Dying into the Mountain

If you learned Old Norse religion from children's book, as many of us did, you might have a too simplistic idea about the afterlife. Likely, you think most men were warriors so they went to Valhöll, Odin's hall in Ásgard.

Maybe so, but there's more difference of opinion among scholars than you might know, and there was probably also far more complexity.

The stories we have were recorded in Christian times, which makes them late and arguably unreliable to some degree. By the time they were written down the oral culture that produced them was already being transformed by new ideas imported from Romanized Christianity.

In pre-Christian times, it seems likely the Scandinavians had only a generalized idea of an underworld ("Hel"). This seems to have been the belief common among European cultures. The soul might or might not have been something separate from the body. No one is quite sure how much of that is due to Christian influence. Personally, I'm inclined to think our ancestors had a tripartite soul, so I tend to see it as body, soul, and spirit; three components separating at death. That's a debate for another day.

Systematized ideas about the "Nine Worlds" and the halls of different gods probably date to Christian times, and probably evolved in response to Christian notions of Heaven and Hell.

In pre-Christian times the dead went to live underground, in burial mounds (or somewhere near the place of interment). If the soul separated from the body, it was probably not a far separation, perhaps only as far as the nearest burial mound or mountain. Rudolf Simek (2007) says some mountains in southern Sweden that were believed to house the dead were called Valhall. Their relationship to Odin's hall is not clear.

For our ancestors, the dead were the alfar ("elves"), to whom offerings were made. They evolved into genii locorum ("spirits of place") who go by various names now; tomtar, nisser, brownies, and so on. These protective beings represented the first farmer to clear the forest and establish the homestead there.

The story of Þórolfr Mostrarskegg in Eyrbyggja saga, although very late, shows how this belief might have worked in practice. Þórolfr was a pioneer of Iceland. He gave Helgafell ("Holy Mountain") its name and designated it as a sacred place. He believed he and his descendants would "die into the mountain." That is, they would go to live inside the mountain when they died. Notice: in death they do not travel back to Norway to join their ancestors there. Instead, they pioneer a death-place in the new land.

This story is said to have been confirmed when Þórolfr's son Þorsteinn drowned. A local fisherman saw the mountain open up, and heard Þórolfur welcoming Þorsteinn to the feast that was taking place inside.

So, what about a separable soul? Again, Eyrbyggja saga is a late and potentially unreliable source. We have a drowned man, one whose body was apparently not recovered, yet he joins his father in their family's holy mountain. His soul must have separated from his body. Was it that way in the original? We don't know. It could be Christian influence. Or not.

Many of my neo-pagan friends are attached to their ideas about Valhöll and Fólkvangr, and all that. Too much glitter for me. Aesthetically, I far prefer the idea dying into the land, or -- since I live in Denver -- dying into the mountain. Presumably Mt. Evans. There's something very basic here that transcends both historical pedantry and romanticized fantasy.

• Arith Härger, "Do Women go to Valhalla?" YouTube, Nov, 27, 2019.

Related Post

• Justin Durand, "Viking Mortuary House." Pagan Cowboy, Oct. 21, 2019.

More Information

• Jackson Crawford, "The Minor Afterlives of Norse Myth." YouTube, Nov. 30, 2019.

Pagan vs Post-Christian

C.S. Lewis asks, "Are there any Pagans in England for me to write to? I know that people keep on telling us that this country is relapsing into Paganism. But they only mean that it is ceasing to be Christian. And is that at all the same thing?"

He thinks not. They're very different things.

"To say that modern people who have drifted away from Christianity are Pagans is to suggest that a post-Christian man is the same as a pre-Christian man. And that is like thinking . . . a street where the houses have been knocked down is the same as a field where no house has yet been built. . . . Rubble, dust, broken bottles, old bedsteads and stray cats are very different from grass, thyme, clover, buttercups and a lark singing overhead.”

Because it's Lewis, you know there will be a pitch for Christianity. It's what he's known for. And here it is. Pagans and Christians have in common religiosity, a belief in objective right and wrong, and a sense that it impossible to be perfect.

Post-Christians have lost it all. If you start as post-Christian, you must go through paganism to Christianity. "All that Christianity adds to paganism is the cure."

"It is hard to have patience with those Jeremiahs, in Press or pulpit, who warn us that we are “lapsing into Paganism.” It might be rather fun if we were. It would be pleasant to see some future Prime Minister trying to kill a large and lively milk-white bull in Westminster Hall. But we shan’t. What lurks behind such idle prophecies, if they are anything but careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal; that Europe can come out of Christianity “by the same door as in she went” and find herself back where she was. It is not what happens. A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past."

"It looks to me, neighbours, as though we shall have to set about becoming true Pagans if only as a preliminary to becoming Christians."

It's always a pleasure to read C.S. Lewis. He organizes his thoughts so cogently that even if you don't agree, he sets you to thinking.

• CSLewisDoodle. "A Christmas Sermon for Pagans." YouTube <youtube.com>, June 7, 2019.

America is a Religion

Just finished watching "Americans Are Religious About America". That rings some bells.

"Basically, American Civil Religion is when Americans are religious about America. The series argues that Americans are being religious when they create and curate American identity and ideals."

Robert Bellah says, "The phrase 'civil religion' is, of course, Rousseau's. In chapter 8, book 4 of The Social Contract, he outlines the simple dogmas of the civil religion: the existence of God, the life to come, the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice, and the exclusion of religious intolerance. All other religious opinions are outside the cognizance of the state and may be freely held by citizens. While the phrase 'civil religion' was not used, to the best of my knowledge, by the founding fathers, and I am certainly not arguing for the particular influence of Rousseau, it is clear that similar ideas, as part of the cultural climate of the late eighteenth century, were to be found among the Americans."

There was a thing briefly, 10 or 11 years ago I think, that takes it further. One of my Roman neo-pagan chums--I can't remember who it was--posted for awhile about launching an American neo-paganism constructed consciously along Roman lines. I can't find it now, might have been at LiveJournal, so I'm relying on memory. The idea was that it makes no sense for Americans to hold on to European (or other) gods. We declared our civil independence, so why not our religious independence?

For a project like that, Rome was an easy choice. The new American republic was modeled in part on the Roman republic. When America was founded, Neoclassicism was a major cultural and political influence in both Europe and America.

I was quite taken with this idea, in part because of my deep roots in America and in part because of the logical consistency. I had a website at ReligioAmericana. Very briefly. I can't find any of its content now, but there wasn't anything memorable.

I don't remember much about the social conversation. There was stuff about heroes, holidays, and monuments. I do remember some of them. Dea America (perhaps aka Our Lady of Guadalupe), Columbia, Lady Liberty, the deified George Washington, and all the company of Founders; the patriotic holidays; and the national monuments and battle fields.

I can understand all that. When I was growing up the lamp on my nightstand was a bronze cast of George Washington praying before the Battle of Valley Forge. Definitely a religious piece, as well as a heritage piece. The lamp had belonged to my (step) father and his father before me. My grandfather was George Washington Place. I'm guessing his name was the reason for buying the lamp.

That was the year I added Fortuna Denveriensis and her festival on November 22 to my calendar. In the classical world every city had its local Fortuna. I wouldn't want to risk not honoring Denver's.

I also remember a post about the importance of rivers in classical paganism. So, Dea Plata for the patron deity of the Platte River that runs through Denver. Once upon a time I knew the Latinized deities of other American rivers. Now I remember Chalchiuhtlicue but not the re-named Colorado River or Green River. How strange is that?

I think my dad would have been pleased. He believed and taught that foreign religions could not take root in America. The land would reject them. He was thinking of the lure of American Indian religions, but a Romanized American paganism seems like it might be another possibility.

More Information

• Bellah, Robert N. "Civil Religion in America." Dædalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 96:1(1967), pp. 1-21. Reprinted at <robertbellah.com>. Retrieved Nov. 18, 2019.
• ReligionForBreakfast. "Americans Are Religious About America." Episode 1. Youtube, Oct. 10, 2019. Retrieved Nov. 18, 2019.
• ReligionForBreakfast. "The Cold War Origins of 'In God We Trust'." Episode 2. Youtube, Jan. 16, 2020. Retrieved June 18, 2020.
• ReligionForBreakfast. "The American Flag is a Religious Symbol." Episode 3. YouTube. Mar. 27, 2020. Retrieved June 18, 2020.
• ReligionForBreakfast. "Ceremonial Deism: The Religion of the Supreme Court." Episode 4. Youtube, June 16, 2020. Retrieved June 18, 2020.

Updated June 18, 2020 to add links.

Asuras and Devas

One of the more interesting questions in religious history is why there is a divide and reversal between the asuras and the devas.

If you've made a serious study of religions this divide is old hat. If you haven't heard of it until now, you can begin to see it easily and quickly just by watching for it. I noticed it before I ever heard about it. From a Christian perspective our word devil must certainly be related to our word deity, and also to the Hindu word deva. From there it just spirals into endless fascination.

Michael York phrases it this way, "The divine-asurian duality I posit rests on an attempt to explain the Indo-Iranian dichotomy in which the Vedic devas or deities versus the asuras or demons becomes inverted into an antagonism between the Avestan demonic daevas and the 'angelic' ahuras headed by Lord Mazda. A further variant of this mythogen is the conflict between the Norse aesir headed by Odin and a unbeatable race of beings called the vanir. 1 The dismemberment of Tyr reflects the temporary impairment of the divine hypostasis which in Scandinavian myth has become permanent as the aesir or Odin successfully gain the pre-eminent position. The much wider survival of the *dei- cognates throughout the IE daughter languages reveals the earlier central placement of the divine devas."

More Information

• "Aesir-Asura correspondence". Wikipedia. Retrieved Nov. 17, 2019.
• "Asura". Wikipedia. Retrieved Nov. 17, 2019.
• New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove. "Zarathustra's Indo-European Legacy". YouTube, Nov. 6, 2016. Retrieved Nov. 17, 2019.
• York, Michael. "Toward a Proto-Indo-European Vocabulary of the Sacred." Word, 44:2(1993), 235-254. Retrieved Nov. 15, 2019.

Related

• War Between the Gods of East and West

Revised to add links.

Linking Religion to Ethnicity

Some interesting thoughts here. Ethnicity, language, religion, and race are not entirely independent variables. Traditional pagans won't be surprised by that.

This particular discussion reminds me of something I often hear from Jewish friends -- if go back just a few generations, you run into a solid wall of orthodoxy. The ancestors of modern Jews are never anything but Orthodox.

It's the same for Christianity in the European diaspora, although not many people I know are willing to acknowledge it.

Ironically, the neo-paganism that draws on our European ethnicity, begins by discarding our actual ethnicity. Go to a Lutheran church in modern America and you'll discover a big chunk of Germans and Scandinavians; the people whose ancestors in Europe were Lutherans. It works for other churches as well.

I might be a bit more sensitive to that because I belong to another culture that approaches being an ethno-religious group--the Mormons. Not that I'm a Mormon, but I'm not exactly not Mormon either. I prefer to call myself an Ethnic Mormon. Nearly all my close relatives are Mormon, and I grew up inside the "Zion Curtain" (the Intermountain West). But if Mormonism were really an ethnicity, I would have to count myself only 1/8 Mormon. It just happens, in my case, to be the pot everyone melts into.

• Masaman. "The Fine Line Between Religion and Ethnicity". YouTube, Nov. 12, 2019.

Ancestors and Personal Power

"In traditional East Asian forms of witchcraft and ceremonial magic, connection to your ancestral lineage hs always been expressed as kind of a requirement. Real talk, right? Historically and culturally, ancestors are always involved. . . . When you do anything at all, it's got to be on behalf of your ancestors or in the name of your ancestors, You talk to them. You ask them for advice. You, like, feed them, too."

And not just East Asia, but all over the world.

"There is this belief in a correlation of some kind, a connection between your closeness to your ancestors and your personal power. The enduring wealth of family dynasties are explained through ancestral connections. Decline and a downfall of a family's collected power is explained by a lack of or broken ancestor connections."

There are many interesting pieces here. The place of adopted children in the family. How ancestral lines can be damaged. How they can be healed. How to create an ancestral altar.

I got a chuckle out of a comment about offerings at the ancestral altar. Just like Mom or Dad loves your gift even when you really got them the wrong thing, your ancestors react the same way. They like that you did something, even if it's not quite right.

• Wen, Benebell. "Ancestral Power and the Witch | Bell Chimes In #44". YouTube, Oct. 26, 2019.

And now, I can't resist adding a different point of view here. Mambo Sandy says, "Every ancestor don't like your ass." Good point, and some sane advice from what is probably my favorite YouTube video of all time.

• Deleon, Mambo Sandy. "Not All Ancestors and Dead Want To Deal With You!!!". YouTube, July 12, 2016.

See also

• Deleon, Mambo Sandy. "How To Properly Start An Altar." YouTube. Feb. 27, 2015.
• Deleon, Mambo Sandy. "Should You Have Ancestor Altar". YouTube. Oct. 30, 2017.

Pater Aeneas

Sum pius Aeneas, raptos qui ex hoste Penates classe veho mecum, fama super aethera notus. Italiam quaero patriam et genus ab Iove summo. [I am pious Aeneas, who carries my Penates, snatched from the enemy, in my fleet with me, known by my fame above the ether. I seek my fatherland, Italy, and a race from highest Jove.]

Vergil, Aeneid 1.378-80.

In my undergrad Latin class we translated Vergil's Aeneid. If you don't already know, the Aeneid is a propaganda piece composed by the Roman poet Vergil (70-14 BCE). It glorifies Aeneas, the legendary Trojan prince who was the supposed ancestor of Julius Caesar.

When Prof. Brian Sykes assigned nicknames to the haplogroups, he chose Gilgamesh as the nickname for the founding ancestor of haplogroup G. I've joked for years that he should have chosen Aeneas.

And yes, I get that this is a marketing ploy to make it easier for customers to relate to the science. I also get that this clever little system always chooses a nickname for the ancestor that begins with the same letter as the haplogroup itself. So haplogroup G has to have an ancestor name that begins with g. And the name Gilgamesh, from the Sumerian Noah, reminds us that haplogroup G originated somewhere in the Middle East. It's not one of the major European groups.

Still. I'd rather have Aeneas as my mythical ancestor.

That's not as crazy as it sounds. Haplogroup G2a, my group, is heavily concentrated in Tyrol and the Alps, and that is where my paternal line originated in historic times. (Swiss, not Swedish as you might suppose from my surname.) My intuition, all those years ago, that it might be connected to the Etruscans and their Rhaetian cousins is increasingly plausible. Presumably, then, the Rhaetian speakers in the Alps originated with those Etruscans who fled a Celtic invasion of Italy in the 4th century BCE.

The Roman historian Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BCE, thought the Etruscans came from Lydia in what is now Turkey. The story he tells does not match Aeneas and his band of refugees, but it now seems clear there were other versions. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing 400 year later, thought the Etruscans were indigenous to Tuscany but admitted that his predecessors were "unanimous in stating that the Etruscans came from the East". In fact, Aeneas seems to have been the founder-hero of the Etruscans perhaps from the archaic period and certainly long before he was Romanized.

Having been the mythological founder of the Etruscans, Vergil turned him into a proto-founder of the Romans, then the Habsburgs, those claimants to Rome's legacy, made much of their own supposed descent from him.

Aeneas would be the ideal mythologized representation of the remote ancestor of haplogroup G2a. And that's why I have him on my ancestral altar.

More Information

• Brouwers, Josho. "Aeneas before Virgil: Early Greek sources about the Trojan hero". Ancient World Magazine, Jan. 28, 2018.
• Dillon, Kenneth J. "The Trojan Origin of Roman Civilization (TORC)". Scientia Press. Retrieved Nov. 8, 2019. Speculative.
• Mounford, Peter. "Aeneas: An Etruscan Foundation Legend". ASCS 32 Selected Proceedings, ed. Anne Mackay, 2011. Retrieved Nov. 11, 2019.
• Tanner, Marie. The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Pr., 1993.

Sic pater Aeneas intentis omnibus unus fata renarrabat diuum cursusque docebat. conticuit tandem factoque hic fine quieuit. [So our ancestor Aeneas, as all listened to one man, recounted divine fate, and described his journey. At last he stopped, and making an end here, rested.]

Vergil, Aeneid 3.716–18.