We become what we worship

“A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.” -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Conformity

“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested, - ‘But these impulses may be from below, not from above.’ I replied, ‘They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.’ No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.”

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

This is what you shall do

“this is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning god, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem . . .”

-- walt whitman

Seidhr for me

I’m not really so naive that I don’t see the connections I touched on in my entry Seidhr today, August 5, 2004. My (American Indian) connection to ravens and those dreams about flying horses that haunted me for so many years have parallels in Norse religion. I can never bring myself to be fully candid with my friends when I talk about the dream life I have in the so-called parallel universe. Frankly, seidhr scares me. Not surprising, considering Ridge’s problems, or what I think his problems were.

I’ve been exploring some Internet sites on the subject of seidhr. Many of them, even the heathen sites that trumpet their own authenticity, are talking about nothing more than a recreational guided visualization. But, I also see a few that have a ring of authenticity. There really are people out there who are reaching levels deep enough to be difficult or frightening, and it seems that they have a better support system than I thought possible. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that I might benefit from their experience and learn a thing or two if I could bring myself to talk about what happens for me, and -- even harder -- be willing to undertake these journeys knowingly. A first step, I think, would be to relax the stranglehold I have on seeing myself as a rational being.

At the simplest level, what happens for me is this. A universe exists for me to the side of this one. Many of my dreams take place there, and it is relatively easy to me to enter it by beginning to fall asleep but stopping short. In that universe, there is a geography with many familiar points. The highway that heads west. The lighted bridge. The neighborhood that’s so hard to find just to the west of downtown. The street with the house in Logan and the changing zoo just north of that. The town that is Mantua, but not Mantua, with the highway that I keep trying to follow. The dam, with the reservoir and the elevator down to the powerplant and the enormous water pressure above. The empty room that has so much in it behind the wall. Roads and pipes everywhere. Houses and rooms in houses. All of these places have a stable geography and relationship to one another, although I don’t yet have a full map of their relationship to one another. And then, there is the well. The horse that takes me there, even though I’m terrified of heights. The clearing. The lake. They exist on a different level. The house where I live my other life. The old woman I go to at the fire and call her Mother and learn from her but never remember to bring back what she tells me. And the man I used to call Pan, who is me but not me, and who laughs that I want a name for him. Are these one world, or three? I’m not sure, because when I’m in one place I’m just there.

I don’t object to visiting any of those places. In fact, my visits are rather pleasant even though I rarely go intentionally. I can talk about them as though they are parts of dreams, so it is not very threatening to think about them. In fact, they could be dreams if I didn’t know that they aren’t, if they didn’t have a sharp reality, a numinous quality, an underlying sense (with the landscape, at least) that I am choosing to give these particular forms to things that really have other forms because it is less frightening that way.

It’s some of the other things that are truly frightening. When I get on that horse, I don’t know where I’ll end up and I don’t know how to control my destination. Sometimes, I’m in places so overwhelming and confusing that I can no longer cope with the idea. I will be paralyzed, not able to escape, and not sure how to return to myself. When I do come back, I’m drained. I might be despondent for days and terrified that I’ll cross a line someday and become psychotic, as so many of Evelyn’s ancestors must have been.

It’s that fear that has me thinking I could learn something from other practitioners, if I could find ones who know what they’re doing. I read something on one seidhr site today about the way he sees ley lines, and I thought, “Yes! That’s the pipes, the highways.” (I didn’t think until tonight that I actually believe in ley lines, but yes, now I know what they’re talking about. Those things. I feel like a simpleton. Of course, I know what they are.) I was also reading tonight about fylgya and it occurred to me for the first time that maybe my ravens are like that, and perhaps I can send them out the way Odhinn does and have them come back to me. Again, the simpleton. I don’t even have to try it to know that it would be very simple.

But, thinking about the gods . . . why is it that there is nothing in this alternate universe I can recognize as being connected to any pantheon?

Enough for tonight. Writing has relieved some of the anxiety that’s been building the past few days. Maybe I can sleep now.

Freyja and Frigga

I’ve been thinking about the construction and survival of myth. I don’t think there’s any argument that myths change over time, and that the myths of any particular culture in the form we have them are not the only forms that ever existed. They are merely the only forms that survived. In fact, the more we know about a particular culture the more likely that we have surviving variants. To a greater or lesser extent, these variants allow us to make guesses about the original form of the myth.

For the Norse myths, the "final authority" is Snorri Sturluson, a 13th century Icelandic poet and historian who preserved what he knew about the religion of his ancestors. Other bits and pieces survive, but we are often indebted to Snorri for giving us the framework in which to understand them. Even so, he was writing more than 200 years after Iceland officially converted to Christianity. We can trust him, but he was not infallible, and just where to draw the line is a matter for scholars to debate.

The question that has caught my interest is whether the goddesses Freyja and Frigga might have originally been the same. Snorri separates them and his interpretation is considered authoritative. By his time I suppose they were thought to be two separate goddesses. But, were they originally separate? Were they separate throughout the Norse world? Indeed, were they even separate in Iceland when it converted to Christianity? These are difficult questions, because there is actually quite a bit of evidence that they might have once been identical. I don’t pretend a scholarly analysis, but I’ve collected some of the points that I find significant.

Names

Their names are similar, although they come from different sources. Freyja and Frigga. Freyja seems to mean Lady and Frigga seems to come from an Indo-European root meaning Love. Among the many-named Norse gods, we might expect that Freyja would be a title for a goddess with another name -- and what more likely name than one with sexual overtones?

Moreover, their husbands have similar names, Oðinn and Oðr. In fact, these two names are linguistically related.

Days of the week

The French Vendredi preserves the name Venus, while Friday preserves the name Frigga. If they were different goddesses, it seems more logical to me that the Romans in their Interpretio Germanica would have equated Venus with sexually active Freyja, not with chaste Frigga.

Promiscuity

Freyja is presented as promiscuous. Loki accused her of having slept with all the Æsir, and with her own brother. Mostly famously, she slept with four dwarves to obtain the necklace Brisingamen. Frigga, generally represented as chaste, had her own moments. When Oðinn left on a long journey, Frigga slept with his brothers. In a story preserved by Saxo Grammaticus, Frigga slept with a slave in order to get his help in despoiling a statute of Oðinn for the gold on it. This story seems to me to be parallel in many ways to the story of Freyja and the dwarves.

Stories

Freyja is married to Oðr, who is absent on long journeys and the tears she cries for him become amber. I think this story dovetails nicely with the story of Odhinn being absent for so long that Frigga slept with his brothers. In fact, in Saxo Grammaticus’ version, Oðinn went into exile in shame because Frigga had slept with the slave. Oðinn’s search for knowledge also seems to me to imply, or perhaps merely reinforce, the idea that he might have been often absent.

Sky and Earth

Oðinn is essentially a sky god, married to both Jörd (the Earth) and Frigga (the Queen of Heaven). However, both Freyja and Frigga can also be seen as earth goddesses. Snorri says, “The earth was his daughter and his wife. With her he made the first son, and that is Ása-Thor.” Freyja, as one of the Vanir, can be easily cast as an earth goddess. Frigga tried to preserve the life of her son Baldr by exacting oaths from everything on earth not to harm him. Rocks, trees and every kind of plant take the oath. She fails to ask the lowly mistletoe, which ultimately becomes the cause of Baldr’s death. The story, it seems to me, suggests that Frigga has authority over the earth; authority more in keeping with Jörd or Freyja than with Frigga’s status as Oðinn’s wife.

Magic

Freyja is preeminently the goddess of magic. It is she who taught seiðr to Oðinn. Yet, Frigga is said to know the future, which she does not disclose. What is more likely than that Oðinn learned magic from his wife, who nevertheless withholds some part of her knowledge?

Division of warriors

The Norse believed that the souls of those who died in battle belonged half to Freyja and half to Oðinn. My personal impression is that this division makes more sense if warriors are being divided between husband and wife. I am thinking, of course, of other examples, such as The Nibelungenlied, where Gunther and Kriemhild each have their own band of warriors (and the animosity between the two creates some problems). I find some support in Paulus Diaconus’ story about a dispute between Oðinn and Frigga, where Oðinn favored the Vandals and Frigga favored the Langobards. That story seems to me to yet another echo of the story pattern where husband and wife each have their own war-band.

Another opinion

William Reaves suggests a different interpretation: that Oðinn’s wives Jörd and Frigga were the same (Nine Reasons to Identify Frigg with Jord at http://www.aetaustralia.org/articles/arwrfrigg.htm). He ventures arguments that I’m still thinking about, but his fundamental argument (I think) is that Frigga was the daughter of Fjörgynnr, while Fjörgynn was another name for Jörd. Because Fjörgynnr and Fjörgynn are parallel names (like Freyr and Freyja), Reaves thinks they might have been father and daughter. He notes that in the surviving literature, Thor is twice called son of Jörd and twice called son of Frigga.

I have a different first impression: it seems to me the doubling of names happens with siblings. So, Fjörgynnr and Fjörgynn are more likely to have been brother and sister (like Freyr and Freyja, or Njördr and “Nerthus”). So, Fjörgynn-Jörd should be a niece of Frigga Fjörgynnr’s-daughter. This would make sense if Jörd were the first wife and the mother of Thor, and Frigga were the second wife, as in Snorri.

This leaves me with an elegant, but unorthodox theory that Fjörgynnr-Njördr (the sea) and Fjörgynn-Jörd (the earth) were brother and sister, and the parents of Freyr and Freyja. Fjörgynn-Jörd married Oðinn and they were the parents of Thor. There was a war between the Vanir and the the Æsir, which was settled by an exchange of hostages. Njördr, Freyr and Freyja went to live with the Æsir. Freyja-Frigga married Oðinn, with whom she then shared power, teaching him seiðr, and becoming the mother of Baldr. She betrayed him in her lust for gold. He went into exile. She cried for him, but slept with his brothers. When he returned, they were reconciled. And so on.

Complications

As if all of this were not purely spun from my own imagination, I’m still troubled by Snorri’s comment that Jörd was Oðinn’s wife and his daughter. He also says that she had a brother Aud (“Rich”), which seems a likely title for Njördr. From what I can find, Jörd was the daughter of Nótt by her second husband Ánar (“Second”). Could this have been another name for Oðinn? Nótt’s first husband, the father of Aud, was Naglfari (a name associated with a ship). So, it hangs together, but I’ll think about that some other time.

My guesses aren’t the final answer, even for me. I’m just thinking out loud.

Settling into NRR

And now, Athanasios’ announcement that he has appointed Galerius Aurelianus and me as pontifices in The New Roman Republic.

I’m still in Nova Roma, and I’m pretty sure that Celetrus is too. NRR is a much smaller, much newer group. Very similar concept to NR, but without the strong personalities at loggerheads that makes life in NR so trying sometimes. Our materfamilias has sanctioned membership in SVR, but hasn’t given her seal of approval to NRR yet. I’d like to see our gens exist as a single family across all the Roman reconstructionist groups, with the requirement that none of us ever publicly criticize any of the groups. Seems to me like this is the only practical way to handle the divisions and differences of opinions that are bound to come up.

Understanding the Norse gods

When I have a day to myself, as I did today, I play with the computer and generally poke around the web in search of interesting problems connected with being pagan. Today it was the genealogy of the Norse gods.

The past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about a book about Norse myths I had when I was growing up. I wish I could remember something about it so I could find it again. (I gave away most of my childhood books to my nephews, so perhaps one of them has it. The only two I kept, and still have, are Viking Adventure and Tarzan and the City of Gold.)

The book of Norse myths presented the relationships of the gods in a different way from most of the presentations I’ve seen as an adult. Most significantly, it made Frigga and Freyja the same person. It had Freyr and Freyja as brother and sister, children of Njörd and Jörd, who in turn were children of Night. That much I remember. I wish I could remember the rest.

I don’t think it is anything new that Freyja and Frigga might originally have been the same goddess (so Odhinn and Odhr would be the same god), but I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a full analysis or any discussion about how the various gods would then fall into relationship with one another. Early on, I encountered a categorical assertion that Freyja and Frigga were completely separate. I took it in uncritically. No doubt that idea played some role in my decision to part with my childhood book that “confused” the two. Nevertheless, I’ve noticed over the years that there is always some footnoted suggestion that the two might once have been identical.

What is more interesting to me is the identification of Jörd as the sister/wife of Mjörd. Makes sense to me, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it anywhere else. It would give a name to the goddess so often given only as “perhaps some form of Nerthus.”

So, with the vastness of a day away from work, I spent some time looking for more information. I was able to find a William Reaves article that argues for Odhinn’s wives Jörd and Frigga being the same person. I didn’t spend the time today to follow all his arguments because I wanted to see if there might be other theories elsewhere. Apparently not. My childhood book would have made Odhinn’s two wives mother and daughter, not identical as in Reaves’ argument. Is it really possible that the original form of the myth had Odhinn married one woman (Jörd, apparently the first wife if she was mother of Odhinn’s eldest son Thor’s), and then later to her daughter (Frigga/Freyja)? And, would a children’s book actually present the myth that way? I wonder. Maybe I just remember it that way.

I seem to remember from my childhood book that Freyja married Odhinn as part of the settlement that ended the war between Vanir and the Aesir. Can that be right?

I didn’t find my answers today, but now that the question has come to the forefront of my consciousness, I’ll be alert for further clues. And, with luck, I’ll have more time to explore later this weekend. However, this might be one instance where I need to leave off looking through the web and start looking in a real library with real sources.