked pretty similar. The recognition of those similarities led in the late 20th century and the 21st century so far to a lot of alternative spirituality types talking about "shamanism" as a hip and trendy set of practices, sometimes with psychedelics, sometimes without. All of this is to say that any digging into hints of "shamanic" practices or beliefs in the Norse lore could be a lot of different things.

With all of that out of the way, I think it is almost certain that the beliefs and practices of the circumpolar peoples influenced the Norse and their lore - they were close neighbors for thousands of years, and in the historical period, we have stories of indigenous folks being sought out for their particular wisdom or magic. Anyhow, the relevance for this myth is that Kvilhaug claims that it follows the overall pattern of a shamanic "soul retrieval." One of the beliefs/practices common among the circumpolar folks is that someone's soul (or one of their souls, or part of their soul) can be lost or taken by hostile spiritual forces. This causes a slow, wasting sickness. The shaman is brought in to make a journey through spiritual realms to find the soul and bring it back, healing the patient. There are some elements in the story that suggest Idhunn plays the role of "soul" and the wasting sickness is obviously the aging felt by the Gods. The first maybe-clue is the stick that Loki tries to hit Thjazi with - a staff or stick was often used by shamans to create a repetitive beat to induce altered states of consciousness for spiritual journeys. Loki is then taken on a journey of a kind, one that he can't seem to stop (a bad trip?). Thjazi's realm Thrymheim might mean something like "the land of drumming" - again, drums were a common tool of circumpolar shamans. The shape shifting into animals is another trait of how shamans described what happened on spiritual journeys. All of which is to say, it's an interesting hypothesis, and at least plausible, but I'm not sure where else to go with it.

In this chapter, Kvilhaug also gives a quick refresher on her idea of "formulae" that we talked about back in the introduction, and she is helpfully specific. Kvilhaug argues that when you see a pair of figures in a myth, one masculine, the other feminine, the masculine figure represents the obvious, clear, outward expression or cause of something, whereas the feminine figure embodies the obscure, hidden, inner expression or cause. Further, the nature of the relationship between the masculine and feminine figure tells you something: if it's a husband and wife, then it's usually a pair of different, but complementary concepts or forces. If a brother and sister, concepts or forces that are seen as two sides of the same coin. If a one-time liaison, then it implies they are somewhat complementary, but maybe not wholly balanced. Significantly here, a daughter represents the hidden, non-obvious results of the father's obvious actions. You could also look at Loki's obvious, outward actions (stealing Idhunn) and Idhunn as the hidden cost (the aging). None of this is that shocking to anyone who's ever read any Jung, but Kvilhaug states it in a helpful and straightforward way here, and for all the ragging I do on her, I try to give full credit where she truly is helpful and insightful.

Okay, as I mentioned above, this is the bit of this chapter that has me thrown off. Kvilhaug argues that Idhunn should be seen as the shared, collective "soul of the Gods," Her loss as equivalent to a man losing his soul, and Her retrieval akin to a shamanic soul retrieval, as discussed above. I think she makes a compelling enough case, I don't have a problem with this interpretation, I just don't really understand it.

First off, let's take this at face value: the Gods are distinct beings, but they share "a soul" in the shape of Idhunn. What the heck does that mean? What is a shared soul? Is it but one soul among many, one part of the soul, or what? Whatever it is, what do we mean to say She is a "soul" that is "shared" by all of the Gods, other than that to lose Her will make Them grow old?

Secondly, and maybe even harder to understand, is how does this interpretation interact with her pantheistic beliefs? My understanding of Kvilhaug's pantheism is that she believes there is a vast, undifferentiated divinity that touches (or is?) all things. The various Gods, Goddesses, and other beings are aspects, manifestations of that unified godhead - maybe more akin to masks or costumes than to "separate" beings. This is why she sees "the same" God or Goddess in different tales with different names - she thinks they are merely functionally similar manifestations of the same less-personal divinity. At least, that's my understanding so far. Well, if that's the case, then what does it mean for these masks to "have a soul?" Wouldn't the soul just be another aspect of the same pantheistic godhead? Here, it's less weird for the masks to share something (they're all manifestations of the same underlying divinity, right?), but I don't get what calling that something a "soul" even means.

Really, this is not rhetorical - I'm scratching my head here. If you have some thoughts on how to get this through my thick head, I'd be much obliged.

Kvilhaug uses one section to talk about one of Loki's rather interesting titles: the "Mover of Stories." She points out that this implies that the skalds of yore fully understood what he was doing in the tales where he was involved - turning them into interesting stories, making "something" happen. To that point, I agree with her. Where she maybe goes a bit far, is to put this together with the lack of evidence for historical worship of Loki (no place names with his name, no inscriptions, no statues or amulets, written accounts, and so forth) to argue that Loki was purely a literary invention of the skalds to make for some interesting stories. As we've talked about, I'm generally skeptical of her tendency to see any "characters" in the lore as "purely literary invention," and she's perfectly willing to make that assumption, because she sees all of the Gods and Goddesses as just aspects of a pantheistic godhead anyway. I'm not so sure. Worship of Loki is a controversial topic in modern heathenry. Many cite the lack of evidence for worship along with the seemingly clear arc from "friend of the Gods" to "harbinger of the end times" to say that He is clearly an evil figure and not fit for worship. Others say that's just reading too much of the Christian devil into Him. Still others say hey, that's a good point, maybe He was a later addition by Christian-influenced folks, and so you shouldn't worship Him for that reason either. On the other hand, folks who do worship Loki point out that the absence of evidence is not necessarily the evidence of absence. They also point to his central role in some very important myths and draw comparisons with "trickster" figures in the beliefs of other cultures. For myself, worship of Loki is not currently part of my practice, mostly because I've heard that folks who do worship Him often end up acting like jerks, and because I haven't sorted out what to make of Him and His role in the lore. That being said, I think treating Him with disrespect is likely unwise, and I remain open to seeing where my practice takes me. If nothing else, I think the thought that He is "just" a literary figure is likely wrong.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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Two of my favorite, but very different takes on slack come from John Michael Greer and Zvi Mowshowitz. One thing I like about these two, is they both do a pretty good job of defining what is inherently a nebulous topic, usually better illustrated through examples than crisp definitions, but they both get pretty close. To smash together a few points Greer made in his post, slack is the condition of not going all out all the time, which means it is resilience, which means it is the opposite of efficiency. What I especially like about Greer's definition is the way it points out that two "good" things can still be at odds, even be literal opposites of each other. Mowshowitz, being a Rationalist, gets even further in a crisp, verbal, declarative-knowledge definition of something that might be better explored through allusion, metaphor, and gnosis. His definition is: "The absence of binding constraints on behavior." Now, despite the ribbing in my last sentence, this is a very good definition that has more to it than it might first appear. For, after all, "constraints on behavior" can take the form of resources, relationships, obligations, or even moral codes. In a twisted way, you might say the psychopath has a certain amount of slack not available to the psychologically normal.

I bring up this rather distasteful example to make a wider point - doing what you want has several variables that go into it: can you do what you want? will you do what you want? what do you actually want? All of these variables can be tweaked to get more slack - increase your capabilities, increase your willpower, and get clearer on what you want and spend more time on that than on other stuff. If you have a job that you feel is stealing your slack, well, you can 1. quit your job, 2. try to figure out what about your job could make slack rather than steal it, 3. quit trying so hard and see if you find slack that way, or any other number of other options. That's part of what makes slack such a valuable thought - it's specific enough to guide behavior, but open-ended enough to allow some flexibility (fittingly enough). What is perhaps most important to think about is how slack is personal. What gives you slack might stress me out, and even worse, what gives me slack in one situation might not in another.

Now, this is a bit of terminology I came up with on my own. If we can think of slack, then it makes sense to think about the opposite: hassle. Anything that takes your slack is hassle. So, anything that puts a constraint on your behavior, anything that stops you from doing what you want, that's hassle. Again, notice that hassle is very personal - work that I find stultifying might be enriching for you. Work that at one time I might not sweat, at another time might stop me from doing what I truly need to do. What's even worse is that work that might be good for you could be hassle if you have already said "yes" to too much work - helping at the food bank, or teaching at a local school, or working a shift at a business you care about might individually be good for you, even supportive of slack, but maybe all three would be hassle. Again, moral or cultural or conventional views of what you should do and not do could also be hassle, if you don't really agree with them.

Now, if you've been following along, you might be asking "isn't 'slack' just the same kinda thing as Nassim Taleb's 'antifragility?'" There are some definite overlaps, and in Skin in the Game, Taleb dives into some of the more moral aspects of his view of uncertainty, which gets a little closer to what slack is doing. But altogether, one of the things the Book of the Subgenius nails, that is hard to get from outside descriptions of slack, is that this is an actual, desirable, metaphysical quality. Now sure, the Book of the Subgenius conveys this through ridiculous jokes and exaggerations and short-of-breath monologues, but it does do a very good job of getting the point across. I mentioned above that the Church of the Subgenius is a very weird example of something that is at once satire and something serious. I think the main way they pull this off is by gleefully ignoring logical coherency in favor of aesthetic coherency. The fact that part of the aesthetic is contradiction and madness somehow paradoxically adds to the coherency. It's wild. The point is that slack is not merely the ability to rationally do what you want to achieve concrete ends in the real world. It is the feeling that what you want matters, whatever else the society around you says. It is the willingness to cast aside very serious obligations because they do not actually serve what you want or need. Heck, slack is both working you keister off on your own start up idea or checking out at your corporate job and doing the bare minimum not to get fired. At its heart, slack is a joyful embrace of the worth, sacredness, and autonomy of the individual, expressed in the crassest and most ridiculous ways available.

I have one more thought on slack that's even more out-there than what I've shared so far. At one point after getting out of the Army, my wife asked me what it was like and what I missed. She knew that I had been mostly miserable for the last few years of my term of service, and that I was no fan of the Army generally speaking, but she also knew that I had expressed some positive thoughts every once in a while. One way I tried putting it was that I "liked being a soldier" but "hated being in the Army," which was my attempt to explain that I liked the skills capabilities I was required to learn, but not so much the career bureaucracy that came with them. But one night, on a walk through her mom's neighborhood on a pleasant San Antonio evening, I had an insight. What I truly missed was a sense of ease. I tried to explain to her what I meant by ease - I felt reassured that whatever I did, I'd be okay, that whatever trouble I got into, someone had my back, that whatever I put my mind to, I'd have some kind of good outcome. In spelling this out, I realized that what had given me this feeling was a combination of being in the best shape of my life, being as competent as I've ever been in shooting and hand-to-hand fighting, and perhaps most importantly, being a part of an extremely tight-knit gang called a platoon. If you're not familiar with the military, a platoon is a formation about 30-50 soldiers strong, led by a Platoon Leader (2nd Lieutenant, the most-junior rank of Commissioned officer in the Army) and advised by his Platoon Sergeant (an enlisted soldier with 15-20 years of experience, usually). The point is, day-to-day, your platoon is the group of guys you do everything with - going to the range? You shoot with your platoon. Doing exercises? You maneuver with your platoon. Cleaning bathrooms? You clean with your platoon. Sitting around smoking and joking? You sit around with your platoon. The point is that as a soldier, you have a multiply-reinforced relationship with your platoon. Now, I don't know about other specialties or units, but in an infantry platoon in the 82nd Airborne circa 2010-2012, there was certain, how do you say, character, to this grouping. Paratrooper are raised on a mythology of scrappy self-reliance, fighting spirit, and individual initiative. When you find yourself surrounded by 30-40 guys who have all drank deeply from this well, you discover that you are more than yourself. Sure, you might be fit, and dangerous, and willing to fight, but you're just some guy. A few dozen of your best friends, though, and now you've got something to reckon with. Now, it's not like I was ever in a bar fight with my platoon buddies backing me up. But I always knew that if it happened, they were there.

So what does this have to do with slack, which seems so peaceful? Well, being afraid of the violence someone might do to you is a constraint on your behavior, right? And removing that fear would remove a constraint, wouldn't it? The thing is, if you don't want to be delusional, to remove your fear of someone else's violence, you need to be able to offer your own violence, and group violence is waaay more effective than individual. What all of this means is that hardass military discipline is, paradoxically, a route to slack. Maybe not the only way, and maybe not the most effective way (remember circumstances!), but it's an aspect that I think often gets left out, since violence is distasteful and somewhat antithetical to what slack seems to be about. But if our goal is to truly have the most slack we might, we care naught for what slack 'seems' to be, and instead look to cultivate what will truly bring the most slack - even if that means finding a few dozen of your closest friends and getting good at hurting folks.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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• The Seed of Yggdrasill - Overall Rundown
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 1 - Introduction and the Books of Old
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 2 - Creation, Cosmos, and the Ruling Powers
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 3 - The Maiden with the Mead - You Are Here
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 4 - Retrieving the Soul of the Gods
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 5 - The Loss of the Golden Age in Old Norse Myth
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 6 - Ragnarok and the New Age
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 7 - Death and Resurrection
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 8 - The Way of the Wand Witch
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 9 - The Priestess and the King
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 10 - The Wise Man's Path
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 11 - The Trials of Thorr
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 12 - The One and the Many and Epilogue

In this chapter, Kvilhaug shows that when she has a fairly well-defined topic, her tendency to draw in far-flung comparisons and links proves itself insightful and helpful, rather than confusingly scattered. It might also be that she comes off as more coherent here since she's building on the work she did for her master's thesis, so this is already a well-developed body of thought for her, and one which was subject to the supervision of an advisor. At any rate, though I still found plenty to write down here (for those keeping score at home, the backs of ten 4x6 notecards), it was a lot easier to keep the main thread of what this chapter was about in mind. It likely also helped that it was half the length of the last chapter. All that being said, let's see what Kvilhaug has to tell us about the Maiden and her Mead.

This was the topic of Kvilhaug's Master's Thesis, and it's the core idea in this chapter. In fact, most of the chapter is just giving examples of the pattern to point out variations and show how widespread it is. Maria's framework for this initiatory pattern has five stages: 1. Vision Quest, 2. Vision, 3. Descent, 4. Trials, and 5. Consecration. The vision quest typically involves engaging in some ecstatic techniques like fasting and ordeal, the vision brings some kind of knowledge or insight, the descent is into an otherworld, usually the land of the dead, the trials often involve proving eloquence and knowledge to a male giant related to the mead woman, and lastly, consecration is when the woman serves the hero mead and usually "embraces" him (if you catch my meaning). Not every example follows this pattern exactly, but it seems like a reasonable analysis to me. If nothing else, you can say that there's a recurring motif of a hero journeying somewhere, facing some challenges, and then being served magical mead of some kind by a maiden. Kvilhaug argues that this pattern represents the mythic grounding for real-life initiation rituals seeking esoteric knowledge.

Kvilhaug spends a chunk of this chapter discussing the archaeological and historical evidence for women serving mead in ritual contexts, which I found somewhat perplexing at first. Once I read through that bit, though, it became clear to me that what she was doing was trying to prove the plausibility of her theory that the myths give some kind of insight into real-life Heathen religious practice. The reason I found that surprising is because I find that claim fairly obvious, but then, I've been using myths as the basis for religious practice for the past few years, so maybe it's not as obvious to others as it is to me. Anyhow, the short version is that there were definitely important social and cultural rituals that featured women serving an alcoholic beverage to men. What the religious dimension of these rituals was is harder to say for certain, but it seems pretty clear that something was there. At any rate, Kvilhaug briefly references Michael Enright's excellent Lady with a Mead Cup, which goes into great depth on the role of first divinatory priestesses and later the Lord's wife in the Celtic and Germanic warband culture that arose as the Roman empire collapsed and eventually grew into the medieval social organization.

Okay, so we're all on board with the idea that myths can tell us about religious practice, and that a recurring pattern is likely something important? So, what does Kvilhaug's pattern help us see? Well, first off, that there are a lot of these stories. Most folks who know anything about Norse lore at all have heard of Odin giving an eye to drink from the Well of Wisdom, and he brought back the mead of poetry, but it turns out those are far from the only stories about a magical drink. Apparently, Kvilhaug's thesis does more to step through the five stages identified above and demonstrate where they can be found in various myths, whereas this chapter focuses on the woman herself. In these tales, the woman is almost invariably described as some variation of "shining," is usually beautiful, and often rules some lands or folk. On the other hand, there is also often a counterpart, an ugly, fearful "ogress" associated with death, fetters, and darkness. Kvilhaug argues that these two female figures are like two sides of the same coin, the most extreme example being Hel, Goddess of the land of the dead, who is literally half bright and beautiful and half dark and dead. Interestingly, the esoteric knowledge sought by the hero is often given by the ogress, but it is the bright maiden who allows him to remember it.

Memory seems to be an extremely important thread in Germanish lore. Mimir, whose name likely means "memory" owns one of the wells from which the world tree draws its sustenance. That very tree is sometimes called "Mimir's Tree." When Mimir's head is cut off by the Vanir, Odin preserves it and consults it for wisdom. Speaking of Odin, His two ravens are named "Thought" and "Memory," and He says that though He fears losing both of them, He fears losing Memory more. Throughout the tales that Kvilhaug goes through in this chapter, the element of memory comes up again and again. The crucial moment in Svipdagsmal is when the titular character remembers his true name and past relationship with the maiden he seeks. This is an aspect of the lore that I want to dive more deeply into, but the ability to remember seems to be a key spiritual power sought by Gods and men alike.

I know I've harped on this before, but in this chapter, Kvilhaug explicitly argues for equating many (all?) of the "mead women" from these tales. In some cases, she gives interesting arguments for why two (or more) characters might be interpreted as the same Being called by different names, and obviously there is some of that going on in nickname and metaphor-heavy Norse poetry. Still, Kvilhaug seems to use a fairly monist view on things where ideas like "separate identities" for different deities are "more fluid" than we're used to these days, and the distinctions don't really matter, because they're all emanations of the same divinity anyway. Personally, I find this a little too neat for the messy world we actually live in. As I've said before, I'm working my way through a course of study that posits an essentially Neoplatonist view of Being, where there is a "One" that is the source of all life and consciousness, and in some important sense, everything that is is just a manifestation or aspect of that One. On the other hand, the course I'm working through says over and over again "these views are meant to train you to think about the world in certain ways, and not to be taken as infallible statements of how the world works on faith." I've come to be suspicious of any theories or ways of understanding that too readily fit into what humans find convenient. The thought that "you know, all of these similar, but slightly different ladies must actually be different takes on the same underlying divine power" strikes me as the kind of simplification that is appealing to human reasoning - it removes the messiness of individual experience, minor variations, idiosyncratic details, and so forth, and replaces all of that with a nice, easy to understand and explain abstraction. And that's not even touching the pragmatic side of things. Let's suppose that Gerdhr, and Freyja, and Frigg, and Jordh, and Ran, and Hel truly are, in some important sense, "the same" - there is a single divine "person" that answers to all of those names. Even if that is true, then why do we have tales about the different names? And why were there different religious practices for them? Maybe it is important to use the right name for the right situation. The reason for my scare quotes and tentative language is that these are ideas that I don't know if we can properly conceptualize, and even if we can, can we ever truly know the answers? It seems like an empirical approach is all we can hope for - say the prayers, do the rituals, and see what happens. And how are we to know whether many individual, highly finnicky rituals are the right way to go, or one unified, rationalized ritual? By trying them out and seeing what happens, I suppose.

Anyhow, for what it's worth, Kvilhaug is very good at spotting parallels between myths that might suggest the same God or Goddess is being called by a different name, or alluded to obscurely. This is great! It provides wonderful fodder for bethinking (meditation). I'm just not quite ready to accept that this is the "right" interpretation, and Kvilhaug seems pretty convinced. My other complaint is that she sometimes seems so ready to spot parallels that she doesn't carefully spell out why one exists. For example, there's a passage where she's drawing a comparison between Aegir's nine daughters and a list of "nine" valkyries - except there are 13 names in the list. She doesn't address this. At all. She just says "look at this list of nine valkyries," and then talks about the significances of the names (all 13 of them). Now, am I saying she's wrong? Not necessarily - maybe some of those names are referring to the same person, and it's clear from the Old Norse grammar in a way that the translation doesn't make clear. But if so, it'd be darn helpful if she shared that. Point being, I take all of Kvilhaug's analysis as interesting and potentially helpful possibilities to ponder, and not as "this is the one true way to understand this myth."

Remember back in chapter 1, when I complained that Kvilhaug's section headers were misleading, and it seemed like comparative mythology was going to be one of her pillars, but then she said she wouldn't be using it much? Well, in this chapter, she does decide to bring it in, which I personally find interesting and helpful, even if some of it is in service of her extreme willingness to equate different characters that I find frustrating. I suspect that she brought in the comparative myth here for the same reason she got into the archaeology we talked about above - she wants to counter skepticism about her core thesis, that seeking out a maiden with a magic drink was a very important element of at least esoteric heathen religion, and that the clues to it are in the myths. Again, I don't feel as much need for evidence, as I don't find that claim that hard to swallow. Anyway, whatever her reason for including it, the comparative material is quite interesting. For my druidly leanings, her discussion of Cerridwen and Taliesen is especially interesting. From an Indo-Europeanist standpoint, her comparisons of the mead with Haoma (Zoroastrian) and Soma (Hindu), and the disir of Norse myth (a word for "female spiritual beings" that seems to have fairly wide applicability) and the dhisanas of Hindu myth are all rather interesting. This is one place where Kvilhaug does more to back up her tendency to see the unity between figures. According to her, in the Vedic texts, there are many dhisanas, female spiritual figures who help and guide people, but they are all aspects of Dhisana, the unified feminine tutelary deity. Kvilhaug points out the etymological relationship of dis and dhisana and the shared characteristics (including an association with mead/soma) and argues that all of that suggests a common proto-Indo-European source. If they had a common source, then it's not that far-fetched to posit that the Vedic motif of "manifestations of a unified divinity" might not have been an innovation, but rather retained from that ancient common source. If so, then it's not nuts to think the Germanish folk had similar beliefs about the related deities. Again, I'm not totally sure I buy it, but it's at least plausible.

Kvilhaug takes it as given that at least some of the Eddic poems, including the so-called "heroic" poems, clearly and frankly discuss reincarnation. My own understanding is that it's a bit muddier than that, especially since it seems the clearest references to reincarnation are in prose notes that stitch together poem fragments and were written by Christian compilers - stuff like "back then, they had a superstition that the dead could be reborn into a new body, but we know better now." This is one of those areas where I wish for some more careful and fully-cited scholarship from Kvilhaug - what passages are you referring to? What are the arguments for and against your interpretation? Is this commonly accepted, or a fringe view? For all the problems with modern academia, the norm of trying to give a state of the field for contentious questions is an admirable one. Anyhow, let's set aside for a moment the strength of the textual or archaeological/historical evidence that the elder Germanish folk believed that a soul could come back into a new life (we'll also set aside which souls we're talking about, since the elder heathens believed that each of us had many). If we do that, two questions come to mind: 1. why might we suppose a belief in reincarnation is a reasonable hypothesis? and 2. if we accept that hypothesis, what do the texts then say to us?

For the first question, I would point out that some flavor of metempsychosis seems to have been very widespread across many different ancient cultures. Sometimes only part of the "self" was believed to come back, and in others only some folks reincarnated, while others did not. I was shocked that when I finally (ahem, 2022) read all of Plato's Republic, I discovered that it ends with a detailed description of the process of reincarnation, told as if it's an eyewitness account. When I went looking for articles on the subject, it was funny, but also a bit sad, that all of these scholars were tying themselves in knots over "what could Plato have possibly meant by this weird section?" and not a one of them stopped to consider "maybe Plato/Socrates thought this was actually how things worked and it would be good to know." Pythagoras, the druids, certain Egyptians - lots of ancient folks outside of the Hindu/Buddhist sphere believed that after death, something of the self came back into new life, here in this world.

For the second, things start to get really interesting. Kvilhaug reads the sequence of heroic poems as the tale of a single reincarnating person learning what he needs to in order to reach enlightenment. The contrast between shades in Hell and bright, hearty warriors in Valhalla. The meaning of being born with your own norn and orlaeg (karma?). All of these take on very interesting implications if paired with a belief in reincarnation. Perhaps most interesting to me is the emphasis on "memory." Might it be that the reason memory was so valued in the myths was that a memory of your persistent individuality, rather than your transient personality, was the goal of esoteric spiritual work? To me, this seems to give a whole host of helpful bethinking threads, but whether it's "really how things are" is a question I'll have to stay quiet on for now.

As I mentioned in the opening, I think that the fairly constrained topic of this chapter was a boon for Kvilhaug. She got to fare far and wide with her references and comparisons, but they always came back to this central idea of a maiden with magical mead, which gave everything a coherence and relevance that it has, at times, been harder to find in Kvilhaug's work. If the rest of the book works more like this - a fairly tight, coherent topic, with a lot of speculation around it - then I'll be quite happy. If not, well, I'm sure it will still be helpful nonetheless.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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By Thunor's (touch forehead)
Mighty (touch solar plexus)
Hallowing (touch left shoulder)
Hammer (touch right shoulder)

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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• The Seed of Yggdrasill - Overall Rundown
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 1 - Introduction and the Books of Old
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 2 - Creation, Cosmos, and the Ruling Powers - You Are Here
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 3 - The Maiden with the Mead
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 4 - Retrieving the Soul of the Gods
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 5 - The Loss of the Golden Age in Old Norse Myth
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 6 - Ragnarok and the New Age
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 7 - Death and Resurrection
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 8 - The Way of the Wand Witch
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 9 - The Priestess and the King
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 10 - The Wise Man's Path
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 11 - The Trials of Thorr
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 12 - The One and the Many and Epilogue

A quick word on spelling: since I am a lazy typist, I will not be using vowels with any diacritics in this post, nor will I use the letters eth and thorn. Instead, I will use plain vowels, for thorn I will write "th" and for eth I will write "dh." I will also try to write the Old Norse nominative form, even when the word is technically genitive in the sentence (like "Odhinn's"), since it doesn't make sense to me to partially decline nouns in a language I don't know! However, I maybe a bit inconsistent about this, so please bear with me.

Whoo boy, this was a looong chapter - 145 pages. This chapter was as long as her whole book Idhunn in Myth and Poetry. So that's why it's taken me a while to get this posted after our nice, bite-sized chapter 1. Looking forward, the next-longest chapter is about half that. I filled up 16 4x6 index cards (one side) with notes! At any rate, I think the reason this one is so long is that it lays a lot of groundwork she'll be referring back to as the book goes on. As you might guess from the name, it focuses on the creation of the cosmos, mostly as told in Voluspa, but it ranges fairly widely from there. As I mentioned in my last post on this book, organization and structure are not exactly Kvilhaug's strong suit, which was somewhat frustrating. While reading this chapter, I often found myself wishing it had instead been written as a stanza-by-stanza commentary on Voluspa, since that would have given it a firm skeleton to flesh out. As it is, the chapter very roughly proceeds from "In the beginning" to the world as it is/was for the audience of Voluspa. On the other hand, Kvilhaug takes the lore seriously and does a lot to highlight what is deep and spiritually significant in it, so it was worth it to wade through.

So, if you didn't already know, Voluspa is arguably the single most important Eddic poem, certainly the one that gives the clearest understanding of elder take on cosmology. Its name means "The speech of the volva ('witch/seeress')." Odhinn calls this volva back from the dead to learn what she has to say, and most of the poem is her telling what she knows.

Kvilhaug dives right into things by giving a detailed analysis of the first words of her speech: Ár var alda. This is apparently a stock phrase that came to mean more or less "once upon a time." It's usually translated as something like "Of old was the age" or "it was at the very beginning" or "in earliest times." Kvilhaug argues that these are misunderstandings and lays out her case that it actually says "before was wave," and thus he preferred translation is "In the beginning was the wave." She connects this idea with the sea giant Aegir and his daughters the waves (more on this in a minute). She believes that Aegir and his wife Ran represent the mother and father of the cosmos. This is also one of the places where she brings up potentially intriguing parallels with modern science, in this case something about the big bang and vortices. Mostly I find such discussions somewhere between unhelpful and annoying amongst spiritual matters - to me it smacks of trying to borrow legitimacy from science for something that ought to be given legitimacy on its own merits.

Anyhow, remember how I mentioned that this cosmological poem is the speech of the seeress? Well, who is this seeress anyway? We don't truly know, but she says that she "remembers" all of the things from the beginning that she tells of. Kvilhaug offers several possibilities: Freyja, Ran, Jordh, maybe even Audhumbla, the cosmic cow that freed Odhinn's grandfather Buri from the ice. This gets us to one of my critiques of Kvilhaug's approach that I touched on in the first post of this series: she tends to look at figures in the poems mostly as metaphors and symbols meant to convey esoteric spiritual insights. Now, that alone I don't have a problem with - in fact, I find it very helpful. Rather, when you put that together with her pantheist viewpoint, that all of these figures are manifestations of the same underlying spiritual unity, you get a tendency to speculate that two (or three, or more) figures from the lore are "the same." She has a point that the Old Norse lore is full of roundabout ways of talking about things - again, as we said last time, that was one of the main points of that kind of poetry. That means that sometimes, yes, one figure is the same as another (for example, I find the equation of Gullveig and Freyja convincing), but I think Kvilhaug is a bit too cavalier about it.

This tendency to equate figures gets into some wider issues in heathenry. The first is what is sometimes called "soft vs hard polytheism." I found this discussion by Ocean Keltoi helpful for laying out this debate. Basically, at the extreme ends, "hard" polytheists treat each distinct divine name as a different Being - Odhinn is not the same as Woden is not the same as Wotan. "Soft" polytheists (well, using the definition from the video) believe the opposite: Odhinn, Woden, and Wotan are in some sense "the same." Different soft polytheists take this to different extremes - some say that Mars is the same as Tiw, due to the intepretatio Romana of the German Gods (see the days of the week). At the extreme end, you have pantheists who believe that all of the names refer to different experiences of the same, single divine reality. Now, heathens decide how soft or hard to make their polytheism based on some combination of gnosis and episteme. On the episteme side of things, you have folks study the lore, look for commonalities and distinctions between Gods and decide logically whether they're the same or different. Often, this is informed by archaeological evidence, comparative mythology, and other sources. Broadly, this is called "reconstruction," and all modern revivals of pre-Christian religions engages in it to some degree, but some folks put much more emphasis on "getting it the way it was back then." This gets into the contrast between authenticity and validity we talked about. In the heathen community, broadly speaking, the stricter the reconstructionist, the harder the polytheism. Gnosis, on the other hand, is all about personal experience, and by its nature can't be verified or confirmed by others. Again, everyone who takes religion seriously uses gnosis to some degree - what feels right, which Gods to pray to more or less, how to word those prayers, and so forth. Again, to speak very broadly, the more folks lean on gnosis, the more likely their beliefs and practices are quirkier. Since pantheism doesn't seem to be attested in the surviving lore, at least not straightforwardly, its looked at as quirkier by many heathens.

I guess a word about my own beliefs is in order to give some context for my comments. As I learned from Revival Druidry, I try to focus more on what I do than on what I believe. That being said, I have some working hypotheses based on the spiritual traditions I have found helpful and nourishing so far. The Druid tradition I am working with currently teaches what is basically a flavor of Neoplatonist metaphysics - everything that exists is a manifestation of a unified ground of being. In some sense this is "pantheist," but the key distinction is that this "One" is not personified - personhood shows up at lower levels of manifestation. Those distinct manifestations matter - in some sense, every river, lake, and sea is "the same water" - but if you think it doesn't make a difference whether you're on Lake Erie, going over Niagara Falls, or in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence during a storm, you're gonna have a bad time. I think manifestation is something like this - in some sense, the unity of all things is a deep and important truth, but the different manifestations are an essential part of being here and now, and ignoring or denying them is a mistake. All of which is to say that I think in some sense Odhinn and Freyja and Ymir and all the rest are manifestations of a spiritual unity, but they are also genuinely different Beings. Again, some different names apply to the same Being (Odhinn, Vili, and Ve are likely the same as at least one of the other groups of three Gods - most likely Odhinn, Hoenir, and Lodhurr), but due to my own tendency to rationalize things and some of my own gnosis, I have adopted a rule to assume that Gods, wights, and other spiritual beings with distinct names, traditions, and so forth are different until proven the same. For example, back when I thought all this stuff was "just archetypes," I was intellectually convinced by the argument that Frigg and Freyja were once the same Goddess and at some fairly late point they had diverged into being treated as two Goddesses. Since there was no evidence of this divergence in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, when I started worshiping for real, I assumed that what the Norse call "Freyja" and "Frigg" were just different aspects of the same Goddess, and I prayed as such. Well, before too long, I got a pretty distinct feeling that I was doing it wrong and I should instead pray to two different Goddesses, and that has seemed to go better for me. So, are They "really" different Goddesses? Have They always been? I don't know! I just know what works for my practice. Anyway, all of that is to say that I think Kvilhaug is a little too ready to assert that two Gods are "the same" and pays more attention to possible similarities, shared identities, and parallels than to distinctions.

Now, let's get back to how the cosmos came to be. The first Being to arise in this cosmos is Ymir. Kvilhaug gives his name as "shout" or "noise," which wiktionary says is a folk etymology - it seems the accepted scholarly etymology takes it back to the Proto-Indo-European word for "twin," which is at least a little bit based on comparative mythology, as it seems the myth of a being getting killed having its body used to make the world seems to go way back, and the earliest version might have involved a twin getting killed by his brother. Anyway, Kvilhaug makes much of Ymir as sound, and the idea of "cutting up" sound into small bits as an act of creation is intriguing - what do you think words are? Even if that etymology is not right, Kvilhaug would likely counter that Norse poetry is full of puns, not always for comedic effect, so Ymir "sounding like" it should mean something to do with sound might very well have been the poet's intent, even if that's not truly where the name came from.

The other first Being spoken of is Audhumbla, a cow. She licks the ice of Niflheim for her sustenance and makes milk that Ymir lives on. There's some indication that Ymir was hermaphroditic (he begets the race of frost giants all by himself), but we have here the first pair of a masculine Being and a feminine one, which you'll remember from part 1 is an important symbolic dimension in Kvilhaug's analysis. Women seem to represent the hidden causes of things, that which acts but can't be seen. Men represent the obvious, overt causes of things. This is also the first instance where we see a feminine figure associated with a life-giving liquid, which is what you might call a recurring theme in the poetry (in case you missed it, that's wry understatement, folks). One bit of Kvilhaug's analysis I very much appreciate is how she points out recurrent themes or motifs, and the central role such recurrence plays in the creation story. One way of reading the Voluspa, which Kvilhaug makes use of and I agree is helpful, is as a series of iterations playing out at different scales. You have the first, primal interaction of hot, alive, moving and cold, dead, still where Niflheim and Muspelheim interact, but then you have the same dynamic seen in the first Beings, the first Gods, the first man and woman, and so forth. Oh, and besides the milk that she makes, Kvilhaug also translates Audhumbla's name as "Abundant Brew Ingredient" - another link with holy and/or life-giving drink.

Kvilhaug even takes this iteration a step further, in a concept almost certainly inspired by her study of Hindu myth, where she states that our cosmos is not the first, but rather follows on the heels of many (nine, according to some of the poems). When I first heard her make this claim, I thought it was interesting but likely highly speculative. Having read more of her arguments, I'm finding it a lot more plausible than I did at first. While she brings in many bits and pieces of evidence scattered around various myths, let me share what I think are the most compelling ones. First, the volva herself was around, but possibly already dead, when the first deeds of creation happened. Maybe she was a spirit from the previous world? Speaking of which, one of the first two worlds, Niflheim, is also the realm of the dead. Kvilhaug asserts that it is the realm of the dead left over from the previous cosmos - and so brings with it at least one of its spirits (the volva). Also intriguing is Buri, the ancestor of the Aesir, who is uncovered within the ice by Audhumbla's licking. Kvilhaug translates his name as "storage chest" and posits that he is the surviving but dormant seed of consciousness from the previous cosmos. This is not so crazy when we look forward to the description of Ragnarok, which tells of a rebirth under new Gods after the end of this world as we know it. Lastly, a major focus for Kvilhaug is Heimdall, and here she points to his 9 mothers. She believes that Heimdall means "Great World" and that he is the personification of this iteration of the cosmos, and his 9 mothers are feminine spirit of the 9 previous cosmoi. I'm not wholly convinced this for sure, but as I say, it's thought-stirring.

Another thought-stirring concept of Kvilhaug's that I'm still sitting with is the role she sees for dwarves (thou shalt spell the plural "dwarves," not "dwarfs," regardless of what the Oxford English Dictionary tells you). She sees the dwarves of the Voluspa as distinct from the smiths, craftsmen, and similar characters from other tales. Those more familiar dwarves have some link (might be the same as) the dark elves, and like elves, likely have some link with the spirits of the dead and the mounds where they are buried. The Voluspa dwarves, though, don't seem to have much to do with all that. Instead, they are introduced right before the creation of man and are linked both with men and with the Gods. The list of dwarves, the dvergatal has long confused scholars, many seeing it is a later insertion, basically a scribal error by folks who didn't understand what they were copying. Maybe. But Kvilhaug says instead that the list of dwarves is saying something through the names (there they are again!). The dwarves are said to have made "the images of men," and some of the "dwarves" referred to seem like they might be other names for figures we've met elsewhere, like Ymir and Odhinn. So, what are they? Kvilhaug says that the dwarves are shapes or forms that are taken on by the infinite spiritual powers that made the cosmos so that they might act within it. The etymology of Norse dvergr (and English dwarf, for that matter) has something to do with injury or mutilation or being twisted. Kvilhaug thinks that this speaks to the limitation taken on by things like souls or pure consciousness in order to manifest in the cosmos. As I said, I'm still chewing on this one, but it's a heck of an interesting take.

Okay, I mentioned Kvilhaug's belief that Aegir and Ran, as the Giant and Giantess of the sea are somehow the mother and father of all of creation. Her thought is that they are the Gods of the "cosmic sea," the liquidy unmanifest potential in which the "waves" of creation act. She pulls in a lot of cross-references here, and again, I'm going to have to think some more on it. What's intriguing is that she suggests that Njordhr might be the same as Aegir, and thus Ran would be the same as Nerthus. Njordhr is also associated with the sea, the name of his divine abode has much in common with how Aegir's home is described, and Nerthus was also associated both with plenty and feasting as well as with drowning. Also, Aegir is said to have 9 daughters, usually thought to be the waves of the sea, and in Solarliodh, Njordhr is said to have nine daughters. Also, in Lokasenna, Loki taunts Njordhr for having the nine "Maidens of Hymir" use his mouth as a piss pot (yuck), but Njordhr responds "that's how I got my son that everybody loves (Freyr)." Given the strong associations with incestuous relationships in this family (Freyr and Freyja are sometimes said to be lovers, in Ynglinga Saga, Njordhr was said to leave his sister-wife behind when he came to live with the Aesir, and so forth), the idea that those nine maidens are his daughters and the mothers of their brother is not that far-fetched, but for me, this is still firmly in the "interesting speculation" category.

One last thought for this bit is that I wish Kvilhaug showed some familiarity with Paul Bauschatz's The Well and the Tree. She has a lot to say about fate, the Norns, and the conception of the World Tree, and it would be nice to see how she agreed or differed from him on such things. This is one of the many places where I'm realizing that the synthesis I wish I had to read likely doesn't exist, and I'm going to have to do the work myself. Hence these posts!

One of Kvilhaug's main threads, maybe the main thread, is that the Eddic poems convey esoteric, initiatory knowledge about the soul and its development. As such, she sees the creation of the cosmos as laying certain foundations and providing the earliest archetypes of certain spiritual models. First is the framing of Voluspa: a speech by a volva, someone who does the kind of magic called seidhr. Seidhr seems mostly to have been divinatory in nature, but might also have had other powers. Kvilhaug lays it out like this: seidhr is about knowing (and thus being able to change) fate. The fate of all humans is death. Therefore, the goal of seidhr must be to overcome death (in some sense, at least). Sounds easy, right? Well, Kvilhaug says that basically all of the Eddic poems are trying to get across different aspects of these secrets, along with different approaches (seidhr is not right for everyone). The very first user of seidhr was the witch Gullveig. Interestingly, Gullveig is not mentioned by Snorri, and neither is Odhinn's self-sacrifice in Havamal. Kvilhaug thinks it is because these were clearly magical, heathen initiations, and were thus more likely to draw the ire of the Church. In any case, Gullveig's name is usually translated as "Gold Thirst/Lust," and is taken to mean greed. She comes to the Aesir from the Vanir, does some magic, and then they try to kill her by stabbing and burning her. Three times they try it, and three times she comes back. Most interpretations say that she showed up, started causing strife through greed, stirred things up with her wicked magic, and otherwise instigated the Aesir-Vanir war.

Kvilhaug says this is all wrong. All that about causing trouble? Not in the poem. It's inferred from the name, which Kvilhaug thinks most scholars get wrong. Gull is clearly "gold," but the "veig" bit that is usually translated as "thirst" seems to more commonly mean "(powerful) drink." Given the very widespread association of wise, magical women with "golden drinks" in the lore, Kvilhaug thinks her name more likely means "Gold Power Drink." Most of the time that gold shows up in the poems, Kvilhaug claims, it's not associated with greed or strife (with the notable exception of the Rhine Gold, I would point out), but instead seems to be a metaphor for divine wisdom, the prize you get for following your initiatory journey. This all seems even more likely if we accept that Gullveig is likely another name for Freyja, who is said elsewhere to have brought seidhr to the Aesir, is a prominent figure in the Vanir, and comes to dwell with the Aesir, as well as being associated with magic, drinks, and initiation.

The necessary precondition for all of this initiation is, of course, consciousness, and much of Voluspa seems to be about how consciousness came into the world and found its way into different beings there. First off, the first glimmer of divine consciousness (if you don't assign it to Ymir or Audhumbla) is a remnant from the earlier cosmos - Buri being unearthed from the ice. Here, and elsewhere, whenever we come across personified consciousness, it has three qualities - Spirit, Mind/Poetry/Awe, and Passion/Frenzy/Intent. As personified by Odhinn, Vili, Ve, these shaped the whole cosmos. As personified by Odhinn, Hoenir, and Lodhurr, they created the first man and woman. So, these are somehow fundamental to what it is to be a conscious being, and we see them show up a lot - the three Gods, usually representing these three characteristics, are one of the "formulae" Kvilhaug uses as a key to her analysis. One that she pointed out that I found interesting, and assume we'll hear more about when we get to Ragnarok is how the trinity of Odhinn, Thorr, and Freyr is opposed by a male trio of monsters: Fenrir, Jormungandr, and Surtr.

Another bit that I have found interesting to consider and comes straight out of Kvilhaug's focus on translating names. Hoenir shows up in a few places that would seem to suggest he's rather important, but then he doesn't do a lot. He might be the same as Ve, in which case he helped kill Ymir and make the world. He gives one of the gifts to the first man and woman that make them more than lumps of driftwood. In Ynglinga saga, he is said to be one of the hostages sent by the Aesir to the Vanir, along with Mimir, and they're so impressed by him, they make him their king. After a time, though, they notice he needs to talk to Mimir ("memory") to decide anything and becomes indecisive without Him around. Thinking he's a fake, they kill Mimir, but Odhinn saves his head and preserves it to whisper wisdom to Him. Anyway, what does the name Hoenir mean? Kvilhaug says it's pretty clearly "chickens," but that this has seemed so undignified and nonsensical for one of the creators of the universe that scholars have tried to find all kinds of other meanings. She says, hold on, maybe it's exactly what it looks like. the gift that Hoenir gives to mankind is thought, and Kvilhaug compares the chattering, shuffling, mess of thinking with a flock of chickens - what Buddhists might call "monkey mind." If we accept that Hoenir is/is associated with "thought," then the fact that he is paired with Mimir ("memory") suggests a comparison with Odhinn's ravens Huginn ("thought") and Muninn ("Memory") - which I was embarrassed not to have thought of on my own.

Speaking of Mimir, he is sometimes said to be a giant, and there's a reasonable case to be made that he's Odhinn's maternal uncle. From Snorri and Havamal, we know that Odhinn gave an eye to get a drink of the Mead of Memory from Mimir's Well. There are a lot of places where giants or giantesses act as the gatekeeper for initiatory experiences, which seems a bit odd, since the giants are usually characterized as enemies of the Gods, and Snorri says flat out they're evil. Kvilhaug thinks this is a Christian misinterpretation, and says instead giants (and often, giantesses) are best thought of as challenges or obstacles to be overcome, and in the overcoming, you become worthy. Shani Oates puts a characteristically antagonistic spin on this in The Hanged God, where she sees Odhinn's initiation by Mimir culminating in defeating him in combat and cutting his head off himself, rather than saving it from the Vanir. I think there is definitely something here, but I also think there's something to "giants = enemies of the Gods," given how every Indo-European religion we know about has a race of (semi?) divine beings that the Gods fight (but also marry and otherwise interact with). I don't have a good answer here, but I wonder if a very close reading of the different terms that usually get translated as "giant" might reveal some patterns. Oh, and Kvilhaug says "we know that giantesses were worshiped," but she doesn't say how we know that - written records? archaeology? place names? I believe her, but I'd like to know the nature of the evidence.

I mentioned earlier how Kvilhaug sometimes tries to link the myths to science, and how mostly I think that's a waste. She does that with Thorr as the protector of his mother, Jordhr ("Earth"), which she speculates could be a reflection of knowledge of the Earth's magnetic field. She also points out his metal belt and gloves and how they could have something to do with electrical circuits. All of which didn't do much for me, but in that bit, she gave a potential interpretation for Thorr's wife Sif that I hadn't seen before. Her name just means "kinswoman" (same root as English "sib" as in "sibling"), and with her golden hair, she is often seen as the grain (especially with the story of Loki cutting it off). Kvilhaug suggests that another golden thing closely associated with thunder is, you know, lightning. I'm not sure if I buy it, or if I do, what that means, but interesting!

One area where I had enough knowledge to see some misunderstanding/sloppiness was when she talks about Runes. Now, she gets the main idea right: "Rune" means "secret," and in the lore it doesn't only mean Runestaves - letters. For example, the list of "Runes" Odhinn gives in Havamal is clearly not the letters of the Elder or Younger Futhark. But there are places where Runes are "carved," (including in Havamal), and so Runestaves are also clearly relevant. The Runes are an especial interest of mine, the first thing that drew me to magical practice of any kind, actually, so I've done a fair amount of reading, meditating, and my own work here (though there's far more to go!). So, when Kvilhaug says "folks ask me about divining with runes and I don't know anything about that," but then also goes on to quote Tacitus's description of Germans of the 1st century CE doing some kind of sortilege as if it definitely describes divining with Runes, it's a bit frustrating, and makes me wary about other places where she just asserts something is so and doesn't say what her back up for it is. If you're not familiar, Tacticus says that Germans cast lots to decide whether to pursue a course of action all the time. He describes the process in some detail: cut a branch from a fruit-bearing tree, cut that into lots, and then carve "marks" into the lots (Kvilhaug translates "marks" as "Runes," which is definitely not what the Latin said!). Were those marks Runestaves or proto-Runestaves? Maybe. Did the elder Heathens use Runestaves for some kind of divination by the Viking Age? Seems fairly likely, but we can't say for sure. Are modern methods of divination with Runestaves what folks did back then? Almost certainly not. But they work! Once again, validity versus authenticity.

The World Tree is a topic of no small interest to me, as it is central to the work I'm doing on a Heathen Rosary. I think it is one of the deepest and most important esoteric symbols in the lore, so I'm always eager to learn new ways of thinking about it. Kvilhaug especially stresses the World Tree as a macrocosm that is clearly linked with the microcosm of the human body - trees are frequent kennings for men and women, the first man and woman are made from wood, and the first man is named Askr, which means "ash (tree)." Humans are linked with and depicted as trees all over the place, so Kvilhaug thinks that characterizing the cosmos as a tree is meant to draw attention to the similarities between the individual human and the cosmos (as we said in the last bit - "as above, so below"). If you're familiar with the lore, you might have noticed that I mentioned the first man has the name of a tree, but I didn't say anything about the first woman, Embla. Her name has given folks a lot of trouble - some try to render it as an unfamiliar form of "Elm," since a matched pair of trees makes sense for all the reasons I mentioned above. On the other hand, that's apparently not altogether satisfying. Neither is trying to derive it from the Greek ampelos ("vine"). Neither, really is eim + la for "firemakeress" or amr meaning "hard work." Can you guess where Kvilhaug goes with it? That's right, she sees it as a modification of Humbla "Brew Ingredient," which we found in her translation for Audhumbla above. This fits into he general pattern of seeing masculine as the outward, shaping, organizing influence, and feminine as inner, liquid, enlivening influence. This is one (of many) cases where I wish I had the kind of deep knowledge of Old Norse and Proto-Germanic that would let me tell the difference between reasonable etymology proposals and fanciful ones. As it is, I just have to read the arguments put forth by the folks who try to work it out and see what makes most sense.

To get to the World Tree itself, Kvilhaug translates is usual name, Yggdrasill, as "Old Steed," and stresses that in some sense, the world is the "steed" of souls who enter it, carrying them along their path of incarnation and, possibly, initiation. That name is more often translated as "The Steed of the Terrible One," where Yggr "The Terrible" is taken as a heiti for Odhinn (another case where I wish I could evaluate the plausibility more on my own). It is also called the Miodhvidhr ("Mead Tree") and Mimameidhr ("Memory Tree"). Snorri gives it three roots, each drawing from a different well - Urdharbrunnr ("The Well of Wyrd/Origin"), Hvergelmir ("Yelling/Churning Boiler"), and Mimisbrunnr ("Mimir's Well"). So, from the names and the roots, we know that the Tree is linked to the magic liquid(s) important from multiple myths, as well as at least some of the qualities of mind (memory). The creatures that live in the tree give more clues to what the World Tree is about - near the top sits a huge eagle, Hraesvelgr ("Corpse Swallower"), with Falcon on his brow, Vethrfolnir ("Wind Diminisher"). Kvilhaug says over and over again that "winds" are usually a metaphor for mortality and death in the Eddic poems. I'm not sure if that's widely accepted, or a piece of her own analysis, but it seems to make good sense (a lot of divine dwelling places are called "wind-shielded" or "windless," places full of death are "windy," and stuff like this eagle-falcon pair), Niddhoggr ("Malice(?) Striker") chews on the roots, Ratatoskr (usually given as "Drill Tooth," but Kvilhaug says "moving container") carriers messages from the snake to the eagle, the stag Eikthrynir ("Oak Antlers"), and the goat Heidhrun ("Bright Rune") chew on the leaves. Kvilhaug proposes a parallel to the chakras of Tantric practice, seeing Niddhoggr as the kundalini, Hraesvelgr as the spirit, and Vethrfolnir as the third eye. I'm not sure about the tantric comparison, but the other explanations are certainly compelling. One element she stressed that I think will be worth more careful thought is that Eikthrynir and Heidhrun both chew on the leaves of the World Tree, which might represent human souls, and then release a liquid - the stag drips liquid from his antlers down into Hvergelmir, the well of the land of the dead, whereas Heidhrun makes mead for milk, which becomes the drink of Odhinn's chosen in Valholl. Kvilhaug proposes that this symbolizes how un-initiated souls fall back down into Hel (for reincarnation later), whereas those that achieve divine knowledge escape from this cycle to the immortality of Valholl. I trust there will be much more on these topics when she gets more explicitly into discussing reincarnation in later chapters.

Okay, one of the ares of Kvilhaug's thought that I struggle with the most is when she starts talking about "the soul." For example, her conclusion to The Goddess Idhunn in Myth and Poetry is that Idhunn is "the soul of all the Gods." I don't really know what that means, but maybe it's because I'm not grokking her flavor of pantheism. There are similarly confusing things when she gets to discussing individual human souls. This is further complicated by the fact that the Old Germanish folks seem to not have believed in one soul per person. Instead, each person had many souls, each of which handled different bits of we today are used to thinking of as a unity. This is an area I need to study more, as I think it's very weird, very interesting, and potentially very spiritually fruitful. Complicating things still further is Kvilhaug's tendency we noted earlier to highlight similarities and try to equate things - so are Norns, Valkyries, Swanmays, Fylgur, and Hamingjur all different things? The same thing? Distinct but related? Honestly, I came away still confused on what exactly Kvilhaug is saying about these Beings, other than that they have some things in common and might sometimes (always?) be "the same" - for example, maybe Valkyries are just the personal Norns of those found worthy by Odhinn. Personal Norns? That's right, besides the three "main" Norns, Urdhr ("Origin"), Verdhandi ("Becoming"), and Skuld ("Debt, Obligation"), it seems each individual had a personal Norn (or maybe a whole set of them?). Snorri tells us that these could be of different kinds - As-Kind, Elf-Kind, and Dwarf-Kind, and that the kind of Norn determined what would happen in life. Folks were also thought to have a fylgja, which is usually translated "follower," which was a helpful feminine spirit that might also (sometimes) be an animal. Clan leaders were said to have a Clan Fylgja. These were sometimes believed to be/be associated with female ancestors. Hamingjur are another (usually feminine) being/part of the soul that seem to be associated with luck and magical power and might be the same spiritual entity as the fylgja but described differently due to what its doing functionally. Again, all kind of hard to say, and I didn't find this as helpful in sorting this out as I would have liked. Oh, and if all of these beings are feminine, what of the masculine side of the soul? Well, that's (maybe) what elves are - masculine spirits/bits of the soul that have something to do with ancestors. Anyhow, I suspect we'll be coming back to all of this more as we go, but I'm not sure whether my confusion about what Kvilhaug is trying to convey will clear up or not - but I suppose finding out is the adventure we're on.

One area I found very interesting was when Kvilhaug talked about some of the similarities between the beliefs of various circumpolar peoples with shamanic traditions, such as the Sami and some folks of Siberia, with Germanish beliefs. That's another work on my wishlist for someone to do so I can read it: a thorough, wide-ranging comparison of what we know about historical shamanic beliefs and practices and those Germanish beliefs and practices that seem similar. You see bits and pieces of it here and there, but I've yet to see something thorough and all in one place. Kvilhaug shares how the Sami and some Siberian folks believed that the Sun lived in a blessed realm in the south, next to a rejuvenating source of water at the foot of the world tree, and that the souls of humans fly from there at birth and back there at death in the shape of water birds like swans or ducks. To say that these characteristics are strikingly similar to much of what we find in the Old Norse poems is a bit of an understatement. Whence the similarities? Well, the more obvious (and likely the more likely) origin is the fact that the Germanish folk were neighbors with these circumpolar folks for a very long time - from what we can tell, it seems like the Proto-Germanish language came to be in what are now the Nordic countries during the Nordic Bronze Age of ~2000 - 500 BCE. The Sami and the Finns are very likely descended from the folk who lived in those lands before the ancestors of the Proto-Germanish folks showed up. We know there was a lot of contact and a lot of exchange - for example, the ancient Finns seem to have started worshiping a hammer-wielding sky God not long after the Proto-Germans showed up. On the other hand, there's a more far-fetched, but thus more potentially exciting theory, laid out pretty clearly in The World's Oldest Myth? Now, Tom Rowsell expresses it with fewer qualifications and cautions than I might prefer, but that's likely mostly to make for compelling film. Anyhow, the main consensus view of "who were the Proto-Indo-Europeans" these days is the Yamnaya archaeological culture (see here for a good, even-handed discussion of the top three theories). From ancient DNA samples, we know that the folks of the Yamnaya archaeological culture came from a merger of three main populations: the Eastern Hunter Gatherers (EHG), Early European Farmers (EEF), and Ancient Northern Eurasians (ANE). Here's where the story gets interesting. You know who else is partially descended from the ANE group (which originated in modern Siberia)? Many of the circumpolar folks and American Indians. Now, the DNA by itself doesn't prove anything, but amongst folks with this shared ancestry, you often find beliefs about the world and the afterlife that are weirdly similar. The land of the dead has some kind of body of water, is guarded by (a) dog(s), has a tree that is the world growing out of it, and is ruled by woman who is both scary and beneficial. Not all of those elements show up together in every case, but often at least two of them cluster together and are very widely dispersed with no intervening contact since a very, very long time ago. That suggests that some of these beliefs might be insanely old - like, 24,000 years old, at least. Almost impossible to say for sure, of course, but it's like catnip to someone like me who is fascinated by the hazy borders of what we can know about the past.

So, whoo, here we are. The next chapter is, as I said, mercifully shorter, and focuses on "The Maiden with the Mead," the subject of Kvilhaug's master's thesis, but apparently new work on the same topic here. So, expect lots more on feminine spiritual Beings and/or bits of the soul, magic drinks, and initiation. As always, I welcome any thoughts, recommendations, or corrections.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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The series The Book of the New Sun was first published as four books: The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor, and The Citadel of the Autarch. Later, Wolfe wrote a follow-up called The Urth of the New Sun, but pretty much everyone was like "okay, what we have now is just a five-book series." What might also trip you up if you go to buy these books is that these days, you're most likely to find them in three volumes: Shadow and Claw, Sword and Citadel, and The Urth of the New Sun. Even though technically, "The Book of the New Sun" only means the first four books, I'm going to use it to mean all five, and for this post, I'll be shortening that to BNS. Also worth marking, while we're talking about these books is that Wolfe wrote another series set in the same future called The Book of the [ahem] Long Sun, but I haven't read that one, so any thoughts on that will have to wait. Michael Andre-Driussi, a (wonderfully) obsessive fan, also compiled, with Wolfe's blessing and sometimes help, The Lexicon Urthus, which is a dictionary of many of the strange words and characters of all of these books, but beware: thar be spoilers aplenty in that thar book. Andre-Driussi came up with "The Urth Cycle" for all of the books and stories set in this future, but I won't be using that name, since it casts a wider net than I'll be talking about today.

I can say without spoilers that what stood out to me the most about these books was the epic scope. It reminded me of Dune in the best way - the story touches on many of the bits of a big, wide world, and hints at even more that you get only the barest glimpses of. There's a rich culture that is very unlike ours, but filled with the same kind of men and women with the same kinds of hopes, dreams, and flaws we have always known. Further, in the BNS, not only does that scope extend across the world and beyond, but also through time. It starts, as many tales do, with a a promising young man thrust out of the familiar by circumstance, and he meets many challenges with varying degrees of success, learns about himself and the world, and as he comes to know and shape more and more of the world around him, we the readers come to learn of it. Along the way, he meets many characters, some endearing, some hateful, but all very human, even if only encountered for a moment. Wolfe has a knack for clearly describing what is happening in terms of the action, while slowly revealing how much more was going on around the action - the thoughts of the characters, the stakes, the ramifications, and so forth. He lulls you into thinking you're just reading a dry account of some things that happened, and only when he hits you with the reveal do you realize what was going on for the past several pages (or chapters, or books). It's a remarkable technique. At once it makes the book extremely readable, while also giving it great depth that's easy to miss if you treat it as casually as it seems to invite you to. Another structural trick Wolfe pulls is that the later you get into each book, the more that happens in shorter and shorter chapters. So, fair warning: if you're reading these before bed, as I was, when you get to what you think will be the last two or three days worth of reading, you might find yourself staying up far later than planned.

I know this has been some weird stuff to highlight in a "review," but truly, getting much more into specifics will start spoiling things pretty quick. So, if you enjoy thoughtful, deep speculative fiction with a wide world rendered in all of its bizarre opulence, that is nevertheless briskly plotted and full of plenty of action, you'll like these books - give them a read. If you've already read them, or if for some reason you don't care about spoilers or this doesn't sound like your cup of tea and you won't ever read them, then I have more substantive thoughts on what's in the books below.

Alright, so, I went into reading BNS with very little notion of what I was getting into, with one exception (discussed below). All I really knew was that Wolfe was supposed to be very good, and this was maybe his greatest work. So why not start there? As it begins, you quickly settle into "okay, this is a fantasy world," with its castles and sword fights and a guild of torturers. But fairly early on, little bits of detail thrown out as just part of the description start catching you - did he just call the floor of the tower a "deck?" Do those soldiers have guns? Wait, and energy shields? In other words, you start to work out that this seemingly faux-medieval society has some very advanced technology, just in very limited hands. Further, you also start to gather clues that this isn't just some technological world fallen into a new middle ages, it is our world, and somewhere in South America to judge by the geographical clues you get as the story goes on. This kind of "slow reveal" plays out in multiple ways throughout the books - the details of the world and its technology, the nature of its relationship to other worlds in the universe, the nature of the narrator Severian, and even its moral/philosophical theme. Here is where I was "spoiled" a bit by David McGrogan over at Monsters and Manuals, a D&D blog I've been reading for years. He made a comment in some post (can't find it just now) about the "slowly revealed Christianity" of BNS, and having now read it, I think he's right. Sure, it's a very weird scifi version of Christianity, but much of the moral development and growth of the story is along these lines. Luckily, like Lewis at his best, this doesn't degrade into cheap moralizing or "message fiction," but instead is played out in the thoughts, actions, and reflections of the characters entirely organically. As such, the overall story has a lot of growth, weight, and moral depth. Maybe the biggest, weirdest slow reveal, for which you need to read The Urth of the New Sun for full effect, is the mind-bending approach to time, space, and the universe(s). Characters live backward in time, others find their own graves, and more. All of it, Wolfe is keen to point out, is consistent with current (as of the 80s) scientific theories of how the universe might work, but told to evoke a sense of magic and wonder.

Further, Wolfe weaves in a lot of religious, occult, and esoteric references and themes. Many of the characters are named after saints, symbolism from the Tarot shows up, and the mind-bending time and universe stuff is framed in Cabalistic terms. Here's where the Lexicon Urthus I mentioned comes in handy - I waited until I finished to take a look at it, and so I've only glanced at a few entries. I also reckon that re-reading with more of these associations in mind would enrich the story where they show up (much like how The Wasteland is at least as much about its allusions as everything else it's doing). All that being said - the story works all by itself, so it's not like it's boring or confusing without this knowledge. There's also a recurring element in the form of a book of stories, some of which are given in full, others of which are summarized or mentioned by characters. The stories combine elements from familiar references, like The Jungle Book, but as filtered through thousands of years of re-telling and mutation. Again, Wolfe does a really good job of making what he presents interesting and relevant to the story, while any references or allusions are more Easter eggs than keys needed to unlock what's happening.

Altogether, BNS hits a lot of notes that much scifi, hell, much fiction of any sort, fails to pull off: a story that moves briskly and builds to a satisfying conclusion, deep characters that grow over time, numerous deep allusions, and a well-developed moral point of view that doesn't hammer you over the head. I can see what all the fuss is about, and if you got this far despite not reading it, I strongly recommend you check it out.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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I got this short stave from Eirik Westcoat's Eagle's Mead, and I try to remember to say it as soon as I wake up and get out of bed. It's a half stanza of Ljodhahatt followed by a half stanza of Galdralag. I also say my Hail Idun after this.

This dawning day
Brings deeds of might
For us the brave and the bold.

Awake today,
aware I'll live
and find a rune to rown,
and find a rune to write.
Alu.

("Rown" is an archaic word for "to whisper," with connotations of knowing and sharing a secret. "Alu" is the word that became "ale," but it seems to originally have meant the sacred quality inherent in alcoholic drinks, and only later came to mean the drink itself. I use it as pretty-much equivalent to "amen" when I pray.)

This is a quick little prayer that I say every time I put on my Thunor's Hammer necklace. My own practice is that I hold it in my left hand as I say the prayer, facing north, and as I say the words "Mighty Hallowing Hammer," I make the sign of the hammer over the hammer charm. I carved the charm itself from oak, put it on a leather thong, and put some beads on that to stand for the Gods, Goddesss, and Wights (spirits) that I have a relationship with. For a long time, I didn't wear a hammer, as I didn't have a particularly strong relationship with Thunor, but after some prayer and meditation, I realized one of the ways I could build that relationship was to wear the hammer and say a prayer every time I put it on, so here it is.

As for the poem itself, it's two half stanzas, one slightly defective, of Ljodhahatt (the last line has 4 stressed syllables, with two pairs of alliteration, rather than 2 out of 3 stressed syllables alliterating as would be strictly correct. I felt the meaning was more important than sticking strictly to the shape.):

O Thund'rous Thunor
Thanks I give
For mighty hallowing hammer.

Worthy may I wear
This warding mark
To banish bale and welcome weal.
Alu.

("Bale" is an archaic word for "harm, injury, evil" and "weal" is an archaic word for "well-being," which is the root of "wealth.")

I say this one after a few minutes of "Color Breathing" (doing the Four-Fold Breath while visualizing a color entering my body through my solar plexus on the inhale, filling me while I hold air in my lungs, then leaving through my solar plexus as I breathe out, and filling the air around me while I hold the air outside. I do a different color for each day of the week, given in The Dolmen Arch, Volume 1, but Yellow is a good general-purpose color) and before settling into the theme of my bethinking (discursive meditation). This one is two half stanzas of Galdralag. The "kindly" in the second half stanza is unstressed, which is kinda cheating, but it felt more important to be respectful than strictly meet the meter.

Oh spellweavers,
Wounded by spears,
Lost lives for wisdom,
Wakened well for lore!

Hail Woden!
Hail Frige too!
Kindly weaken bonds on my wits
And unfetter my heart to hear!
Alu

(This prayer calls upon Woden and Frige (my take on the Old English name for Old Norse Freyja. This is slightly controversial, as we don't have clear attestation of whether the Anglo-Saxons worshipped equivalents of Freyja and Frigg as separate Goddesses, and if so, what Their names would have been. My own gnosis has me worship Them as Frigg and Frige (pronounced "Free-yuh")). It references two mythic events: Woden stabbing himself with his spear and then hanging himself upon Yggdrasill and Gullveig the first witch being killed by spears and burned by the Aesir. I accept the interpretation that Gullveig is Freyja, and that both of these deaths-and-rebirths are magical initiations, and so I invoke them in my own seeking initiation.)

This one does not follow a poetic shape, but I based it on a poem found in Northern Practice for the Solitary Practitioner by Galina Krasskova and Raven Kaldera. Blessing your food is a good idea for all kinds of reasons, and I also like to use the chance to remind myself how much work goes into putting food on my plate, and my thankfulness for all of the beings that helped that happen.

I thank the Wen of land and sea for this food.
I put forth my blessings to the souls of the beings that went into it,
The lands it came from,
The wights of those lands,
Those who got it from there to here,
Those who made it,
And those who share it.
May all of their might and main feed our hearts, as well as our bodies.
Alu.

("Wen" is one way to wend (translate) Old Norse Vanir into English. It's not actually attested in Old English, but using what we know of how Old Norse and English both changed from Proto-Germanic, the singular would be "Wan," and this reconstruction assumes it would have fit into the same class of nouns as "Man/Men." I've also seen reconstructions that assume a standard plural and instead go for "Wan/Wanes." I don't have the linguistic chops to know which is a more plausible reconstruction, Wen "feels right" to me.)

I say this one whenever I bless a drink for prayer or the oil for the lamp I light on my stall (altar). It doesn't quite fit any of the meters, as I haven't been able to come up with something I'm happy with yet. As such, I might change this if I can work something out.

Hail Thunor,
Hallow kindly
And bless this drink/oil,
With my thanks.
Alu.

This one is also from Eirik Westcoat's Eagle's Mead, and follows the same mixed Ljodhahatt/Galdralag shape as the waking stave. Again, I say my Hail Idun as well.

Now I wend my way
Into the well of sleep
To thee oh wynnful Woden.

To learn thy ways,
I'll listen well,
Seeking runes to rown,
and finding wode to win.

("Wynnful" is an archaic word for "delight, pleasure" with connotations of folks getting along and being happy in each other's company. "Wode" is the spirit/substance of inspiration/poetry/ecstasy that forms the root of "Woden." In Old Norse it is Oðr.)

Whether you find these prayers helpful for your own spiritual work, as always, I welcome any and all feedback!

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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When I heard "military fiction," these were some of the first books that came to mind. Kratman is a former Army officer who finished his career as a JAG working on rules of engagement, but before that was an enlisted guy and a combat arms officer who served in the invasion of Panama. The conceit of the series is that there's another planet that is very much like Earth, has been settled by mankind, but for some reason I can't remember, it's technology level is basically that of the early 21st century. I say "conceit," because this is clearly an excuse to set up conflicts between analogues of real-world nations, but with the narrative flexibility to change things that might be inconvenient in a straight "alternate history" piece of writing. These books are very focused on the technology, tactics, and strategy of war, but also with more philosophical musing on the subject than you might expect. Kratman also writes from an unabashedly right wing place, and some of what's in the books is definitely meant to troll left wing folks - the "Not EU" of this world is a frequent punching bag. Stay away if you don't want lots of blood-and-guts action scenes or if the political thing bugs you.

This book is a fictional telling of the well-known Battle of Thermopylae, where a Greek coalition led by the Spartan King Leonidas and his 300 Spartiates fought the oncoming Persian army. It's way more historically accurate than Frank Miller's 300, but it still takes some liberties, as it is mostly a vehicle for showcasing the kinds of virtues that make men fight against impossible odds. As such, the Spartiates come across as very admirable, which might not be that accurate. That being said, it's very popular in the military today, especially among elite units, as a model for what camaraderie and discipline can look like. Pressfield was a Marine, and he gets the grunts-eye-view of small unit dynamics very clearly.

I haven't actually read any of this yet, but I've heard good things. One online friend said it's like "Star Wars, but written by hardass vets." I've been a bit turned off of space-oriented scifi for a bit now, but I'll likely check this out at some point.

Okay, these aren't exactly "military fiction," as there's a lot of other stuff going on, but Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle have significant portions that follow soldiers around on wacky missions and through huge battles. Reamde is a techno-thriller, but one of its main characters is an ex-Spetsnaz guy, and there are a lot of gunfights. Stephenson doesn't have any military experience, but from his writing, it's clear that he knows vets and has listened to them, as his depictions of military guys land right.

These are well-known "dark fantasy" short stories that follow an amoral mercenary company that is fighting in a stereotypical fantasy war, complete with an evil sorceress queen. The thing is, they're fighting for her, not against. Cook was in the Navy during Vietnam, and was apparently attached to a Marine Force Recon unit, but he never deployed. For me, this walks the fine line of "interestingly edgy" and "annoyingly cynical" rather well (unlike, say The Blade Itself which was everything I was afraid a "dark fantasy" book would be, and worse). I've only read the first collection of these stories, so I don't know if they keep up the quality as they go.

These are best known for the movie adaptation Master and Commander, starring Russell Crowe. These books go deep on what it was like living and fighting on a ship in the British Navy in the Napoleonic wars, kind of like Moby Dick, but with warships. Even if that's not your thing, the action scenes are engaging, you get occasional forays into Jane Austen-style high society, and the relationship between the two main characters is dynamic and interesting. If you'd like to go deeper on the real life impacts of naval war, A.T. Mahan's classic of military history The Influence of Sea Power Upon History makes for a fascinating and well-written complement.

Speaking of Napoleonic naval matters, Arabella of Mars gives a taste of that, but IIIINNNNN SPPPPAAAACCCEEE. This book uses the archaic idea that the sky just kept going, and that all of the planets just spin around in it. So, you can float a ship up high enough, and then sail the solar winds to Mars or Venus or the like, which are of course populated by the kind of denizens 19th century authors put there. The first book is a fun swashbuckle with a dash of romance consciously written in the style of 19th century adventure stories by the likes of Haggard or Burroughs. Apparently, though, this upset some folks for glorifying colonialism or something of the sort, and to try to make up for this, Levine wrote the next two books with much more of a political chip on his shoulder, which rather squashed the light-hearted adventure, so I can't really recommend them, but the first one is fun and a complete-enough story to satisfy.

Maybe the most famous work of military scifi ever written, this is a classic for a reason. If your only exposure to the name is the Paul Verhoeven movie, set all that aside. It turns out the screenplay for the movie wasn't initially based on the book at all - it was retrofitted after they got the rights. Now, I love the movie in all of its cheesy glory, but the book is way, way better in every way. Mostly a coming-of-age story about a young man who finds meaning and purpose in the military, it's also got some political philosophy and cool technology. Significant contributor to why I enlisted rather than taking a commission when I joined the Army (hell, likely a significant contributor to my joining the Army at all, if we're being honest here).

This book is a clear homage to Starship Troopers. It's not really amazing or anything, but it's pretty fun. Once again, the first book in this series hews close to the form it's an homage to, to its benefit, and the later books in the series go in some different directions that I found less interesting. Also, as far as I know, Scalzi has no military experience, and he doesn't quite get the "military mindset" as well as many of these other authors, but this book is not as hurt by that as it could be, as the main character is a new recruit finding his way in an unfamiliar world. One thing that makes me appreciate this book more than it deserves is that while it leans into "humans are kinda weak and squishy compared to the aliens we've run into," it doesn't treat humans as helpless babes in the woods - instead, thanks to being mean as piss and ready to take anything that works from other species, humans are definitely contenders.

Speaking of mankind being dangerous to aliens, The Man-Kzin Wars was a project created by Larry Niven to bring many scifi writers together around a loose theme (the eponymous wars), I've only read the first collection, which features Poul Anderson. These wars are a prequel to Niven's Ringworld, which has some really interesting alien psychology, but is not so much military. If you don't know the world, the Kzin are a cat-like species that is very aggressive and warlike, and is one of the first (maybe the very first?) species of aliens mankind runs into. As with Old Man's War, one of my favorite bits is how seriously it takes the thought that mankind is dangerous. In this future, we had finally learned how to get along with each other, then we met these warlike cats who want to fight, and we’re like “guys, do you have any idea what our whole deal is? You sure you want to go down this road?” The stories themselves are of somewhat variable quality, and not all are really “military scifi,” but there were a few that I liked quite a bit.

Another one that isn't exactly military, but certainly is martial, is The Mongoliad, which was a joint writing effort by a few authors, including Neal Stephenson, that was an attempt to launch a multimedia franchise around western martial arts, using a fictional warrior monastery as its focal point (think Shaolin monks, but in plate with longswords). I enjoyed the initial cycle of books, but the short stories and spinoffs did less and less for me, so I ended up putting them down. Strongly recommended if you have an interest in historical European martial arts (the authors all know each other from their HEMA group, and so the fight scenes are loaded with realistic details).

The Furies of Calderon series has some strong military elements as it goes on, though again, I might not call it "military fantasy". Apparently, someone challenged Butcher to write a series based on a prompt something like "Pokemon meets the four elements." He took up the challenge and managed to make that not cheesy, as the "Pokemon" are elemental nature spirits, and are how folks do magic in this world. Speaking of folks, they're basically Romans facing barbarian invaders, hence the military element that comes up more and more. I don't think they're quite as good as The Dresden Files, but it's got likable characters with good growth, it's very readable and well-paced, and explores the implications of the world-building.

Lastly, another “martial”, but not “military” book – Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa is a big sprawling epic about the most famous swordsman of Japanese history, and it does a good job of exploring a warrior mindset, even if most of the book is not about battles. Also, when the battles do happen, they tend to be smaller fights, rather than clashes of armies. Even still, it's got a lot of tension and action and it does a really good job of exploring the conflict between the martial virtues and the softer virtues of everyday life.

Hopefully there's something that grabs you in the above, and if so, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Also, if you have any good military fiction to share, it's a sub-genre I often come back to, so I welcome any recommendations.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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• The Seed of Yggdrasill - Overall Rundown
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 1 - Introduction and the Books of Old - You Are Here
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 2 - Creation, Cosmos, and the Ruling Powers
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 3 - The Maiden with the Mead
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 4 - Retrieving the Soul of the Gods
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 5 - The Loss of the Golden Age in Old Norse Myth
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 6 - Ragnarok and the New Age
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 7 - Death and Resurrection
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 8 - The Way of the Wand Witch
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 9 - The Priestess and the King
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 10 - The Wise Man's Path
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 11 - The Trials of Thorr
• The Seed of Yggdrasill 12 - The One and the Many and Epilogue

Earlier this year, as research for my Hail Idun, I read The Goddess Idhunn in Poetry and Myth by Maria Kvilhaug (for which I could have sworn I had a write-up, but I must have made that up). I heard about Kvilhaug when folks pointed me to her Master's thesis Maiden and the Mead Cup and her main book, The Seed of Yggdrasill, and what I found when I dipped my toes in both of those intrigued me greatly, but this was during my year with the dead, and so I had to hold off. Then, in the same year (2022), she put out The Goddess Idhunn, and I knew I had to read that as soon as I could. It was the first non-fiction book I read of the year, and I was almost hopping up and down for a book-length treatment of a Goddess that is very important to me.

On the one hand, the book gave me exactly what I was looking for: wonderful, in-depth analysis of every stanza of the two Eddic poems that feature Idhunn. Translations of every proper name in those poems, so that the potential symbolic meanings of characters, places, and things can be understood. A thorough run-down of possible archaeological evidence for related (or the same?) Goddesses. A full list of every kenning given for Idhunn, with translations of included proper names. A discussion of what Her own name might mean, and alternative possible etymologies. It was very nearly the perfect country and western song, err, I mean, perfect book on one of the non-star Norse Goddesses.

But on the other hand, whooooo boy, some things about that book were infuriating. There's no index. There's no footnotes. There are annoying typos and formatting errors that occasionally introduce confusion about meaning (like not ending italics after a quote is finished, or leaving out the verb). Worst of all, it's a collection of transcripts of video lectures originally put out on YouTube. And it appears to be barely edited at all. This means that missteps in speech are part of the text, as is an amount of repetition that can be useful from one video to the next, but not so much within a lone 200 leaf book. It also uses the kind of fluid "mostly organized" approach that can sound conversational and thus fine in a spoken context, but a tighter organization would be much, much better.

All of which means that I found The Goddess Idhunn terribly frustrating: it has some truly worthwhile stuff in it, helpful to any student of Norse myth, and invaluable to someone for whom Idhunn plays an important role in religion, but it could be shared in ways that were so much easier to understand, reference, and so forth. So why am I telling you so much about this little book in a post about a whole 'nother book? Because it's 600-leaf big sister of a book, The Seed of Yggdrasill shows many of the same strengths and weaknesses, and that's much of what's kept me from getting to it for the last few months. That being said, I have now more than once had the distinctly hair-pulling experience of pulling The Seed of Yggdrasill out to get Kvilhaug's take on something, or her translation of a name, finding hints at something that feels deeply meaningful and worthwhile to add to my understanding of the Lore, but not being able to find the specific thing I was looking for, or else only finding it after 3 or 4 tangents. I realized I was going to have to tackle the whole thing, get a good idea of what's in there, and organize my own damn notes as a reference, since this book isn't going to do it for me. That being said, the book is a bear - not only 600 pages, but 600 textbook-sized pages, and though there are a fair number of pictures and single column poetry translations, it's still pretty much as long you'd think, so it's gonna take some doing to get through this, and I'm going to post on it as I go. Let's get to it!

First, a handful of thoughts on the physical book. I have the 2020 edition, which is the one currently available, but it was first printed in 2012 as a hardcover. These days, you can only get paperback, which seems to be POD via Amazon. Kvilhaug's "publisher" is Three Little Sisters, which has links to all of her books, but as I said, these days, I think they're just ebooks or POD through Amazon. To be fair, it does seem to be at the higher end of resolution and print quality, as far as POD goes, at least the full-color version I have. As I said above, some of the formatting leaves some things to be desired - the title page is on the left page of the very first spread in the book, with the copyright page on the right side, and the title on the spine is backwards from what I would expect (is this a European/Scandinavian thing? I think I saw it on another book put out by someone from there). The typography is unobtrusively attractive, set in Georgia, and with distinct-enough headers and such to stand out. As I mentioned, there's a decent number of pictures, but not a ton, and they're usually pretty small. Most of these are black and white and/or line-work, such as the sketches archaeologists make of carvings or reconstructed artifacts, but some of the pictures benefit from the color. It might also be that the pretty crisp resolution of the printing only comes with the color version. Altogether, this is neither slapdash nor anything to write home about, but a perfectly serviceable medium for delivering the information it has. I just wish there were still a hardcover version available with better binding, for the sake of longevity.

This bit is very short, but has a few handy things in it. Kvilhaug begins by telling the tale of how she came to care about Norse Myth, after being taught as a kid in Norwegian school that these were basically "the silly stories folks believed before they got Christianity, and then even better, science" (which just hurts my heart to hear). She then talks about how the translations of the poems are her own, some spelling conventions, and some basics on how letters in Old Norse words are pronounced. Lastly for these quick 8 pages, the best bits: a list of Old Norse magical/religious terms, a list of Old Norse terms for religious professions of different kinds, and a list of the kinds of divine beings talked about in Norse myth, broken up into the masculine and feminine powers. This last one especially is helpful for giving not only a translation of the name for the group, but also a few thoughts on how/when different terms were used. Altogether, most of this stuff is likely not needed for anyone who's going to read this particular book (this is emphatically not "My First Book on Norse Myth"), much of it helpful nonetheless.

Okay, I gotta admit, looking through the table of contents, I assumed this chapter would be a mostly-skippable overview of the content and history of our sources for Norse myth that I mostly already know. There is some of that, but I was pleasantly surprised to find there's actually more here as well - in 56 pages, I filled up three 4x6 notecards (one side only) with notes. Don't worry, I'm not going to try to squeeze all of that into this post, but there was a lot that seemed interesting, insightful, or a useful thread to follow up on.

Altogether, this book has a lot to recommend it, but it takes a certain amount of energy to grapple with in anything but the most casual way. I sincerely wish Kvilhaug had some kind of partner of the organizational, attention-to-detail variety who shared her passion for these myths. Then we could have things like a list of all of the major Gods, Goddesses, and steads with their names translated, to be used as a reference when reading. We could have chapters and sections that can be looked up as needed, rather than having to be sifted out of the entire 600-page web. We could have lists of the formulas she's identified with pointers to what myths you can find them in. Such glorious possibilities! Alas, for now, I'll have to settle for making my own sense of what she has to offer and sharing what I find with you.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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Though I only read this book the year before last, it's done a lot to shape my thinking since. I'll likely need to look back on it later, but for now I'd like to write this out to help set its ideas in my mind more strongly. This book did two main worthwhile things for me: 1. It gave me a helpful framework for thinking about economics that all my earlier reading lacked, and 2. it laid out in enough depth for me to feel like I understand the challenges we are likely to face with energy going forward. So, if those sound like something you might also find helpful, let's dig into The Wealth of Nature: Economics as If Survival Mattered.

The framework I spoke of above is the "Three Economies." This is an expansion of E.F. Schumacher's work in Small is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered (the title of Greer's book is, of course, a nod to this) - Schumacher talked about the primary and secondary economies, and Greer found it helpful to add the third.

One of the biggest gifts of the Primary Economy has been fossil fuels. Plants used the energy in sunlight to pull carbon out of the air and into their bodies. Some of those got eaten by animals, and some of both ended up at the bottoms of seas or swamps or the like, and for millions of years, the pressure of titanic slabs of rock squashed them into oil, coal, and so forth. It is not an overstatement to say that the Industrial Revolution and everything it brought could not have happened without fossil fuels. I've linked it before, but Wait But Why has a pretty good break down of the mind-blowing amounts of energy fossil fuels have let humans harness. I'm less sanguine on what alternative energy technologies will let us do than Tim, but I'll get into that below. The point is that fairly readily available fossil fuels have let mankind spend the last ~300 years seeing what we can accomplish when we use huge amounts of outside energy to make things easier for humans, and a lot of the outcomes are pretty darn impressive. But mark that premise, as it turns out to be a doozy.

Here's where I may lose those of y'all who are techno-optimists. So far, we haven't found any concentrated energy sources as useful as fossil fuels. Fission power has been tried in a wide variety of states with very different regulatory regimes, and yet has never worked without a lot of subsidies. Fusion power has been coming "any day now" for longer than I've been alive. And we're getting to the point where fossil fuels are harder and harder to get to, because we already dug up the easy stuff. Technologies like fracking take far more energy input than conventional wells, which means more of the energy we're pulling out of the ground is being used to, you know, pull energy out of the ground. At some point, that becomes a losing proposition. All of which means that I've come to the distinctly uncomfortable conclusion that the exponential growth in technology we've been enjoying in the modern era is likely to come to an end, and the future will be something very different than most folks imagine. Of course, I could be wrong - maybe fusion really is right around the corner this time, or maybe every government that has tried fission has handicapped it in similar ways. I don't know, but I hope whether you agree with this last bit or not that you find the Three Economies framework and the model of thinking about energy in both amount and concentration as helpful in making sense of the world as I have.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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First and most importantly, for any religion to do well in the long run, it needs to, you know, be a religion. By which I mean it needs to give a solid way for its followers to interact with the divine and find meaning through that interaction. One thing that tends to help a fringe religion find a niche is to reach the divine in a way that the mainstream religions around it lack. As you might guess, Druidry's way to the divine is through the natural world. When the Druid Revival got going in early 18th century Britain, the two main systems of belief on offer were orthodox Anglican Christianity or the burgeoning Scientific Materialism. Neither had much use for nature as a path to seek transcendence. If you're anything like me, you've stood somewhere filled with beauty, like Muir Woods, or looked up at a stunning sunset, and felt the touch of something greater. Druidry celebrates such moments and invites us to seek them out, even to notice them more often. Watching a roly-poly trundle over tiny rocks, sticks, and leaf litter can hold as much wonder as the mightiest settings, if you let it. There's nothing new about finding the divine in nature - most every religion throughout time has had hallowed groves, blessed waterfalls, and other steads of undeniable beauty and power. But in the land where the Industrial Revolution was about to be born, neither of the main streams of belief at hand had much use for such things, and many Englishmen felt that lack keenly and went looking for a way to fill it.

What these men found to fill that lack were the very few traces of elder Druidry found in classical writing - a time or two in Caesar, another handful in Tacitus, some wondering-out-loud in Posidonius, and that was about it. Take a tick to put yourself in the shoes of an English gentleman, learning the classics, and just think of the thrill whenever far-off and mist-shrouded Britannia comes up. If that same gentleman also felt the divine most keenly while walking through the woods or seeing the sun rise over the moor, then how much more bewitching the glimpses of wise druids gathered in their sacred groves, must have been. These days, what we have since learned about the elder Celts and their druids makes clear that the image of druids conjured by the revivalists was rather unlike the true elder druids, but as we've said before, maybe that's not such a big deal. For however off the mark their rebuilding of the past might have been, what they did find was a set of beliefs, practices, concepts, and imagery that spoke to the need for nature spirituality in the British (and later, English-speaking) world. Something about being a druid, rather than just a chap that likes to sit out in the woods, spoke to something deep within these folks, and it still has the power to stir strong feelings today.

While druids rallied around the core image of the ancient druids, the very scantness of what was known left a lot of room for filling in the gaps. Also, many folks over time and throughout Britain, at least somewhat independently, seem to have landed on becoming a "druid." Lots of far-flung folks putting these scraps together meant that many unalike takes on druidry got cooked up and only later brought together. Lastly, these folks were pretty much all weirdos and self-willed thinkers who deeply felt the need for going your own way and doing your own thing. Take all of these things together and what you get is that for as long as there have been revival druids, there has been a lot of variation in what they believe. Many (maybe even most?) druids have been Christians, though, of course, the not-so-orthodox kind. Some leaned into their classical schooling and worshiped the Greek Gods. Still others dug into the Welsh or Irish writings to find the pre-Christian Gods of those lands and began worshiping them. Heck, some druids in the 20th century even made up some Gods and were shocked when they seemed to get an answer! A joke I've heard Greer tell many times is "ask three druids, get five answers." The point is that around a shared heart of finding the divine through nature, druids have welcomed a broad range of beliefs.

As I've said before, though, Druidry is far less about what you believe and much more about what you do, and has been since pretty much the beginning. Maybe this came about through give-and-take between folks with unalike beliefs trying to come together. Maybe it's a natural outgrowth of the emphasis on individual experience and understanding. Wherever it springs from, druids have always put more weight on practice than on dogma. Sure, druids have developed philosophies and teachings about the world, how it came to be, and what kind of divine forces shape it. Many of these teachings have even come close to being held among all druids, such as the belief in Awen (pronounced roughly "Ah-oh-en"): a spark of the groundmost wellspring of Being held within each of us that drives how we think and feel and make. But reading about Awen, talking about Awen, even understanding Awen, pales next to living in a way that is shaped by your own Awen. Reading Iolo Morganwg's Barddas doesn't make you a druid, but bethinking on the threads you find there might. Drawing up and labeling an ecosystem doesn't make you a druid, but using your understanding of how ecosystems work to steer cleanup work in the nearby woods or wetlands might. Knowing the dates of the solstices and equinoxes doesn't make you a druid, but coming together with a handful of other druids to welcome each turn of the wheel of the year might.

Speaking of rituals, from very early days, druids have often made sure to do their rituals out where everyone can see them. Now, sure, some of this is thanks to the outdoors being the best place to worship and feel bonded with nature. But it was also a way to show folks what they were up to. Worshiping in the open had a couple of helpful outcomes. For one, seeing rituals helped folks learn that there even was such a thing as druidry. Those who might want to give it a shot could readily get in touch with the druids they had seen in the park at midsummer, making public rituals a way to bring aboard new druids. Maybe even weightier, though, was that public rituals showed folks what druids were not up to. No animal sacrifice. No naughty sex stuff. No devil worship. Just some odd fellows in robes chanting about peace and the sun and excalibur and so forth. This second reason may have been key to druidry's keeping alive - fringe spiritual movements start out under a cloud and have to show themselves not to be shady. We all know the stereotype of a scary cult, and with good reason. Without the weight of tradition to help, new religions have to go to greater lengths to show they're on the up-and-up, and truthfully, maybe that's for the best. For a very long time, druids have made sure to make it clear what they're up to and what they're not up to. The upshot? When was the last time you heard someone put forth that a wicked cabal of druids is pulling the strings of the mighty to evil ends? That's right, never.

Above, you might have thought I was being silly to bring up "naughty sex stuff," but truthfully, for some time there was quite a lot of overlap between alternative spirituality and sex. If you don't check out the linked post (again by Greer), the short take is that for a long time in Christian lands, men could get away with sleeping around so long as they were fairly discreet, but women could not. During Victorian times, a new answer was hit upon: if you wrapped up the shady sex in shady magic, both man and woman now had dirt on each other - mutually assured social destruction. The man would be just as harmed by it coming out that he was doing spells as the woman would be by it coming out that she was doing sex. This blend of magic and alternative spirituality slowly lost importance as sexual mores loosened, and was killed off pretty thoroughly after the sexual revolution. Druidry got going before this innovation and seems never to have had much to do with it.

When Neopaganism hurtled into high gear after Halloween 1979 (the date that both Drawing Down the Moon and The Spiral Dance were published), it had more than a little sex baked into its scene. Drawing on both the alternative spirituality scene with its background of magically-themed sex clubs as well as on the counterculture movement and its close alignment with the sexual revolution, one of the things that helped Neopaganism get and keep its popularity was a culture of fairly widespread casual sex. Druidry wasn't really catering to those yearnings, and so it was seen by most folks flocking to the Neopagan scene as old-fashioned, stodgy, and boring. So far fewer newly-minted spiritual explorers found their way into (Revival) Druidry than other ways of belief like Wicca.

It turns out that this might have been a blessing. When any kind of movement or scene becomes a fad, the folks who flock to it are mostly looking for a good time. The folks who shaped that movement or scene are then faced with a strong pull to tweak things to give these new seekers the good time they're looking for. The more folks who show up, the less they'll have in common besides wanting to find a good time, and so the movement finds itself more-and-more pulled to put forth whatever has the widest draw. Even worse, if folks in the scene heed that it has become hip, they may start shooting for growth for its own sake. The trouble is that these outsiders found themselves drawn to the scene because it was unlike the mainstream or other scenes they might have gone to. If the scene goes too hard for being all things to all folks, well, it wipes out what made it stand out in the first stead, and it starts to lose those who showed up for a new, different good time, and maybe even those folks who made it special to begin with. On the other hand, if you can hold off the siren call of popularity, if you don't make the most of being a fad, and instead you keep up "flake filters" that gently send on their way folks who don't want to do the work, you might see a slight bump from becoming better known, but you also won't be left with nobody when the fad rolls back.

So, what can budding alternative spiritual movements learn from Druidry? Well, so long as their goal is not to take over the world or grow as fast as they might, but instead to meet the spiritual needs of a small group for the long haul, rather a lot. First, make sure that whatever you are putting out there meets a real spiritual need, even better if its one that no one else is meeting right now. Second, to meet that need, call upon a strong aesthetic that grabs folks and fires their imaginations. Third, set out a heart of belief and practice that meets that spiritual need, but leave everything else as bendsome as you can get away with. Fourth, make one bit of that shared core a weight on practice over belief. Fifth, do some chunk of your practices out in the open to draw in those who may want to come onboard and soothe those who look askance at what you're doing. Sixth and lastly, steer away from being too sexy, cool, or "of the moment" - shoot instead for those things that are timeless and look for ways that take some amount of work from those who would come into your movement. I'd be shocked if this list hit everything it might have, but I hope it's a good starting point for thinking about what a religious movement should (or shouldn't) look like. That being said, I'd love to hear anything you think I've missed or gotten wrong.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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My first exposure to druidry as anything besides a feature of D&D campaigns, ancient history, or pop culture was in Isaac Bonewits's book Real Magic, which I found through the ESR essay I linked in the post on my beliefs, or maybe a reply to a comment somewhere on his blog. I can't really recommend Bonewits's work these days (though the bibliography is still pretty good), but finding a seemingly reasonable person in the world of woo was very helpful to get started. In that book, Bonewits lays out a taxonomy of polytheists, dividing them into Paleopagans, Mesopagans, and Neopagans (I can't remember if he coined "Neopagan", but he might have). Paleopagans are folks who follow or followed polytheistic religious traditions that were wholly organic - Ancient Greeks, modern Hindus, and so forth. Most of us know these days what a "Neopagan" is - folks who have adopted a polytheistic religion of one kind or another in the recent past, separate from their wider cultural context. Mesopagans are what he called those folks who tried to bring back various polytheistic belief systems between the rise of Christianity and before the twentieth century.

Seems reasonable enough as a way to label things, right? Well, the thing is, Bonewits did not propose this framework without some self-interest. You see, he was the founder of a Neopagan religious organization that seeks to reconstruct the beliefs and practices of the ancient Druids of the Celtic world - Ar nDraiocht Fein (ADF), and so had some interest in how polytheistic believers identified themselves and others. There was just one problem - there were already folks running around calling themselves "Druids," and the alternative spirituality scene is small enough that this caused some consternation. So, Bonewits set about describing how the Mesopagans were deficient in various ways - they lacked the knowledge of ancient beliefs gained through more recent scholarship, they borrowed Christian beliefs and practices, and much else that Bonewits didn't truck with. So, you see, ADF and similar more recent reconstructionists are the real druids, not those fellows in the funny headgear.

As I set out in my post on authenticity, at that point of my journey, this made plain good sense to me, and so I pretty much dismissed these older druids without even considering them, especially since I was more interested in Germanic myth and belief anyway. Well, not too long after this is when my friend introduced me to John Michael Greer's work (that was JMG in the nemyss link, by the way). Greer is an enthusiastic and influential Revival Druid - he was the head of the Ancient Order of Druids in America for twelve years and helped build it from an almost defunct handful of old folks into a thriving organization. At first, I thought this was kind of a silly way to go about religion, but it didn't make a big difference since I thought it was all in our heads anyway. As I read more and more of his work, though, I came to respect him quite a bit as an even-handed, thoughtful man with his own deep beliefs, who nevertheless refuses to push them on anyone who doesn't want them. It was Greer's writing that got me to seriously consider the reality of spiritual beings, and then to take up a daily magical practice of a banishing ritual, meditation, and divination. I started with a Heathen variant of the Golden Dawn Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram and Middle Pillar Exercise, using the Poetic Edda for meditation threads, and the Runes for divination. After my spiritual awakening, I realized I was going to need a more complete framework to follow, and much to my surprise, divination and prayer suggested that I should do the Revival Druidry thing for awhile, while still worshiping Anglo-Saxon Gods (mostly). So I grabbed Greer's Druidry Handbook and Druid Magic Handbook and got to work.

At this point, you might be asking yourself "wait, what the heck does being a druid have to do with Woden and Thunor and their lot?" (as an aside - more than you might think. The ancient Celts and Germans were neighbors with shared cultural ancestry, and so had a lot of shared beliefs and practices). Over the years reading Greer, I had come to understand that Revival Druidry is wonderfully flexible. Revival Druidry is more about what you do than about what you believe, and even within this grounding in shared practice, there's room for a whole lot of variation. What holds all of this together are three main themes, as outlined by Greer in The Druidry Handbook: reverence for the land, personal spiritual development, and public ritual. Mark the utter lack of anything in those three threads about which Gods to worship, what kind of clothes to wear, doctrines to follow, and so forth. This has meant that over the last three hundred years there have been Druids who worship Jesus Christ, the Greek Gods, the Earth herself, and much else besides. The shape of their personal development has included prayer, meditation, fasting, asceticism, bacchanalic feasts, and more. The public rituals have held a bit less variety, as that is where Druids actually do come together and agree to do the same thing, at least for a bit. Most of these rituals somehow mark the turning of the year and the changes found in nature that come with it.

For myself, this looks like following the paths laid out in Greer's two books I mentioned above, along with the practices in another two volumes of his, The Dolmen Arch. I've been working on better getting to know the land around me and to do less to harm it (like composting as much of our food and yard waste as we can). As for ritual, I haven't done any publicly yet, but I mark the two solstices and equinoxes as well as the halfway points between them on my own out in my backyard. I wouldn't truly call myself "a druid" just yet, as I haven't finished the self-initiation given in any of these books, but I have settled in fairly comfortably walking "the druid path," at least for a time.

Three things led me to following this path that likely all would have shocked me a few years ago. First, Greer's advice that magical newbies should pick a well-defined course of practice and follow it to the letter. Secondly, the weight that Druidry puts on balance called out as something I needed to work on. Lastly, Druidry pulled in a lot of directions I didn't want to go. I know that last one especially doesn't sound like it makes much sense, but I'll unpack all three.

Though the exercises I mentioned above got me some plenty impressive outcomes, there was a problem. At the time, that was pretty much all there was to the "Heathen Golden Dawn." Greer was collaborating with one of his readers who was doing the heavy lifting, but not long after putting those up, that reader had to put the project aside and so it wasn't moving for a while. Another reader picked it up and is close to finishing a book detailing a complete beginner's course of study, which is great - but wasn't much help two years ago. The reason this mattered is that Greer very strongly recommends that folks beginning the practice of magic should pick a course of study known to be balanced, effective, and not to turn the lives of folks who follow it into smoking wreckage. Since I trusted Greer, I wanted to follow one of his courses of study, and since the traditional Golden Dawn approach didn't do much for me, that left The Celtic Golden Dawn and The Druid Magic Handbook.

It was the second thing I laid out that led me to choose the latter over the former. You see, the Golden Dawn system is all about calling upon spiritual forces from "above" - which is great, and works very well for a lot of folks (and a taste of it had worked great for me!). The system worked out by Greer in the Druid Magic Handbook, though, calls upon spiritual forces from above and below. Now, hold your horses. By below, I emphatically do not mean noxious spiritual entities (let's call a spade a spade: demons). Another good habit I have picked up from Greer is to have absolutely no truck with any demonolatry or anyone who practices it. No, by "below," I mean those spiritual forces that come from and flow through the earth - the kind of thing that makes some sites sacred, the life and power that bubbles up in springs, and the drive to live that burns deep in your belly. Many spiritual traditions historically have distrusted or even rejected this source of spirituality (I'm looking at you, Christianity). The terms I have learned for these two currents of spirituality are "Solar" and "Telluric" (telluric comes from a Latin word for Mother Earth, and so means "Earthly"). The Solar Current is very macho: disciplined, exalted, shining, bright, hard. The Telluric Current is more feminine: relaxed, welcoming, dark, warm, soft. Through the spiritual work I had already done, I had realized that I'm naturally a very Solar person, and I'm terribly out of touch with the Telluric. It became clear to me that I needed to bring these into more balance, and that meant learning a whole new ritual framework: the Sphere of Protection (which is the heart of what the Druid Magic Handbook teaches).

And the third thing that brought me to Druidry comes from putting the above two together: following a Druid course of study, by the book, start-to-finish would make me do many things that I wouldn't choose to do otherwise. Think of working out: most of us (myself very much included) don't much like picking up heavy weights or peddling on the bike or what have you. But if we want to be healthy, we do it anyway. And I needed a spiritual work out. I have two big struggles that both are at least somewhat tied up with leaning so heavily Solar - I like to skip around and I like to skip ahead. By skip around, I mean that I get grabbed by some new interest and then go deep on it for a while, but usually after a few months, it's on to some other interest. With many of these, I come back every once in a while over the years, but there are few crafts or lines of research I've kept up steadily through the years. A book that requires at a minimum a year or two to get through, and more likely 3-5, would be a good dose of stick-to-it-iveness. Linked to this, Druidry is also not the perfectly customized, just-as-I-like-it set of beliefs and practices I would design for myself if given free rein. Again, rather than skipping to some other tradition and/or borrowing the bits of it I like, I'm forced to find the worth in what's presented to me. As for skipping ahead, well, not to preen overmuch, but I'm a pretty smart guy especially about words and propositional knowledge. Book smart, you might say. In the kinds of fields where being book smart is the main thing that counts, you can often find shortcuts - work out the algorithm or the principle behind the specific examples, and you can skip over further examples. That's all well and good where it works, but the trouble is that my being good at that has led me to use that as my default approach at everything and to want to skip past the boring groundwork and get on with the advanced stuff because I "understand" it. Well, again, following a specifically laid out course with the intention of "you have to do all of it, as presented, for as much time as it takes to do it right" gives me a great chance to work on better balancing myself and my spiritual life.

Altogether, after two years of following this path, I have found a lot to like about it. There's been plenty of room for my learning about and building my worship around Germanish myth and Gods. I've come to better know and care about the living world around me. For the first time in my life, I've kept up a daily meditation habit for more than a few months. The myths, symbolism, and rituals of druidry have opened up to me and shown me both their own worth, as well as deeper insights into those of my Germanish beliefs. It is a decidedly quirky approach to the spiritual for weirdos who want to go their own way, but don't want to build everything from scratch, and it turns out that suits me very well indeed.

So, I've talked a lot about the role Druidry has played in my own spiritual growth, but not much about what Druidry is or where it came from. Up at the top, I mentioned it has not always been the most authentic religion out there. You see, while Druidry coalesced around a handful of figures throughout the 18th century, one who had an outsized impact was Iolo Morganwg (that's roughly pronounced "Yolo Morganoog"), or Edward Williams as he was known when he wasn't penning Welsh poetry. Morganwg was a Welsh antiquarian and scholar with a passion for medieval Welsh poetry. Throughout his life, he shared works he had discovered that revealed the deep wisdom of the medieval bards who had kept alive the teachings of the ancient Druids. The core philosophical concept was Awen (pronounced closer to "ah-oh-en" than "ah-when") - the single great wellspring of all of Being, that manifests in each and every living thing. This and other teachings were put forth in poetry and stories that he had in his immense collection.

The only small trouble was that it came out after he died that much of that wisdom poetry had been written not by medieval bards, but by Iolo himself. He was so good at medieval Welsh poetry that the top scholars in the field didn't work it out until some outside clues helped them piece it together. While some of the work he shared to illuminate his philosophy was actual medieval poetry, a good chunk of it was not. This was of a piece with much of the early Revival - as has been very common among alternative spiritual movements, to try to make themselves appear legitimate, most individuals and groups of early druids claimed to have some kind of real link to the druids of the pre-Christian Celtic world, somehow kept alive in hiding all these long years. Sadly, all of these claims were wholly made up. Every druid was working from the same very sparse scraps of knowledge about the ancient druids, mostly gleaned from the Greeks and Romans.

In the midst of these folks having their imaginations captured by what they knew (or thought they knew) about the druids of old, a funny thing happened. Inspired by shreds of knowledge about ancient druids, filling in the gaps with a lot of Neoplatonism, and putting on funny robes and waving their arms around as they walked around stone circles, these fellows came up with a religion that filled an unmet spiritual need - a way to reach the divine through nature. In the 18th century, many of the trends of modernism were picking up speed: folks were moving to cities, the first glimmerings of the industrial revolution were being seen, and traditional ways were being questioned or even scrapped. When it came to religion, English society was offering two choices: formal, dogmatic Christianity on the one hand, or atheistic materialism on the other. The Druid Revival was made by those odd fellows who looked at that choice and said "no thanks, I'll roll my own." Neither of the major choices available had much room for Nature as a primary touchpoint with the divine. Neither option offered much in the way of working things out for yourself and holding beliefs that went against its accepted dogma. Neither worldview had much room for quirky weirdos who want to put on funny robes and welcome the dawn with a song. Druidry did.

Which brings us back to Iolo. True, his philosophy was more likely his own work than a tradition handed down from the middle ages. Also true, he wrote the poems that evoked that philosophy in symbols and gave it its aesthetic appeal. And yes, unluckily also true, he lied about these things. But let me ask you a question I have borrowed from Greer: what, precisely, is it about a charismatic, gifted poet, sharing the inspiration he gained from divine sources in verse, with a storyteller's flair for the dramatically True over the literally factual that is not quintessentially Celtic? How much more druidical can a man get? What's more, for the past nearly 300 years, those folks who read his (forged) works, meditate on the philosophy found therein, and try to live by the insights found by doing so find wisdom, comfort, and spiritual fulfillment. In other words, for as long as they were presented as the preserved teachings of the ancient druids, they were not at all authentic. Now that we can approach them as the work of a talented and likely inspired man of the 18th century, they can become authentic. But all along they have been valid - very many folks who seek along that path find something of what they're looking for.

A kidding header aside, if what I've shared about Druidry has at all sparked your interest, I've shared many possible starting points above. Most of them have John Michael Greer in common. I have not yet earned the right to refer to him as a "teacher" of mine, as I haven't worked all the way through one of his books, which is the standard he says he finds acceptable there, but my spiritual path has obviously been greatly shaped by him. He has another book that just came out, meant for total beginners called The Druid Path. I haven't checked it out yet, since I'm plodding along with his older books. You could also do worse than to just start reading his blog and/or less formal journal, at which he hosts a weekly "Ask Me Anything About Occultism," called Magic Monday for reasons I hope I don't have to spell out, which is a great way to jump into the deep end. There are a variety of Druid organizations available as well: I've mentioned the The Ancient Order of Druids in America already. Greer has stepped down as their Grand Archdruid, but they're still very much around and have a lot of resources online (spoiler alert: many of them were written by Greer). I've heard from some folks that at least parts of the organization have perhaps become caught up in the political turmoil of our times, so if that's a concern for you, consider yourself forewarned. Another organization which has been around for a long time, but about which I know even less, is The Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids. Lastly of course, though I'm far from an expert, being only two years into this journey, you can of course ask me any questions you have.

Even if you are not interested in learning any more about Druidry, I hope you will at least take a moment and appreciate that our world has space in it for a bunch of weirdos to draw inspiration from the well of the past, channel it into something that speaks to the deepest yearnings of those who cannot find what they're looking for in the mainstream, and water a tree of belief that has grown slowly but steadily, with many unalike branches. I don't know about you, but that gives me great hope that we just might be alright.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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As a kid, my folks took me and my sister to a United Methodist church most every week. I don't remember if we went every Sunday, but it was close enough, along with Sunday School. Mostly I remember doing arts and crafts about Biblical stories, and church was just one of those boring things my folks took me along to, like when my dad went to look at home theater equipment or my mom and sister went clothes shopping. But at least sometimes there were donuts.

The first somewhat serious engagement with Christianity I remember was thanks to a summer camp I attended twice. I had a friend come back from a camp called Sky Ranch and tell me how awesome it was - water slides, horseback riding, even a "Blob" like in the movie Heavyweights (to be fair - when I saw Heavyweights, I was like "just like at Sky Ranch!"). I begged my parents to let me go and they reluctantly agreed, since at age eight, this would be my first sleepaway camp. I didn't know it was a Bible camp until I got there and every meal had the teen counselors singing psalms set to guitar. Also, we talked about Biblical stories after meals and said prayers before bed. Still, I was more drawn to the zipline and the rodeo at the end of the week, but some of those psalm-songs were pretty cool, and when I went back the next year, I took a bit more interest in the Bible study sessions, but still, it was mostly about the summer camp stuff.

Not too much later, my dad's work moved us, and when we got there, we just never found a church. It was thanks to a few things: my grandmother moved in with us, my dad's job got busier, and frankly, Christianity was not all that central to our family. Looking back, I bet my folks thought that taking your kids to church was something you were supposed to do if you didn't want them to turn out screwed up.

Anyhow, the next time I bumped up against religion with any seriousness was when a friend of mine from back in Dallas was in town. He's about 6 years older than me, and I had always looked up to him as "the cool older kid." To be fair, he never blew off the hero-worshipping little kid down the alley. When I saw him in Virginia, he had gone to college, and I was in junior high, and I found out he had gotten pretty deeply into Christianity, which was a bit of a shocker. See, this is the guy who introduced me to Magic: the Gathering. He was a nerdy, smart guy into the nerdiest sorts of gaming. The other gamers I hung out with and looked up to were all some flavor of skeptical or hostile to traditional religion. My friend showed me a model of a smart person who nevertheless believed, and that made an impression on me.

Well, not too long after that, as you might not be shocked to hear, there was a girl. My first girlfriend was a Wiccan - not just adolescent rebellion, since her mom and stepdad were Wiccans, but it was still a bit shocking/weird back then. She loaned me some of the books, which spoke to my fantasy-loving heart, but I didn't get that much into them. As teenagers are wont to do, I copped some poses about the crushing weight of Christianity, but never really went anywhere past that.

We moved again, and as you might expect for a couple of 15 year olds, our vows of undying long-distance love didn't last all that long. For the rest of high school, religion wasn't that big of a deal for me. My new girlfriend had a similar bland, respectable Methodist background. One of my friends was the son of a Methodist preacher and himself a youth pastor, but mostly we quizzed each other on obscure Tolkien trivia. I had set aside the Wiccan stuff and fallen back on "Christian, I guess", if not just vaguely agnostic. It wasn't that big a deal in my life, but I didn't truly ask much about it.

My freshman year of college, I became friends with a senior. We hit it off immediately, found that we had rather a lot in common, and we're still good friends eighteen years later despite his career taking him all over Asia with visits home to the states, few, far between, and mostly dedicated to family. This friend was my second example of someone intelligent, nerdy, and thoughtful who took Christianity seriously. He organized a Religious Studies reading group that I participated in, and I joined him in laughing at some of the excesses of the Neopagan scene described in Drawing Down the Moon, debating some of the metaphysical shortcomings of hardcore dualism, but most importantly for my own development, engaging seriously with C.S. Lewis's arguments in Mere Christianity. Here was a rationale for Christianity that was even stronger than the two positive models in my own life: an atheist who had come by it the hard way, intelligent, thoughtful, extremely knowledgeable, and making arguments that were not some variation of "because this infallible book says so". I found it very compelling and launched into a briefly strong interest and belief in Christianity that slowly faded into something I consciously believed, but did not have much bearing on my day to day life.

During my time in the Army, religion didn't play much of a role in my life (oddly enough, it tended to pop up at times like right before jumping out of an airplane - "no atheists in foxholes" and all that). I wore a medallion of St. Michael the Archangel that some organization gave me (he's the patron saint of paratroopers - he descends from the sky and kicks ass, you see), but it was mostly a good luck charm and not much more.

From there, I got out and went to business school and then started working as a management consultant. Somewhere amidst the travel, the attempts to analyze and optimize everything, and struggling to work out whether what I was doing "actually meant anything, really" my belief in anything transcendent collapsed. I became more and more attracted to hardcore rationalists who were unapologetically scientific materialists (to borrow a jokey distinction from Neal Stephenson, not meaning that they were really into BMWs and fancy watches, but that they believe that the material world of the senses is the only one there is). For a time, this was exhilirating and liberating: if I'm not constrained by some arbitrary rules handed down from iron age tribesmen and the Hellenistic prophet who made a few changes, then morality, meaning, purpose, they can all be whatever I want, right?

Obviously I was retreading the same ground that Nietzche, the existentialists, and others had attempted, and you might not be too surprised to learn that it ended up leading to aimlessness and depression. That approach was also just terrible at dealing with some of the actually bad shit that came down the road, like my healthy, non-smoking mom being diagnosed with Stage IV Lung Cancer and my wife suffering a miscarriage. So, I had been convinced that this world and life was all there was, but trying to work out belief and meaning from scratch wasn't going so hot.

For dramatic purposes, I've held off introducing some influences that I really encountered earlier, but this is where they truly became significant. I began to take far more seriously Jung's contention that mythology contained deep psychological truth and meaning encoded in symbols and "beings". I thought something like "well, 'gods' may not actually be magical dudes and ladies floating out there in the sky or an alternate dimension, but they might actually be useful, nuanced personifications of inter-related concepts, impressions, and feelings, and religious ritual might be an empirically-proven technique for interacting with these aspects of the subconscious". This essay by the old-school hacker and polymath Eric S. Raymond is a pretty good explanation of the concept, and might be the first place I encountered the idea. It will also come as no surprise that this led me to find rather a lot of value in Jordan Peterson's material (at least, if you've engaged with him at any level beyond "is this guy the devil?"). His work really helped me get a more intuitive grasp of the archetypes and how to recognize them in stories and mythologies, along with what they're doing in our subconscious (for example, using archetypal analysis helped me figure out some of the weirder ends of my sexual fantasizing over the years. No I won't tell you what it was).

As you might have guessed from my interest in fantasy fiction and games, I've always been fascinated by mythology. I first encountered the idea that myths could encode sophisticated understandings of the world in a chapter of Stephenson's Cryptonomicon where a character explains how the story of the conception of Erechtheus actually says a lot about the nature of money. I've since come to figure out that that whole section was a rehashing of Jung, but hey, it succeeded in making the point very clear. Through much of the time I considered myself a Christian, I would say things like "if I got to pick what I believed, I'd believe in the Norse Gods. Valhalla sounds like a pretty rad afterlife." Now I was in the position of actually believing that I could choose what to believe, since I figured that any system of practice reasonably grounded in what we knew about actual ancient polytheist religion would work as an interface with my subconscious. So I started saying prayers to the Norse Gods. Again, I basically believed I was talking to subconscious processes put in place by evolution, but I also believed that might turn out to be useful.

Well, for a while I kept going through the motions, waiting for the results I expected. While an intellectual understanding of the archetypes was proving very useful in extracting significance from literature and mythology, my prayers and rituals (practiced alone, and though with regularity, not particular energy) were not really doing much for me. So, when my mom died and we had our first daughter not long after, I tried to keep up with these practices for a while, but they fell by the wayside, which was okay, because I was fine. I had whiskey.

According to my wife and family, I was not fine. Sure, I was mostly keeping up with my job and being a new dad, but I didn't seem myself, and I didn't seem okay. I responded as many folks do: no, you're wrong, I am okay, and I'm going to go back to my whiskey. I eventually agreed to see a therapist, mostly to placate my wife, and that has been helpful, but didn't have as much to do with my spiritual development as some other things (if your friends or family tell you they think you should talk to a therapist, consider giving it a try - you don't have to go back if you don't like it!)

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the "other things" were drugs. Likely not exactly how you think, though. A few months after my first daughter was born, I went to a friend's bachelor party. While there, I tried LSD for the first time. I had been reading and listening a lot about psychedelics and their potential for psychological growth and healing, and I wasn't especially interested in it as a "party drug", so I was a bit surprised that my first encounter was pretty much that. Part of what convinced me was that the fellow who brought it is knowledgeable, careful, interested in the spiritual/psychological uses of the drug, and a medical professional to boot. So I started out with a half dose, didn't feel much of anything and took another half dose, and ended up having a pleasant, but fairly minor experience, with some bendy wood grain and my face looking odd in the mirror, followed by a complete inability to sleep.

What the hell does that have to do with my spiritual development? Well, not much. If anything, I was a bit disillusioned with the transformative promise I had built up in my mind for psychedelics. But it was enjoyable and I hadn't experienced anything remotely approaching the negatives people warn about, so when a few months later some friends of mine invited me to take some mushrooms on a camping trip, I said "that sounds great". This time, I was more comfortable with taking a bigger dose, we were in beautiful natural surroundings, and I was entirely with some of my closest friends, rather than a mixed group of folks I know well and not so well. Well, again, no ground-shaking insights, but I had an extremely pleasant afternoon where I enjoyed the sights, sounds, and feelings of a cold stream on a hot afternoon in the woods with my friends. I did have a small insight, as I was "coming down", though. For those of you who have never experienced it, one of the weirder things about psychedelics (apparently mushrooms even more than LSD) is that as they start to wear off, it comes in waves - you feel euphoric and things are moving that you know aren't really moving, and then a moment later everything is normal, and you think "oh, okay, I guess that was a fun ride that's over, now", but then you start noticing some weird stuff again. They're like waves that gradually reduce and go back out to sea. Well, this effect was far more noticeable than on my prior trip, and so I found myself wondering "how will I really know when it's over for good?" Oh, I should have mentioned - these drugs also reeeaaallly mess with your sense of time. But in the midst of "is this it? Whoah, guess not. Wait, is this it now?" I came to the realization that it didn't really matter when it ended, because the value of the experience had been independent of its finitude. A concept I had encountered plenty of times in Taoist and Buddhist philosophy, but not one that I had really "grokked" without some chemical help.

Okay, okay, I know, that starts to hint at something vaguely spiritual, but it doesn't really have to do with religion, does it? I had to lay out the first two experiences for the third (and so far, last) to make sense as a crucial step in my journey. As I mentioned, I had had some hopes about psychedelics before trying them, and so far, my experiences had veered far more to "a good time with my friends" than "mind-expanding insight that shakes your beliefs to their core". So when the next opportunity presented itself at another campout, I pursued the straightforward strategy of "more dakka". I took a medium size dose of mushrooms, and an hour or two into that, I took a dose of LSD, and within an hour of that, I took another. Well, much of the experience was as before: me discoursing at greater than necessary length on the military history of the Roman empire, giggling uncontrollably at fart jokes, staring transfixedly at natural beauty. At some point, though, I laid down and looked up at the stars, and as they began to dance and swirl and resolve themselves into crystalline patterns, three major things happened: 1. I felt overwhelming, but ultimately positive, grief about my mother, 2. I had an insight about thinking versus feeling, and 3. for a moment, I lost my usual sense of "self" without being unconscious.

Point number 2 was largely brought about by point number 1, and is the main one I want to focus on here, though point 3 might have some interesting implications to dive into at some point. My whole life I've been a "smart guy" - I started talking early, I read above my age level, I got put in gifted and talented classes as soon they were an option, and so on and so forth. Most of the problems in my life had been the kind that smarts make easier: once you understand how something works, you can often "skip to the end" without doing the intermediate steps. If someone is trying to illuminate a concept through examples and the first two make it clear, you don't need the next five. If I can toot my own horn, I'm especially good at this kind of inferential thinking, so I've sought out situations in life where I can excel by being good at it. Well, the powerful grief I felt for my mom on this trip made me realize that this was a trick I had learned to over-apply throughout my life. I thought that because I "understood" my grief, I was done. I could skip right to the end of moving on, with occasional sadness. That realization made me realize I do this all the time - "oh, I understand that working out is important for being happy and healthy, that's the same as actually doing it everyday, right?" That's an intentionally ridiculous example when put explicitly, but some part of me more or less thinks this about anything where the experience, the doing of it is more important than understanding it in principle.

Okay, so thank you for bearing with me for that brief foray into psychedelic "trip reports", which are always less compelling to literally everyone else than the one who experienced them. Back to your regularly-scheduled examination of intellectual influences. So, here I was doing better psychologically and personally - I wasn't drinking so much anymore, I was doing even better as a dad, taking care of more things around the house, seeming more myself, all that good stuff. So I wasn't any more interested in spiritual topics like philosophy, mythology, religion, and so forth than I always had been when I read a book called World Full of Gods by John Michael Greer.

My best friend from the Army introduced me to Greer a few years back, and some of his writings had been interesting and useful to me from the standpoint of approaching religion as an exercise in archetypes, which at this point in our narrative, was still what I believed, but I wasn't very actively practicing. World Full of Gods sets out to make a case for polytheism, and to greatly boil down a well-written and argued book, it rests on two main arguments against atheism: 1. most atheist arguments against religion are hopelessly tangled up in its history of arguing against culturally dominant monotheism (mostly Christianity, with a side helping of Islam in more recent years), 2. the scientific materialist worldview underlying most atheism rests on a key premise that is not self-evident. I found 1. interesting, but less important, as I was already largely comfortable with the idea that "religion" need not necessarily mean "Christianity" and most of the arguments that had brought me along to atheism had relied less on "the argument from evil" ("how could an ominibenevolent, omnipotent, omniscient God allow evil to exist in the world?") and more on "things that don't cash out to verifiable predictions about the material world aren't falsifiable and so can't be usefully reasoned about".

It was the second argument that got me thinking. Greer argues that the worldview of scientific materialism is based on a fairly simple premise: the only things that count as "real" are those things sensed by the five senses. This sounds pretty uncontroversial at first glance, especially in our modern society, where the scientific materialist worldview is so much the default. Notice a few things that are left out, though: imagination. The experience of feeling something. Thoughts. Now, sure, you can arrive at approximations of these things that are sensible to the five senses: I can think words in my thoughts and then type them into my laptop, put them somewhere that you can see them with your eyeballs, and if you and someone else read this, you can both be pretty confident that I thought these words, and since words and letters have a pretty tight correlation, that's likely pretty good. But what about less clear cut cases? If I describe to you (to borrow another image from Stephenson, this time from Anathem) a "purple nerve-gas farting dragon", it seems rather likely that an image pops into your head of what this creature might look like. Does it look the same as the one I'm imagining? Much harder to say. Maybe if you and I are both accomplished artists, we might draw what we see in our minds eye and compare those drawings, but that wouldn't capture the emotional associations you have with the image (funny? scary? a blend?). Even if we hooked both of us up to the most advanced neuroscanners ever invented and had both of us imagine the dragon, the sameness or differentness of the shapes or lines on the screen wouldn't tell you what it was like to imagine the dragon.

Okay, I've treated the argument fairly briefly here, and maybe not to your satisfaction, but basically as Greer presented it was enough for me to go "huh, okay, some parts of human experience that seem wildly important and self-evident aren't actually adequately grounded out in what is traditionally considered falsifiable." You may or may not be with me on this point, but for now, we'll proceed with the narrative as if I found it convincing at the time, because I did (and still do). Greer then points out that almost every human culture for all of human history has had experiences in this non-sensory realm (or at least, partially in this realm) that they regard as self-evident and obviously real, and these experiences are of various beings that have various levels of personhood, power, and knowledge, and may or may not be tied to material things like trees, rocks, animals, and so forth. Basically, it boils down to this: the claim that religious experiences are "just in your head" ignores the crucial importance of "just". It is weighted with tremendous metaphysical load - if something happens in your imagination it is not "really real".

So, I now had a profound personal insight I am bad at things that are not intellectually, linguistically describable, and an intellectual argument that this blind spot might be exactly where religious experience happens to live. I decided to conduct an experiment: I would resume prayer and religious ritual, along with a new practice called "discursive meditation", and as far as I was able, I would try to believe the Gods to whom I was praying and about whom I was thinking were "really real" even if my only experience of them would be "in my head", and I'd see how it went for a while. The short answer is that about two weeks after starting this experiment, I had a profoundly strong religious experience of being visited by a Goddess and briefly hosting a God. It was amazing, wonderful, and utterly recognizable to anyone who has read about religious experiences. It was at once one of the most singular experiences I've had and also completely mundane to most humans for most of human history.

Okay, so if you wanted to pin me down, what do I truly believe now, today, as of this writing? Well, first and most importantly, I believe that what you do is far weightier than what you believe. By which I mean that I don't put a lot of weight on what thoughts you (or I) hold in your (or my) head about how Life, the Universe, and Everything tick. Letting myself be open to the ontological reality of non-physical consciousnesses outside of my body might have been a necessary step to getting where I am, or it might not have been. Sitting my ass down and bethinking on the myths was definitely needed to get me where I am. So while I am going to try to give as short a run down of what I believe as I can, I want to put the warning ahead of it that it is subject to change and far less important to me than keeping up with prayer, ritual, meditation, and divination.

That first point stems from the next biggest chunk of my belief, which I've also gotten mostly from Greer: the cosmos is way bigger and way weirder than our social primate brains can ever hope to understand with any great fidelity. Even the bare fact of how big all the stuff outside of the Earth is, how truly far away it is, is literally unthinkable - we can't know it, the best we can do is approximate. So if physical reality is that hard to understand, the spiritual realities that underlie and go beyond it must be even more unfathomable. Once again, the best we can do is get the rough shape of it.

Speaking of "getting the rough shape of it," despite the inadequacy of our current state of development for truly understanding Being, I also think that we can get glimpses of what's going on under the hood of material reality through a variety of spiritual practices. I think that every long-lasting spiritual tradition has had some insight into the eternal truths of the universe, but nothing so simplistic as "all religions are basically the same." Instead, since all of Being (including its spiritual elements) is big, weird, and complex, I think that different spiritual traditions get glimpses of different bits of the unfathomably complex big picture. Think the wise men and the elephant, and that's pretty close.

For my own practice, gnosis is far weightier than episteme - as I said above, I can't truly ground my religious experiences, including the first big one, in any kind of "proof" that would mean anything to anyone else, or even to myself, intellectually. I have to rely on the experience itself. If I've had a meaningful experience that makes me and my life better, well, what else do I truly need to know about it? The flip side of this, of course, is that these experiences have been mine, and I don't presume to put them on anyone else. By the same token, if other folks have their own, wildly different, spiritual beliefs/practices/experiences, who am I to tell them how to think/feel about those?

Okay, okay, I hear you asking "yeah, but what do you believe?" Again, with the caveats above in mind, let me try to do the best I can. I think that all of the cosmos is a manifestation of something divine, and that consciousness is in some sense primary to matter. I think all consciousness is a part of that fundamental divine, but it is importantly differentiated. Something like how Niagra Falls, Lake Erie, the Niagra River, and Lake Ontario are all a part of the same system of water, but each has its own differentiated reality. I think some of these differentiated manifestations of consciousness sometimes embody themselves here in the material plane as sundry beings, and that some manifestations of consciousness don't need material bodies. The former would be "lifeforms" and the latter would be "Gods, spirits, and so forth."

I find old school occult philosophy a helpful way of making sense of the world if you accept the reality of non-physical things and of certain weird phenomena that folks have been saying happened to them for hundreds, or even thousands of years, but that the modern materialist worldview says are just plain wrong (see ghosts, for one). This provides a framework for making sense of some of the above. Gods, Goddesses, spirits, and so forth are beings that exist on non-material planes and mostly interact with us through our presence on non-material planes. Maybe the most important of these for religious practice is the astral plane - the realm of imagination, desire, and visualization. The short version is that I think Gods, Goddesses, and Spirits mostly take up shapes/sounds/emotional impressions on the astral plane as a way to interact with us on a level we can all access. Do Gods sometimes take on material forms? Maybe, I've never met one! But I find the idea of astral imagery and it sometimes being "inhabited" a useful one.

Let's do an example. Do me a favor and picture a burly, red-haired, thick-bearded man with a big heart. He loves his wife and his kids, he has a great thirst for ale and hunger for meat, and his temper is a bit short. He's good at fighting, and mostly he's not angry about it, he finds it joyful. But his wrath is terrible when awakened, even if it passes quickly. As you might suspect if you've been reading me for any amount of time, I just described (some of) how Thunor/Thor is usually imagined. Now, if I say "picture this feisty red-haired warrior smashing some trolls with his hammer," you likely don't have a very strong religious response - you don't feel the presence of the divine/numinous, even though you can clearly see in your mind's eye Thunor smashing some trolls. Certain occult traditions would call this mental image an "astral vehicle," and as this example likely makes clear, it's at least somewhat generated individually - I may have described some features to you, which means I shaped the image, but you did the actual imagining, and if we could somehow print out your mental picture and mine, they would almost certainly differ, even though a third person might look at them and think "they were going for the same guy." Well, I think that when you pray, do rituals, or otherwise seriously engage with religious practice, you bring your own imaginings, likely informed by a tradition of what to imagine, to the table, but then to the degree it is a true religious experience, someone else breaths life into that imagining. So if I just ask you to imagine Thunor with the above characteristics smashing trolls, likely nobody's home but your own imagination. On the other hand, if you earnestly pray to Thunor, light a candle, give a drink offering, and quiet your mind waiting for a response, when a mental image pops up of Thunor giving you some advice, that might be your imagined image ("astral vehicle") being animated by an actual outside-of-you non-physical consciousness.

Since I believe in benevolent non-physical consciousnesses, I have to admit to the possibility of malevolent ones too, and everything in between. While I think there are very powerful non-physical beings on our side (Gods, angels, spirits and such), I also think there are a lot of more middling ones that surpass us in some ways and are less than us in others who are more ambiguous, and then there must be some very bad beings that again, surpass us in some ways, but are less than us in others. The word you may be stopping yourself from thinking for this last group is "demon." I don't know that I've ever met a full-on demon, but it seems naive to suppose that every serious religious tradition on the planet is just wrong that there are some non-physical beings out there who are bad news and best avoided.

Anyhow, the benevolent non-physical beings that I feel the greatest kinship to are the Germanish Gods and Goddesses, most of all as seen through an Anglo-Saxon lens. I can't really explain this, except that they speak to me aesthetically, and I've come to believe that that's an under-appreciated aspect of religious feeling: what do you find beautiful/gripping/moving? I've come to have great respect for the Jewish and Christian religions, their teachings, and ceremonies, but imaginatively they leave me cold. I think that's a reasonably good sign they're not for me - at least not right here and right now. But that in no way means I think they're invalid for everyone (see above about gnosis) - if anything, I'm far more sympathetic to religious Christians, Jews, and Muslims (and every other major religion) than I was when I was a materialist.

I also suspect that reincarnation is a big part of how the world works. I don't have any past-life memories or anything, but thinkers and writers I respect say they do, and spiritual traditions that include reincarnation have proven worthwhile to me, and there are a lot of traditions that feature reincarnation. I was shocked when I finally got around to reading Plato's Republic last year to find near the end a detailed description of reincarnation. Somehow, the fact that literally the most famous work in all of western philosophy talked in depth about reincarnation was unknown to me - not only an educated person, not only a liberal arts major, but a Classics major - I studied Greek and Latin history, culture, and literature! Obviously I did a crap job if I got through college without reading Republic, but still, I hadn't even heard of the "Myth of Er". Once I did read it, though, I was like "holy shit, how did I have no idea that the West's most famous work of philosophy talks about reincarnation? It must just be me." And so I went online to see what scholars thought. And you know what I found? A bunch of folks trying to work out what Plato/Socrates meant allegorically, metaphorically, and so forth (that link above continues in this vein). Basically no one took seriously the idea that Plato/Socrates was trying to relate something about how the world actually works. So anyway, I don't have strong evidence for reincarnation or anything, but once you start poking around, the belief in it is way more widespread than you might think if you've grown up with an American protestant worldview.

So, what falls out of all of the above? I believe that there is more to me and to you than our bodies. We have an everlasting soul that was around before we were born and will be around after we die. Other non-bodily Beings are trying to either help or hurt these souls on our way. Those souls come down in the material world to learn its lessons life after life, and all of us will eventually learn every lesson we need, moving on to some new way of being. There are some practices, like religion, magic, and so forth, that can help you learn some of those lessons faster and less painfully. Pretty much all religious folks are onto at least a portion of this, but none of us have the whole picture - as such it pays to be open-minded and welcoming to religious folks, but also not to be too shaken by meeting folks whose practices are very different from your own.

Part of why I've gone into all of this is because these days, most folks either have no religious belief at all or very superficial beliefs. There are very clearly a lot of problems that stem from that, and some folks look at those problems and conclude that the way forward can only be a return to traditional (meaning Christian, at least in America) beliefs. Since those traditional beliefs don't especially resonate with me, I've wanted to share that there are at least a handful of weirdos with strong, sincere religious beliefs that might have more in common with traditional beliefs than most old school Christians would initially grant. I like having the freedom to practice my own very idiosyncratic religious pursuits rather than having that baby tossed out with the bathwater of materialist agnosticism and atheism. In other words, theists of all stripes: I am your friend! There's a bunch of weird stuff out there, and while some of it is very bad, not all of it is.

Since then I've kept up the prayer, ritual, and meditation, and it has continued to be hugely beneficial to me. I don't feel like I have all the answers, far from it, but I do feel like there's something meaningful and worthwhile beyond myself and my day-to-day concerns. So I consider myself a believing polytheist these days, which would have been pretty shocking to me even a couple of years ago. The experience of things so flatly denied by the worldview I held then has been rather a shake-up: I have to rethink my views on rather a wide range of topics, since my nuts-and-bolts ideas about what's "really real" have taken a substantial adjustment.

Of course, I'm also left with the lingering doubts you might expect. Hell, that you might be feeling as more forcefully than "doubts" right at the moment: isn't it more plausible this is some kind of wish fulfillment? Just because it's common throughout history and across cultures doesn't mean it's accurate - it could just mean our brains are all fundamentally flawed the same way. Even if you're convinced of something religious, isn't polytheism primitive or unsophisticated? If you start taking unverifiable thoughts too seriously, isn't that called being crazy?

To all of which I can only respond that some part of me acknowledges the possibility of any of those being true. The whole reason scientific materialism grounds out in the five senses and is suspicious of what can't be verified by them is because you can arrive at much more definite, easier-to-agree-upon conclusions. And the stuff that you can figure out with those more definite conclusions is pretty damn impressive. See: twentieth century physics. It's a useful way of thinking that has done a lot of good for the world, and I'm by no means saying that anyone should abandon the methods or hard-won insights of such careful thinking. What I am saying is that since I have allowed myself to take more seriously those parts of my experience that are not fully describable/verifiable by such thinking, I have been happier and more fulfilled, with a greater sense of meaning than I've ever experienced before. So, if it is a delusion, it's an awfully useful one.

I'll leave you with the ancient wisdom of otherworldly gurus, wise sages, and elder hackers alike: YMMV.

Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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Did this post spark any thoughts? Have anything to ask or share? Feel free to send me an email at jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail.com, and I'll add your thoughts below. You can also comment on the dreamwidth post.

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First off, what are we even talking about when I say "authenticity?" A lot of folks have meant a lot of things by this word, so I'm going to borrow a way of pinning it down from one of the works that has shaped my thinking, this post from John Michael Greer:

Authenticity is a matter of whether something has the source it claims to have; validity is a matter of whether it works.

See that word "validity?" Keep it in mind for later, as it's the supporting actor to our star. For now, though, you can see this meaning of "authenticity" rests on where did something come from, and a bit less so on whether the wellspring from which it comes has the right to bestow the name it calls itself. Here's a couple of somewhat silly examples: Greg Graffin starts a new band, and it doesn't sound much like Bad Religion, but he says "this is punk rock." Most folks would go "okay, yeah, I can hear that." On the other hand, some unknown 15 year old gets together four of his best friends, they learn to sing in lovely harmony, and they put together some stunning dance moves that dazzle all the girls in their high school, but since their oh-so-harmonized and carefully-choreographed lyrics are about anarchy, they say that what they're doing is "punk" - we might not be as likely to go along with that.

Or take something near and dear to my Texan heart: chili. If your Texan grandmother learned how to make chili from her range cook daddy, even if she does something most folks don't with chili, we're not gonna fight her when she says "this is real chili." If a hip Paris chef dreams up a brand new spicy vegan soup and calls it chili, we might feel a little otherwise.

What I'm getting at here is to build on Greer's meaning a bit: our high school friends could say "we're punk because our friend Bill said we are," which might be wholly true. Their punk brand comes from Bill, so they have the source they say they do, but for us to work out whether we buy it, we have to know who Bill is and what makes him a rightful giver of the much-sought mark of "punk."

Okay, so are we on the same leaf about what we mean by "authenticity" for today's talk? Good. Now that we know what we're talking about, we get to an even weightier asking: why do we care? Isn't it kinda open-and-shut that it's a good thing for something to come from where it says it does, and for that somewhere to be somehow rightful? As you may have gathered from the name of this post, I don't think it's open-and-shut, but authenticity can be very helpful, so let's take a moment to talk about what authenticity can do for us.

At its heart, authenticity is a rule of thumb for working out whether we can trust someone or something - is he who he says he is? Did folks truly believe this stuff back in the day? If a work tells you what to do or how to be, by what right does it do so? Put bluntly, things that are not authentic are often lying somehow. If a set of teachings doesn't truly come from where it says it does, how do you know whether anything else in those teachings is true? If the wellspring of a belief is somehow not rightful (legitimate), then maybe that belief isn't either. And if a belief is new, how do we know what effects it will have on those who adopt it in the long run? I've stated all these as problems with the inauthentic, but lets put them positively for the authentic: ideally, a tradition or set of beliefs that is authentic should come from where it says it does, that source should have some claim to validity with regard to its teachings, and ideally, the tradition holding these teachings going back to this source should have been around for a good, long time to see how it responds to the world as it actually is, rather than as its imagined.

This is all rather airy, so let's come down to ground a bit. Take Catholicism. Catholicism says that it is the body of beliefs, practices, and teachings that began with Jesus Christ, as built on by the Church for the last 2,000 years. Now, as for the wellspring, of course some folks don't think there was a living, breathing man named Jesus, much less that he was the son of God and God Himself in the flesh. But we do know that at least that in the first hundred years CE, a new set of beliefs and worship got started in Judea and began to spread around the Roman Empire, and that all of today's Christians, including the Catholic Church, can follow an a unbroken path back to that set of beliefs and worship. How about rightfulness? Well, clearly not everyone acknowledges the rightfulness of the Catholic Church to settle things about Godlore (exhibit A: Martin Luther), but the Church does have a long-running and fairly readily grasped way of working out who gets to say authoritative things about the Church, understanding of holy writing, and changes to ways of doing things. And again, there's a clear throughline for this way of doing things going back 2,000 years. Therefore, most folks would have very little trouble acknowledging mainstream Catholicism as an "authentic" set of beliefs. Even if you don't think they are right, you also likely don't think they are fake.

On the other hand, let's take Scientology. The wellspring was a fairly, but by no means wildly, well-known and well-liked mid-twentieth century science fiction author who said that he gained insight into the make-up of Being while working with folks through a kind of therapy he had worked up. Said author was heard by friends and family talking about how religion was the way to make money. Sometime later, after a bankruptcy, he shifted from calling his therapy a scientific way to a spiritual one, and was hit with a handful of criminal charges as his new church grew. Said church was officially incorporated as a religious organization in 1953. The way the church works out who gets to settle what is religiously true, how those settlements get made, and even what those settlements are is well-known for its murkiness and kept to a narrow group of folks high up in the church. From all this, many folks (myself included) do not see Scientology as all that authentic, whatever else it may or may not be. I'll leave it up to you whether the rule of thumb "don't trust Scientology since they seem not to be authentic" is worth following here, but I know where I land.

I want to talk more about why we are so keen to look at authenticity as if it were validity, but first I want to talk a bit about some of the turns my own spiritual path has taken thus far and what it has taught me about authenticity and validity.

Okay, so we've laid out how authenticity can be a helpful shortcut for thinking about some of the things we care about in weighing a religious or spiritual belief. To get at why I think authenticity is not enough by itself, and sometimes needs to give way to some other ways of judging a set of teachings, though, I think it will be helpful to talk a bit about what I've done and where authenticity has fit in with that.

As you may remember, not so long ago, I was pretty won over by atheistic materialism. If you pushed me, I'd say that I didn't know for sure, and there wasn't really any way to do so, but it was smarter to start out needing to be talked out of the thought that there was nothing but the material world, rather than the other way around. Even though (because of?) this, I still found myself drawn to myth, magic, and other spiritual things, most of all the weirder stuff. Then, an essay by a thinker I had long looked up to, Eric S. Raymond, helped bring together some fuzzy hunches I had into a way of looking at the world that hung together. Namely, that religious or magical practices might do something, whether or not the metaphysics behind the ritual were what they said they were. For one materialist take on how magic might "work," even if not in the way or for the reasons thought by those doing the magic, check out this tale of invulnerability potions against bullets in Africa. Anyhow, I reckoned that if magic was good enough for arch-materialist Raymond, it was good enough for me, and so I had "permission" to check out magic and weirdo religion while keeping my rational materialist way of seeing myself and the world.

So, the frame through which I looked at this stuff was something like this: 1. almost all humans in all steads for all time have had some kind of magical/religious ritual, 2. ritual seems to do some good things that you can't get without it, and 3. ritual seems to reach the nethermind (subconscious) in ways that don't always make sense to the speaking, wakeful (conscious) mind. In this frame, it seemed straightforward that I needed a set of practices that 1. spoke to me aesthetically, as that would shape how strongly my nethermind would answer to it, 2. that fit with Jungian psychology, which seemed to have the best grasp on the very deep, dark places of the mind, and 3. came from a time and stead in the past that took it seriously, since that ought to mean it works. Well, listing these benchmarks make it sound like I went through some thoroughgoing search, poking and testing myth and magic from around the world, but no. Instead, it was always clearly Germanish myth. Even when I was Christian back in college, I would "joke" that if Christianity weren't true, I'd want to go to Valhalla. Luckily, all elder polytheistic sets of beliefs fit with Jungian psychology and had been held by large groups of folks, any of them would have met those benchmarks. That being said, as you might have gathered from what I said about Raymond's work above, I had landed on what some folks mean when they say "soft polytheism" - I thought that the sundry Gods, Goddesses, and other beings were sub-processes of my nethermind shared with the rest of mankind. Powerful? Yes. Maybe scary sometimes? Yes. "Real" in any way other than "all of mankind evolved these same personified shapes of thought?" Not so much.

On that footing, I started doing a lot of reading - learning the myths, reading about what today's worshippers did, and a lot about the Runes. Whenever a writer grounded what he was talking with the Gods as "really real," I'd say to myself "yeah, sure thing, buddy," but even though I didn't think their way of understanding the world was right, I worked to keep a fairly open mind to the thought that they might know a thing or two about how to get the outcomes I wanted. So, I started saying prayers. I started giving beer to the Gods and wights (spirits). At some point, I read this set of essays by John Michael Greer about what's needed for a well-rounded daily magical practice. Once again, I thought his thoughts on what to do would be helpful, but I didn't buy why he thought it worked. One bit of rede (advice) he gave was to "pick a course of magical study and do it 'by the book' start to end," rather than making changes or cobbling together your own thing. This seemed fair to me, so I started in on the The Nine Doors of Midgard from the Rune Gild. I bethought (meditated). I prayed. I cast the Runes. I did daily Hammer Rituals. I followed everything the book said to do.

All along the way, when it came to weighing what to bring into my understanding of the myths or into my practice, authenticity seemed like the only way to work out what was worthwhile or not that made sense. What do the writings from the middle ages say? What does archaeology tell us about the practices of Iron Age Germanish folks? Was this practice a later borrowing from Christianity, or a heathen practice that kept going into Christianity? Anything that smacked of being lately made up, borrowing from other folkways or sets of teachings, or lacking tokens that it was thought or done in the Iron Age or early middle ages was at best a patch to fill in the unlucky gaps of a wondrous, fully authentic reconstruction of the beliefs of elder times.

There was just one problem.

It felt wholly like talking to myself. I'd say prayers and get no answer, not even a feeling or hunch I could put down to my nethermind. I'd do rituals that didn't seem to do anything and I didn't feel anything while doing them. The one bit that did seem to be working was Runecasting. I would get some insights on the things I asked, but it felt more like seeing something more clearly that I already knew than like tapping into a spring of timeless wisdom. I kept on with the practices for a while, hoping I'd get to where they did something, but between my mom dying and my first daughter being born, it got harder and harder to spend 30-45 minutes of my day talking to myself, until I just stopped.

In the meantime, I had kept on reading Greer's blog, Ecosophia. Here was this guy following a rather inauthentic religion*, Revival Druidry, seemingly in full earnest, calmly and unruffably putting forth the literal, non-metaphorical reality of non-bodily thinking beings like Gods, and yet on everything else, he kept on making sense. His takes on what happened in the past and why it came about were insightful and even-handed. On politics, he was good at spotting what was wrong with every side of a given issue. On spiritual matters, his rede was always down-to-earth, principled, and clearly wise. So, I thought "why not read his book on many-godded (polytheistic) godlore, World Full of Gods." As I've talked about elsewhere, this book shook my atheistic materialist worldview and made me wonder if maybe the trouble with all the practices I had tried was that I knew I was faking it the whole time.

*(Speaking on behalf of Greer, he has never said that his religion goes back to pre-Christian druids of Celtic lands, and as the leader of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, he made that straightforwardness the official policy of the organization. So he has always spoken of his religion authentically, but for many years, Revival Druids did say that they were the holders of a set of teachings from elder times.)

So, I told myself I'd do an experiment. I'd spend a few weeks, maybe a few months, being at least open to the thought that the Gods were really real, not just archetypes, not just tides of the nethermind, but Beings outside of me with Their own goals, ends, and so forth. I once again took up JMG's "magical tripod," this time with his Heathen Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram plus Heathen Middle Pillar for my ritual, some guided threads on the Runes from The Teutonic Way: Magic for bethinking, and a daily Runecasting for divination. The practices weren't that unlike what I had tried to do with the Nine Doors of Midgard, but the mindset very much was.

Think on my shock when, after two weeks of this, I have a very strong religious experience, with shaking and tingling all over my body and leaving me with an unshakable ecstatic feeling. I won't share the details, as it was very personal, but it's enough to say that I had set myself an experiment to see if "openness to the existence of the Gods" shaped the outcomes I got from religious and magical practice, and this was a screaming, blinding "YES!" that I couldn't overlook.

I said the practices weren't that unalike, but did you heed something I slipped in there? These practices were much less authentic - The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram is a Golden Dawn ritual, which drew heavily fromn Eliphas Levi's rituals in The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, which was itself a re-working of Renaissance magical practices, which mostly derived from Late Hellenistic practices, which said they came from Egypt, who got them from the God Thoth-Hermes. The Middle Pillar exercise is built on the Tree of Life of the Cabala, which again, the Golden Dawn made heavy use of thanks to Levi bringing it back, after it had been used widely by Renaissance Christian occultists, who got it from High Medieval/Renaissance Jewish occultists, who re-worked it from earlier Hellenistic Neoplatonic models, who got it from who knows where/came up with it.

Notice what's missing? Anything at all to do with Iron Age or early middle ages Germanish practices. The only link was that in these rituals, I called upon the names of Germanish Gods, brought to mind things from Germanish myths, and visualized the Runes at some steps. And yet these practices led to a life-changing happening and a seemingly-abiding shift in metaphysical outlook.

So, clearly, authenticity wasn't the end-all, be-all I had thought it to be.

So how did I, along with many others, end up seeing authenticity as the way to weigh the worth of spiritual teachings and practices? Well, one thing is that if you aren't following the religion that you grew up with (and at some point, maybe even if you are), you have to work out "why do I believe this and not one of the zillions of other religions out there?" This is a struggle that most folks in most times have not had to deal with - you believed whatever your folk believed, the end. Today's world gives us the freedom to do otherwise, but with the high cost of working out what to believe, why to believe it, and what to do with it. Authenticity is one way to go through the beliefs out there and clump them together or pull them apart. As such, authenticity can work as a benchmark for categorization.

Now, categorization is very helpful - it's one of mankind's key thinking skills, and a lot of what we have done is built on it. So I'm not crapping on categorization. The trouble is that there is not, and never can be, a way of categorizing that is not grounded in some sense of what is more (and what is less) worthwhile - in other words, in values. Scott Alexander has a classic post on this called The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories. You should read it, but one of the long-running examples in the post is the made-up struggle of a Biblical-times Judean working out what category to put a whale in. Folks today see a whale called a "fish" in the Bible and think "hahah, how stupid, a whale is so clearly a mammal! Those backwards dopes!" Alexander, though, talks us through why that seems so clear to us and wouldn't even have occurred to some of the folks in Judea. Bring to mind, if you will, a Judean functionary given the task of gathering taxes and tariffs on seafood brought in by fishermen. When one of these fishermen brings in the biggest damned flippered thing ever dragged out of the ocean and is ready to make his riches by carving nearly endless filets off of its bulk, do you think our tax collector friend is going to find it very funny when the fisherman says "that's no fish, it's a mammal!"? Likely not, right? If you mainly care about understanding which animals share their forebears with whales, maybe because you are an evolutionary scientist, then a cladistic understanding that Whales are mammals that went in the water and turned all funny is helpful. On the other hand, if you want to make sure that the king gets taxes on every swimming thing that folks haul out of the water to eat, and the law says to tax "fish," you better believe it's more helpful to think of the whale as a fish (to you, in that stead, in that time).

What makes this still tougher, though, is that authenticity works both as a benchmark for "does belief A belong in this category or not?" as well as a grounding for worth (authentic is better than inauthentic). If it's only one such weight of worth, then okay, no trouble. But what about when you give it the last say on what is worthwhile and what is not? What if it becomes your terminal value? Working out how to think about terminal values is hard - you can't see if it brings about some other good, you can't weigh it like something with a body - everything else you deem worthwhile grounds out in your terminal value. If you want more of a feeling for how hard this is, see all of Western philosophy. Really. It's that hard. But authenticity makes for a welcoming terminal value, most of all to Americans of this day and age, and so many of us find ourselves building our other values off of it, without knowing that's what we're up to. How come?

I think there are three main things that lead us to turn to authenticity as a terminal value, most of all for spiritual things. Going roughly from what we are most aware of to what we're least aware of. First, authenticity feels like a terminal value you can get behind pretty strongly, even with a wholly materialist outlook. Did this set of teachings come from where it said it did? If yes, huzzah! It's worthwhile. If not, great! Into the bin with you! Either way, no need for metaphysical hoo-hah. Now, of course, if you have two teachings that both come from where they say they do, how do you pick between them? What makes one better than the other? Are the teachings from Tibet in 1400 CE better than the ones I came up with last week? How come? Both come from where they said they do, so how do we tell them apart? Whoops, looks like you have to use some values besides authenticity. Oh well.

Next, authenticity is deeply interwoven with how the West has always dealt with spiritual validity. I hope I'm not shocking anyone when I let slip that for a little more than a thousand years, if you were in the West, and you wanted to know "is this spiritually valid?" the answer was mostly "well, what does the Bible say about it?" Yeah, yeah, I know, there was a lot more to it than that, most of all before the Reformation, and most Christians did not take the Bible as literally as some fundamentalists do today, but even still, all valid spiritual truth was seen as coming from God, and the Bible was seen as the word of God, so almost all askings about spiritual validity came down to whether they were backed up in the one authentic wellspring of truth, the Bible. I think that this habit of thought and belief has become very deeply impressed in our psyches and ways of thinking about things. If I can bring up another Greer work, we greatly prefer episteme over gnosis. Many "free thinking" pagans, New Agers, and whatever else have traded one "only well-spring of all truth" for another.

And the last that I'd bring up, the one of which we're least aware, is that I think authenticity soothes our roaring insecurity. Thanks to modernity, and globalization and what not, everyone has somewhat had to deal with feeling cut off from deep, true beliefs and folkways. As I said above, most of mankind to ever live just believed what their folk believed, their folk had believed it since before anyone could remember, and what they believed was linked with the lands where they lived. There was a weight and a depth there, such that a lot of practices kept on well past when anyone knew what they meant or why they did them, but that was just how it had always been, and so they held onto some strength. But modernity has messed with all that, and in America, it's hard to say that anyone other than the American Indians ever had that. We're a new country full of folks who ju