Notes: "Norse Mythology for Smart People"

Notes for "Norse Mythology for Smart People," a website written by Dan McCoy."

This is commentary. And this is really good.

I'm not going to record every detail, just the really snappy awesome bits that Wikipedia never taught me. Some sections (Tales, Book Reviews, My Book, The 5 Best Books on Celtic Mythology, News/Updates, The 10 Best Norse Mythology Books) are not recorded here.

Who was on the Lord’s side, who?

(Nutshell for Non-LDS: Mormons believe that everyone alive once dwelled with God before being born. Before the world was even formed there was a war in Heaven, as John’s Revelation made famous, and this war was about whether we should be allowed to make mistakes when that would mean we would suffer, or if our lives should be so controlled that nobody would be able to sin or choose wrongly at all. Satan advocated for the latter, and the rest is mythology.)

If the War in Heaven was a war of words, an essentially missionary war, and nobody was won over from the Bad Side to the Good Side, then it had to have been the most supremely ineffective missionary effort of all time. Which means that we need to consider…

How many of us were once on Satan’s side of that war?

Jesus Christ, the Serpent

The snake was originally a symbol for Jesus Christ. The reason can be easily seen if we look at other cultures: the shedding of the snake's skin is a type of rebirth that associates the snake with healing, regeneration, resurrection, and eternal life.

The Universal Sacred

It seems to me as I consider it more that it may be very likely that everything is a vessel for the Sacred. One questions how the label matters if it applies to everything, but there are a few other similarly universal labels, like "universe" and "existent," that apply to all existent things. Too, the label is important because it demonstrates our ability to understand a universal aspect.

All things holy

See also: Shakespeare's Beam

I was in the car the other day watching buildings pass by, when it struck me, as it had many times before, that the act of creation is something holy. Something that partakes of the divine nature and mimics, in its own small way, the myriad acts of creation performed by God.

Immediately after this realization, however, there came to me the thought of my time working at McDonald's and Jack in the Box. Making many hundreds of cheap hamburger patties of the lowest quality that the customer would tolerate was surely not a sacred act.

When I see a contradiction like this there a few possibilities. The first is that I don't have enough information at hand and that there isn't a contradiction at all. In this conflict there didn't seem to be that situation. Besides that, though, it could be that the original premise was wrong. Or, finally, that the premise is so right that it forces me to reconsider other ideas that I held.

It was the third possibility that was proven in this situation, immediately after I relinquished my hold on the original premise. Creative acts were something holy, and making cheap hamburger patties was a creative act. And any paradox that I saw here, I realized, was purely my own invention.

Perhaps it seems frivolous. Perhaps it often is. But those hamburgers fed people. They relieved hunger. They sated appetites. For some who couldn't get anything more expensive, those hamburgers were as good as ambrosia.

It's such a little thing, but it still did something. Maybe it wasn't as much of a waste of my time as I first thought.

Shakespeare's Beam

Follow-up to: Afflatus

Over the past two years I have undergone a paradigm shift in re my understanding of writing and the creative process. Or perhaps I have not had a shift of paradigm so much as I have gotten a paradigm: Whence creativity came from, I did not much consider in the past.

Fiction: Four Snapshots of Eternity

"Yesterday's rose endures in its name." -Eco

One.

She thinks that she is going mad. She writes but without direction; her hand has a mind of its own. She writes memories. Her memories, but they are new to her as they form in black ink beneath her fingers and spread across each page with lightning speed.

Our most sacred of "Sacred Times"

Follow-up to: Old Words for New

"And there was War in Heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels." Revelation 12:7 (KJV)

Joseph Smith taught that the War in Heaven was not the work of death but a conflict of words and ideas. It was an essentially missionary conflict, with each side trying to sway as many as possible from the opposition. He taught as well that the war continues today. It is for this reason that I label the War in Heaven as the most sacred of the Sacred Times presented by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There is a war of ideas being waged now, as there has been many times in the past, but the very first such war was that which was waged in Heaven itself.

We live today in a proselyting time, as it always is when God's Church is present. Today, as always, we fight "the war between truth and error, between agency and compulsion." The gardener may take part in the Creation as she organizes her small corner of the world and brings order out of chaos, but there is one theme that is predominant in our lives and persists no matter what else we are doing. Today, as always, our most important identity is that of a "salvation missionary."

A missionary is one that is on a mission. He preaches, evangelizes, or spreads news, but the nature of this news is not specified by his being a generic missionary. His mission may be anything, really. This is why we are not only missionaries but salvation missionaries, whose mission is to be the instruments of God in saving the children of men. Our reason for doing so is found in the question "If you came across a drowning man, would you ask if he wanted help before you dove into the water after him?"

I am currently serving as a full-time (salvation) missionary for the Church of Jesus of Latter-day Saints, but when I am released this will not change my identity as a salvation missionary, only how I approach the duty.

They, the Builders of the Nation

"In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time." Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries

Ultimately one can think of the Sacred as that which either has meaning in itself or serves to draw our minds back to such things. Eliade posited that religions center around an "eternal return" to the Sacred: rituals reenact the Sacred and even allow us to become participants in the great drama. We are not merely remembering Christ's sacrifice when we take Communion but are fellow-guests at the Last Supper, just as we are explicitly baptized to follow the example of Jesus Christ.

Another good example is that of the Mormon Pioneers. By taking the Exodus from Egypt as an example they were able to take strength in their afflictions- even from their afflictions. They were heading to their own Promised Land just as the children of Israel were, and just as surely were being lead by God. Indeed, even the Exodus fell into an archetypal flight from Babylon to Zion.

For the modern-day Church, the trials of the Pioneers have fallen into the Sacred. We are regularly called to remember them and see ourselves in their shoes- we even stage a Pioneer Trek every four years so that the youth can relive it. Just as the Pioneers found strength in the Exodus, so too can we take strength from remembering that we are all pioneers in some manner, and by putting ourselves in their place we can discover that when you follow in the footsteps of another, your way is made easier because of the rocks that have already been moved by those that went before you.

Well is it said of them, and well may it also be said of us as we identify ourselves with their mantle:

They, the builders of the nation,
Blazing trails along the way;
Stepping-stones for generations
Were their deeds of ev'ry day.
Building new and firm foundations,
Pushing on the wild frontier,
Forging onward, ever onward,
Blessed, honored Pioneer!

Ida R. Alldredge, They, the Builders of the Nation

The Other Side of the Line

Follow-up to: Two Fishers

What is it that is most sacred? What is it that lies on the other side of the line which divides the sacred from the mundane, the divine from the profane?

Have we stepped into the realm of sacredness when we break bread in remembrance of the body of Jesus Christ and drink in remembrance of the blood that He shed? Or when one, sitting, has hands placed upon his head to confer the Melchizedek Priesthood upon him and ordain him to the office of an elder?

Most would argue in the affirmative. But what about a hike? A bowl of soup? A transient dream?

For Mircea Eliade the Sacred hearkened back to some First Example, but we can draw another concept for this same term: The Sacred is that which changes you.

When you have seen the Mountain, you have seen neither foothills nor an uninspiring pillar but Mount Kenya, where according to Kikuyu myth God lived when He ventured down from Heaven. You have glimpsed the footrest of His throne, or the dome of His revelations. You have seen His temple, which is like a reagent. It will work through you like yeast until you are transformed, and nothing can rid you of it.

Whether you welcome the change or despise it, an encounter with the Sacred does not leave you the same as you once were, and the only question is whether or not you encourage further change.

All of us must one day cease to ask whether it was Father Lehi that they encountered in the night or specter from the subconscious and experiment upon the word, so to speak, then ask what change, if any, it worked upon them. This is what the man in Two Fishers must wrestle with, and perhaps it is what he understands from his partner's words in the dream.

Fiction: Two Fishers

Two sat alone in a boat, a fisherman and a fisher of men. They sat with their backs to each other, poles in hand, and the silence of the cool night air was broken only by their low voices and the occasional plop of a fishing line.