{"id":3835,"date":"2010-07-01T01:10:24","date_gmt":"2010-07-01T06:10:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paganpages.org\/content\/?p=3891"},"modified":"2010-06-24T18:21:51","modified_gmt":"2010-06-24T23:21:51","slug":"principles-of-paganism-lesson-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/2010\/07\/01\/principles-of-paganism-lesson-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Principles of Paganism, Lesson 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n

In this course we shall be concerned with getting to the roots of pagan religion.\u00a0 We shall clear away anachronisms and<\/p>\n

deceptions in an attempt to uncover the historical origins of nature religion before these were obscured by empire-builders<\/p>\n

and hierarchical priesthoods.<\/p>\n

I say \u2018the historical origins,\u2019\u00a0 because it is no use trying to get hold of the religion of prehistoric peoples.\u00a0 Marija<\/p>\n

Gimbutas has made a valiant effort along those lines in her Language of the Goddess, but until we come to written records<\/p>\n

we really have only shards of pottery and old bones, and not much else to deal with.<\/p>\n

Writing in the Western world began with the Sumerians, during a period of foreign domination named by archaeologists after<\/p>\n

the location of its principle site, the Jamdat Nasr period.\u00a0 Jamdat Nasr is on the middle Tigris.\u00a0 Before that period,<\/p>\n

perhaps around 3000 BCE or a little earlier, we get picture writing but nothing we can tie to spoken language.\u00a0 And what we<\/p>\n

get thereafter are what are known as laundry-lists, that is, inventories of animals and crops for temples, the centers of a<\/p>\n

storage economy. 1 For anything religious we have to wait for the ensuing period, when the Sumerians threw off the yoke of<\/p>\n

the Jamdat Nasrites, a time called \u2018the Period of Warring States.\u2019<\/p>\n

However, though the Sumerians present us with the earliest written records, their religion was already sophisticated and in<\/p>\n

its finished form when they first appeared on the scene in southern Mesopotamia in the early 4th millenium BCE.\u00a0 They were<\/p>\n

already urbanites, and the religion we learn about is largely that of the court, not of the common people, though we can<\/p>\n

deduce a lot of the latter from cylinder-seals and burials.\u00a0 This is not paganism in its nascent form, for which we shall<\/p>\n

have to go to the barbarians of more recent times.\u00a0 And most of the earlier written records we shall consult must be taken<\/p>\n

with more than a grain of salt, because they were written by people who were either hostile to the indigenous faiths and<\/p>\n

determined to wipe them out, or else by conquerors like Caesar who wished to produce propaganda promoting their own<\/p>\n

political ambitions.<\/p>\n

At the outset I mentioned two hurdles we shall have to overtake to get at much of our evidence for robust (that is to say,<\/p>\n

root) paganism as being anachronism and deceptions, by which I meant deceptive translations.\u00a0 For a good example of both,<\/p>\n

let us consider the first two verses of Genesis, in the Old Testament:<\/p>\n

Gen. 1:1 is usually translated \u201cIn the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.\u201d\u00a0 The word translated \u2018God\u2019 is the<\/p>\n

Hebrew \u2018Elohim,\u2019\u00a0 which is plural, 2 and in fact means \u2018the family of El\u2019.\u00a0 El, as Elya, was a god of the Canaanite<\/p>\n

pantheon, and is found as El among the baked archives of the city of Ebla in North Syria, destroyed by Naram-Suen the king<\/p>\n

of Akkad (in Mesopotamia) around 2200 BC.\u00a0 Another of the gods of Ebla was Yah, who later became Yahweh.\u00a0 Yah and El were<\/p>\n

separate deities.<\/p>\n

Gen. 1:2, as usually translated, starts with the word \u2018And,\u2019 but this is always put into italics, meaning that it has been<\/p>\n

added by the translator.\u00a0 The reason it is added in is to create the impression of passage of time, that the second verse<\/p>\n

is describing an event after that described in the first verse.\u00a0 If we leave out the word \u2018and,\u2019 it becomes probable that<\/p>\n

the second verse is simply expanding on the first, telling how the creation came about.<\/p>\n

The verse as translated then says: \u201cThe earth was without form and void\u2026\u201d\u00a0 Here we come to the crux of the matter.\u00a0 The<\/p>\n

word translated \u2018void\u2019\u00a0 actually means \u2018a desolation\u2019 in Hebrew.\u00a0 It is the same word used later in the Old Testament for<\/p>\n

the ruined temples of Baal and Asherah, which were described as \u2018the abomination of desolation.\u2019\u00a0 It didn\u2019t mean there was<\/p>\n

nothing there; it meant it had been abandoned and was no longer inhabited.<\/p>\n

If you travel in Iraq outside the cities (not recommended in these dangerous days), you will see tells scattered here and<\/p>\n

there in the desert.\u00a0 These tells are mounds of earth of interest to archaeologists, for they were once cities and towns. 3<\/p>\n

A common reason they were abandoned was because the river changed its course.\u00a0 For instance, the ancient city of Ur in<\/p>\n

southern Iraq, once a thriving port linked with the Persian Gulf, is now 17 kilometers out in the desert from the present<\/p>\n

course of the Euphrates River.<\/p>\n

Interestingly enough, if you were to go back in time to deep antiquity and walk through the same countryside, while some<\/p>\n

parts would be greener, you would still see tells.\u00a0 Towns were always being abandoned from time to time.\u00a0 The Akkadian or<\/p>\n

east Semitic word corresponding to the Hebrew \u2018desolation\u2019\u00a0 was applied to these once-inhabited mounds.<\/p>\n

This tells us something about creation in Gen. 1:2.\u00a0 We are not starting with a void, but with the ruins of an earlier<\/p>\n

world.\u00a0 The beginning mentioned in the first verse is not the beginning of time, it is the beginning of this particular<\/p>\n

world \u2013 this cosmos.\u00a0 As we shall see, \u2018cosmos\u2019\u00a0 and \u2018world\u2019 are synonymous.\u00a0 One of the meanings of \u2018cosmos\u2019\u00a0 in Greek is<\/p>\n

\u2018order\u2019.<\/p>\n

Creation, then, is an ordering and a reclamation of an older world in ruins.\u00a0 It begins to look like the ancients, in<\/p>\n

describing the beginnings of their world, were not asking the same questions asked by later philosophers and theologians<\/p>\n

concerned to know the absolute origin of everything.\u00a0 This is the main thing to bear in mind when attempting to reconstruct<\/p>\n

original paganism: it is asking, and attempting to answer, a different set of questions.\u00a0 It is neither theology nor<\/p>\n

philosophy nor science in the modern sense.\u00a0 It is in a category of its own, for which we do not possess a label.\u00a0 We must<\/p>\n

examine and consider it on its own terms.\u00a0 That is what I propose to do in this course.<\/p>\n

Suggested Reading: <\/strong><\/p>\n

Ancient Mesopotamia, Portrait of a Dead Civilization, by A. Leo Oppenheim, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press,<\/p>\n

1977 (revised edition).<\/p>\n

The Beginnings of Civilization, by Sir Leonard Wooley, New York and Toronto, a Mentor Book published by The New American<\/p>\n

Library, 1965.<\/p>\n

Exercise: <\/strong><\/p>\n

The sky was once thought to be a crystalline dome, lit by the sun during the day, through which one could see the moon and<\/p>\n

stars at night.\u00a0 This is the meaning of the word \u2018firmament\u2019 (\u2018welkin\u2019 in Anglo-Saxon) in the first chapter of Genesis.<\/p>\n

Not a bad guess for 5,000 years ago.\u00a0 We know better today, of course; but now that we know the blue daytime sky is only<\/p>\n

apparent, we tend not to look at it, except to check the weather.\u00a0 Specifically, we do not look at it as one single thing,<\/p>\n

a blue dome or vault overhead.<\/p>\n

Paganism is about perception, about being alive to the world as it appears and feels.\u00a0 Try including the sky in your<\/p>\n

everyday awareness.\u00a0 See it as a great dome or vault of blue.\u00a0 It\u2019s all right, you won\u2019t get a letter in the mail from<\/p>\n

scientists denouncing you as a traitor.\u00a0 You can go on knowing about diffraction while still enjoying the sensation of<\/p>\n

being in an enormous building roofed with an azure dome.\u00a0 You can be modern in your knowledge and ancient in your<\/p>\n

perceptions.\u00a0 This is what neopaganism and post-modernism are all about.<\/p>\n

Questions:<\/strong><\/p>\n

1. One barrier to understanding ancient religion is anachronism, the tendency to read into ancient ideas the meanings of<\/p>\n

later ideas.\u00a0 What is the other?\u00a0 Give an example of both hurdles.
\n2. Why are the Sumerians unsuitable as a source of information on root paganism?
\n3. This course presents root or robust paganism.\u00a0 What is meant by root or robust paganism anyway?
\n4. Concepts are attempted answers to questions.\u00a0 How does the ancient question about creation differ from the later
\nquestion?\u00a0 How do the answers differ?
\n5. How can modern scientific knowledge be reconciled with ancient views of the world?<\/p>\n

Lesson 1, Part 2<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cosmos and Chaos:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cosmos and chaos are relative terms.\u00a0 The universe at large is not uniformly organized; instead, it is corpuscular,<\/p>\n

consisting of units of greater organization surrounded by areas of a looser, freer organization.\u00a0 The corpuscles contain<\/p>\n

within themselves greater- and lesser-organized areas, and exist within larger corpuscles containing both them and the<\/p>\n

surrounding, less-organized areas.\u00a0 In other words, there are corpuscles within corpuscles.\u00a0 Each corpuscle is what the<\/p>\n

ancients called a cosmos, an ordered world.\u00a0 The Milky Way is more ordered than the intergalactic space surrounding it, and<\/p>\n

the space within my home is more ordered than the outside, which is subject to the ravages of weather.\u00a0 My body is a<\/p>\n

cosmos, striving to maintain itself against the forces of disease and aging; and my mind is a little cosmos, with its<\/p>\n

illuminated circle of thoughts surrounded by shifting feelings and half-conscious urges.<\/p>\n

Pagan religion pictures the world, to the limits of human perception and reason available at the time, in terms of this<\/p>\n

template of cosmos and chaos.\u00a0 Instead of providing an overview, like the later revelatory religions, it applies the<\/p>\n

template of relative cosmos and chaos on whatever scale we are examining at a given time.<\/p>\n

Thus, ancient Egypt, which was continuously inhabited through all four Ice Ages, was a cosmos, centering on the Nile and<\/p>\n

surrounded on both sides by desert.\u00a0 In the desert lived bedouins, and Egyptians knew that their lives were ordered as<\/p>\n

well, but considered that order to be less orderly, less civilized than their own.\u00a0 When the noble Sinuhe, in the Middle<\/p>\n

Kingdom period, had to flee Egypt and live among the bedouins, he achieved great fame in their kingdom (for one Egyptian<\/p>\n

can beat ten bedouins, hands down, any day) but in his old age longed to return to Egypt.\u00a0 He was granted a pardon by the<\/p>\n

reigning Pharaoh and given a place at court.\u00a0 In the end he died happily, knowing he would be mummified and buried in the<\/p>\n

proper manner, not covered with sand like a wretched Asiatic. 4\u00a0 For Egyptians, to die outside Egypt was a sort of<\/p>\n

damnation.<\/p>\n

We see the same thinking in Norse myth.\u00a0 The nine worlds ranged along the boughs of the World Ash-Tree are not equally<\/p>\n

ordered.\u00a0 \u00c5sgard, at the top, is protected against the depredations of the J\u00f8tuns or Giants, but Midgeard \u2013 Middle earth,<\/p>\n

where we live \u2013 is a spottier affair.\u00a0 I live in Norway\u00a0 now, and six hours by car north of Oslo are very high mountains \u2013<\/p>\n

one approaches them gradually ascending \u2013\u00a0 called Jotunheim, the home or realm of the Giants.\u00a0 The Giants, like the Greek<\/p>\n

Titans, were older than the Gods, survivors from an older, wilder, more chaotic world; and through Gods like Loki, who were<\/p>\n

part Giant, their destabilizing influence tended to undermine the efforts of the \u00c6sir, the Sky-Gods, to build up and<\/p>\n

maintain a civilized order. 5\u00a0 At the same time, the struggle between order and chaos leads to development and evolution in<\/p>\n

the world,\u00a0 and many of the treasures and weapons of the \u00c6sir came from Loki as reparations to the Gods after being caught<\/p>\n

in some mischief.\u00a0 Yggdrasil, the World-Ash tree, itself draws its nourishment from an underlying sea of chaos.<\/p>\n

The Hindu Vedas, ancient sacred writings from the 2nd millenium BCE, teach that each cosmos, including the souls inhabiting<\/p>\n

it, has existed from eternity and will always exist, but goes through endless cycles of creation, growth, decay and<\/p>\n

eventual destruction, followed by a period of quiescence when it rests in a seed-state, waiting to be reborn.\u00a0 The seed<\/p>\n

rests within the womb of Kali, the dark Goddess of fate, the active principle of the ultimate reality, an impersonal or<\/p>\n

trans-personal sea of blissful sentience called Brahman. 6 Brahman and Kali are implacable, unlike the Gods; that is, it is<\/p>\n

no good praying to them.\u00a0 Kali\u2019s empire begins where prayers fail.\u00a0 Some of her Western counterparts were Skadi, the<\/p>\n

Cailleach, the Norns, and \u2018the Old \u2018Un\u2019 of the Eddas.\u00a0 It is she who turns the wheel of cosmic cycles and decrees when a<\/p>\n

world will founder.\u00a0 As the prophetess says in the Younger Edda:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe ancient one lives in the east \/ in the Wood of Iron \/ and there gives birth to Fenrir\u2019s brood; \/ one of them all \/<\/p>\n

especially \/ in form of a troll \/ will seize the sun.\u201d 7<\/p>\n

Ironwood is a type of tree that turns rust color when it dies; thus this is a death symbol pertaining to Ragnar\u00f8k, the time<\/p>\n

of the end of the world-cycle.<\/p>\n

Ragnar\u00f8k, however, is the end of a cycle for Middle-earth only, though the old Gods go down to destruction in our defense.<\/p>\n

But \u00c5sgard itself is untouched, and when the new cycle begins, the game-pieces the Gods were playing with on the lawn<\/p>\n

before \u00c5sgard are found undisturbed.\u00a0 The game, incidentally, is hnefatafl, not chess, as scholars, following an idiotic<\/p>\n

academic convention, often mistranslate its name.\u00a0 This deception is doubly ignorant, for chess is of all games<\/p>\n

quintessentially Zoroastrian (that is, anti-pagan), depicting a battle between matched but opposing armies, the very image<\/p>\n

of the forces of Ahura Mazda squaring off with those of Angra Mainyu on the field of the Earth; whereas hnefatafl is a<\/p>\n

siege game, with the forces maintaining order in the center under attack from the forces of chaos coming in from the side.<\/p>\n

It is that easy to conceal pagan symbolism by deceptive mistranslation.
\n
\nSuggested Reading: <\/strong><\/p>\n

The Upanishads, vols. 1 \u2013 4, translated by Swami Nikhilananda, New York, Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1977.<\/p>\n

Tales of Ancient Egypt, Roger Lancelyn Green, London, Penguin Books, 1967.<\/p>\n

The Prose Edda [The Younger Edda], translated by Jean I. Young, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, University of California<\/p>\n

Press, first published 1954.<\/p>\n

The Poetic Edda [The Elder Edda], translated by Carolyne Larrington, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 1996.<\/p>\n

Questions:<\/strong><\/p>\n

One: Name one way in which cosmos and chaos are relative to each other.<\/p>\n

Two: What does the dark Goddess do in favor of chaos?\u00a0 How does she help cosmos?<\/p>\n

Three: Sometimes chaos within cosmos makes a positive contribution.\u00a0 How does this come about?
\n
\nExercise:<\/strong><\/p>\n

When the wind or a breeze is blowing, become aware of your own breathing.\u00a0 Your breath and the wind are connected.\u00a0 Your<\/p>\n

breathing is a little wind, and the wind breathes life-giving air into your face, nostrils and lungs.\u00a0 They are one breath.<\/p>\n

Feel them as one thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Introduction In this course we shall be concerned with getting to the roots of pagan religion.\u00a0 We shall clear away anachronisms and deceptions in an attempt to uncover the historical origins of nature religion before these were obscured by empire-builders and hierarchical priesthoods. I say \u2018the historical origins,\u2019\u00a0 because it is no use trying to get hold of the religion of prehistoric peoples.\u00a0 Marija Gimbutas has made a valiant effort along those lines in her Language of the Goddess, but until we come to written records we really have only shards of pottery and old bones, and not much else to deal with. Writing in the Western world began with the Sumerians, during a period of foreign domination named by archaeologists after the location of its principle site, the Jamdat Nasr period.\u00a0 Jamdat Nasr is on the middle Tigris.\u00a0 Before that period, perhaps around 3000 BCE or a little earlier, we get picture writing but nothing we can tie to spoken language.\u00a0 And what we get thereafter are what are known as laundry-lists, that is, inventories of animals and crops for temples, the centers of a storage economy. 1 For anything religious we have to wait for the ensuing period, when the Sumerians threw off the yoke of the Jamdat Nasrites, a time called \u2018the Period of Warring States.\u2019 However, though the Sumerians present us with the earliest written records, their religion was already sophisticated and in its finished form when they first appeared on the scene in southern Mesopotamia in the early 4th millenium BCE.\u00a0 They were already urbanites, and the religion we learn about is largely that of the court, not of the common people, though we can deduce a lot of the latter from cylinder-seals and burials.\u00a0 This is not paganism in its nascent form, for which we shall have to go to the barbarians of more recent times.\u00a0 And most of the earlier written records we shall consult must be taken with more than a grain of salt, because they were written by people who were either hostile to the indigenous faiths and determined to wipe them out, or else by conquerors like Caesar who wished to produce propaganda promoting their own political ambitions. At the outset I mentioned two hurdles we shall have to overtake to get at much of our evidence for robust (that is to say, root) paganism as being anachronism and deceptions, by which I meant deceptive translations.\u00a0 For a good example of both, let us consider the first two verses of Genesis, in the Old Testament: Gen. 1:1 is usually translated \u201cIn the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.\u201d\u00a0 The word translated \u2018God\u2019 is the Hebrew \u2018Elohim,\u2019\u00a0 which is plural, 2 and in fact means \u2018the family of El\u2019.\u00a0 El, as Elya, was a god of the Canaanite pantheon, and is found as El among the baked archives of the city of Ebla in North Syria, destroyed by Naram-Suen the king of Akkad (in Mesopotamia) around 2200 BC.\u00a0 Another of the gods of Ebla was Yah, who later became Yahweh.\u00a0 Yah and El were separate deities. Gen. 1:2, as usually translated, starts with the word \u2018And,\u2019 but this is always put into italics, meaning that it has been added by the translator.\u00a0 The reason it is added in is to create the impression of passage of time, that the second verse is describing an event after that described in the first verse.\u00a0 If we leave out the word \u2018and,\u2019 it becomes probable that the second verse is simply expanding on the first, telling how the creation came about. The verse as translated then says: \u201cThe earth was without form and void\u2026\u201d\u00a0 Here we come to the crux of the matter.\u00a0 The word translated \u2018void\u2019\u00a0 actually means \u2018a desolation\u2019 in Hebrew.\u00a0 It is the same word used later in the Old Testament for the ruined temples of Baal and Asherah, which were described as \u2018the abomination of desolation.\u2019\u00a0 It didn\u2019t mean there was nothing there; it meant it had been abandoned and was no longer inhabited. If you travel in Iraq outside the cities (not recommended in these dangerous days), you will see tells scattered here and there in the desert.\u00a0 These tells are mounds of earth of interest to archaeologists, for they were once cities and towns. 3 A common reason they were abandoned was because the river changed its course.\u00a0 For instance, the ancient city of Ur in southern Iraq, once a thriving port linked with the Persian Gulf, is now 17 kilometers out in the desert from the present course of the Euphrates River. Interestingly enough, if you were to go back in time to deep antiquity and walk through the same countryside, while some parts would be greener, you would still see tells.\u00a0 Towns were always being abandoned from time to time.\u00a0 The Akkadian or east Semitic word corresponding to the Hebrew \u2018desolation\u2019\u00a0 was applied to these once-inhabited mounds. This tells us something about creation in Gen. 1:2.\u00a0 We are not starting with a void, but with the ruins of an earlier world.\u00a0 The beginning mentioned in the first verse is not the beginning of time, it is the beginning of this particular world \u2013 this cosmos.\u00a0 As we shall see, \u2018cosmos\u2019\u00a0 and \u2018world\u2019 are synonymous.\u00a0 One of the meanings of \u2018cosmos\u2019\u00a0 in Greek is \u2018order\u2019. Creation, then, is an ordering and a reclamation of an older world in ruins.\u00a0 It begins to look like the ancients, in describing the beginnings of their world, were not asking the same questions asked by later philosophers and theologians concerned to know the absolute origin of everything.\u00a0 This is the main thing to bear in mind when attempting to reconstruct original paganism: it is asking, and attempting to answer, a different set of questions.\u00a0 It is neither theology nor philosophy nor science in the modern sense.\u00a0 It is in a category of its own, for which we do not possess a label.\u00a0 We must examine and consider it on its own terms.\u00a0 That is what I propose to do in this course. Suggested Reading: Ancient Mesopotamia, Portrait of a Dead Civilization, by A. Leo Oppenheim, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1977 (revised edition). The Beginnings of Civilization, by Sir Leonard Wooley, New York and Toronto, a Mentor Book published by The New American Library, 1965. Exercise: The sky was once thought to be a crystalline dome, lit by the sun during the day, through which one could see the moon and stars at night.\u00a0 This is the meaning of the word \u2018firmament\u2019 (\u2018welkin\u2019 in Anglo-Saxon) in the first chapter of Genesis. Not a bad guess for 5,000 years ago.\u00a0 We know better today, of course; but now that we know the blue daytime sky is only apparent, we tend not to look at it, except to check the weather.\u00a0 Specifically, we do not look at it as one single thing, a blue dome or vault overhead. Paganism is about perception, about being alive to the world as it appears and feels.\u00a0 Try including the sky in your everyday awareness.\u00a0 See it as a great dome or vault of blue.\u00a0 It\u2019s all right, you won\u2019t get a letter in the mail from scientists denouncing you as a traitor.\u00a0 You can go on knowing about diffraction while still enjoying the sensation of being in an enormous building roofed with an azure dome.\u00a0 You can be modern in your knowledge and ancient in your perceptions.\u00a0 This is what neopaganism and post-modernism are all about. Questions: 1. One barrier to understanding ancient religion is anachronism, the tendency to read into ancient ideas the meanings of later ideas.\u00a0 What is the other?\u00a0 Give an example of both hurdles. 2. Why are the Sumerians unsuitable as a source of information on root paganism? 3. This course presents root or robust paganism.\u00a0 What is meant by root or robust paganism anyway? 4. Concepts are attempted answers to questions.\u00a0 How does the ancient question about creation differ from the later question?\u00a0 How do the answers differ? 5. How can modern scientific knowledge be reconciled with ancient views of the world? Lesson 1, Part 2 Cosmos and Chaos: Cosmos and chaos are relative terms.\u00a0 The universe at large is not uniformly organized; instead, it is corpuscular, consisting of units of greater organization surrounded by areas of a looser, freer organization.\u00a0 The corpuscles contain within themselves greater- and lesser-organized areas, and exist within larger corpuscles containing both them and the surrounding, less-organized areas.\u00a0 In other words, there are corpuscles within corpuscles.\u00a0 Each corpuscle is what the ancients called a cosmos, an ordered world.\u00a0 The Milky Way is more ordered than the intergalactic space surrounding it, and the space within my home is more ordered than the outside, which is subject to the ravages of weather.\u00a0 My body is a cosmos, striving to maintain itself against the forces of disease and aging; and my mind is a little cosmos, with its illuminated circle of thoughts surrounded by shifting feelings and half-conscious urges. Pagan religion pictures the world, to the limits of human perception and reason available at the time, in terms of this template of cosmos and chaos.\u00a0 Instead of providing an overview, like the later revelatory religions, it applies the template of relative cosmos and chaos on whatever scale we are examining at a given time. Thus, ancient Egypt, which was continuously inhabited through all four Ice Ages, was a cosmos, centering on the Nile and surrounded on both sides by desert.\u00a0 In the desert lived bedouins, and Egyptians knew that their lives were ordered as well, but considered that order to be less orderly, less civilized than their own.\u00a0 When the noble Sinuhe, in the Middle Kingdom period, had to flee Egypt and live among the bedouins, he achieved great fame in their kingdom (for one Egyptian can beat ten bedouins, hands down, any day) but in his old age longed to return to Egypt.\u00a0 He was granted a pardon by the reigning Pharaoh and given a place at court.\u00a0 In the end he died happily, knowing he would be mummified and buried in the proper manner, not covered with sand like a wretched Asiatic. 4\u00a0 For Egyptians, to die outside Egypt was a sort of damnation. We see the same thinking in Norse myth.\u00a0 The nine worlds ranged along the boughs of the World Ash-Tree are not equally ordered.\u00a0 \u00c5sgard, at the top, is protected against the depredations of the J\u00f8tuns or Giants, but Midgeard \u2013 Middle earth, where we live \u2013 is a spottier affair.\u00a0 I live in Norway\u00a0 now, and six hours by car north of Oslo are very high mountains \u2013 one approaches them gradually ascending \u2013\u00a0 called Jotunheim, the home or realm of the Giants.\u00a0 The Giants, like the Greek Titans, were older than the Gods, survivors from an older, wilder, more chaotic world; and through Gods like Loki, who were part Giant, their destabilizing influence tended to undermine the efforts of the \u00c6sir, the Sky-Gods, to build up and maintain a civilized order. 5\u00a0 At the same time, the struggle between order and chaos leads to development and evolution in the world,\u00a0 and many of the treasures and weapons of the \u00c6sir came from Loki as reparations to the Gods after being caught in some mischief.\u00a0 Yggdrasil, the World-Ash tree, itself draws its nourishment from an underlying sea of chaos. The Hindu Vedas, ancient sacred writings from the 2nd millenium BCE, teach that each cosmos, including the souls inhabiting it, has existed from eternity and will always exist, but goes through endless cycles of creation, growth, decay and eventual destruction, followed by a period of quiescence when it rests in a seed-state, waiting to be reborn.\u00a0 The seed rests within the womb of Kali, the dark Goddess of fate, the active principle of the ultimate reality, an impersonal or trans-personal sea of blissful sentience called Brahman. 6 Brahman and Kali are implacable, unlike the Gods; that is, it is no…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3835"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3781,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3835\/revisions\/3781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}