Wednesday, May 03, 2017

Fun with mythical/historical metaphors as history-religion-ontology


Camille Paglia viewed the ceaseless battle of nature (which she says is violent, irrational, untamable, and female) versus culture (aesthetic, logical, ever struggling and failing to tame nature, and, yes, male).

I could see Paglia's gendering images in relation to theological materialism, but I would adapt them a bit: the primal material as female gives birth to every cosmos, but within the primal material is also the material will, or spirit-will, as male, which activates material life to evolve toward supermaterial Godhood, with many stops and starts along the evolutionary way.

I might compare these metaphors to the old myth/history of Odin migrating from Asia (thus he is of the Aesir) (proto-Scythian?), and when he reached the North Germanic region, which included Southern Sweden, a war took place between the North Germanic Vanir (old mixed Cro Magnon?) and the Aesir. Eventually a truce was created and a meld of the religions and cultures of the Vanir and Aesir was forged. The Vanir Earth Mother Nerthus, and her male consort, Ingwaz, then synthesized with the Aesir Sky Father, Odin, and his family, eventually creating the mature faith of Odinism, and its people.

But being conservative I work from the transformation of the Western Christian religion with theological materialism, where the material world evolves from the primal material, not God, toward real supermaterial Godhood. The Inward Path of traditional religion is retained but seen as a preliminary inward experience of the real Godhood reached through evolution---and this also can be synthesized more smoothly with modern science. In this way we could metaphorically harken way back to the very old Swedish Nerthus and Ingwaz, if we wanted to.

No comments:

Post a Comment