Mar
Both Ends Against the Middle
Every child tries this trick. He asks his mother for something, but she tells him no. A spark of inspiration strikes, and he decides to ask Dad. Maybe Dad will say Yes. Even if he says Yes the first time, Mom will find out. That is when Mom and Dad realize the child is old enough to be sneaky. First they come up with a new Rule: if one parent says no, do not dare ask the other. Second, they always reply to the question by asking, “What did your mother [father] say?”
Children find out that they cannot play one side against the middle.
Adults are not fooled by children’s cunning.
So why do people think they can play this game with the Gods?
The Gods are not competing against one another. They have cohesion far greater than any human can understand. The Gods are a united front. They are united in ways beyond our comprehension.
Here is the other half of the lesson: the Gods are not great big people with magickal powers. They are spiritual entities. The myths do not give precise information about the gods,. The myths are a combination of allegories, folktales and morality stories. In them, the Gods are actors as if they were in a play.
To be blunt, the Eddas were not written in stone. They are our old lore, but they are not infallible tractates on Divinity. They were composed by people living in very different times, and recorded by people who lived centuries after an alien religion had usurped Heathenism’s place. We ought not make an idol of the Eddas, nor treat the Gods the same as comic book heroes.
Stand tall, stand free. Respect the Gods for their divinity and respect the old lore as a starting point. The next chapter of Heathen lore is to be written by this generation.
“The Gods are not competing against one another. They have cohesion far greater than any human can understand. The Gods are a united front. They are united in ways beyond our comprehension.”
I couldn’t agree more! This reminds me of a story Saxo Grammaticus told in Book One of his “History of the Danes”, where Odin leaves Asgard for a long time, and an imposter (theorized by some to be Loki) takes over and demands that instead of offering sacrifice to the gods together, each of them must receive separate worship if men are not to call down their wrath upon them. When Odin returns, he puts an end to all this nonsense, which may be the cause of him saying in Havamal 145, “Betra er óbeðit en sé ofblótit,” “Better to not pray at all than to over-sacrifice”.
Such a story must have been told amongst the elder folk to remind people that the gods are a united front and do not have to be separately appeased with great and expensive sacrifices, nor can they be turned one against the other, but as you say, are a united front, not in competition with each other.
And I agree as well that the Gods are not great big people, but are spoken of allegorically. Tacitus gives us a hint of native Germanic theology when he says in Germania 9 that “Ceterum nec cohibere parietibus deos neque in ullam humani oris speciem adsimulare ex magnitudine caelestium arbitrantur”, “Moreover, they do not believe in confining the gods within walls nor representing them in any human form or kind, out of the majesty of the heavenly gods.” He goes on to say that they consecrated groves where they called upon the names of the Gods whose presence was felt there. The stories and myths, then, were to help people visualize, to bring things down to an understandable human level, and to transmit important messages in narrative form, but obviously, as Tacitus makes clear, when it came down to actual worship, they knew the gods did not exist in human form, but had an almost inexpressible majesty.
March 27th, 2008 at 6:25 am