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Thread: The Gods Thor and Odin

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    Anti-muhammadan Hrolf Kraki's Avatar
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    Default The Gods Thor and Odin

    What does everyone think about the Gods Thor and Odin? I have really no scientific basis for my ideas, as really none exist (at least that I know of). But I think Odin was a great chieftain who lived long ago and who led his people (the Germanic tribes) to greener pastures in Scandinavia. I think Thor might have been that ingenious blacksmith who figured out he could extract iron from peat bogs. Maybe that is why they are so revered by the Germanic peoples and became Gods. Anyone else have any ideas? Maybe about other Gods too? Let's hear them!

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    Gangster of Love! Octothorpe's Avatar
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    A good question, HK. I've often thought of it as a sort of continuum, where one's belief in the gods occupies more than one stand. Let's have some examples, shall we?

    Some Heathens see the gods as tribal concepts, ideas about the world that the ancestors generated in the past. In order to understand the ancestors, we follow (somewhat) in their footsteps. I've known some secular Jews like this, who really don't believe in the reality of Yahweh, but they'll wear the sacred ritual items when in temple as a way of bonding with their relatives and co-religionists.

    Others might see the Allfather and the Thunderer as personifications of natural forces to be respected by humans. To live well on Midgard is to respect the powers of nature and be good stewards of what we have. That's reason enough for them to venerate the gods.

    Still others might see the gods as 'real' entities, but not as the ancestors ideated them--more like amorphous, energy-creatures, or the potentialities looming out there in meme-space.

    Going further, some Heathens will treat the gods as gods, but with an agnostic attitude of realization that they might not really be there at all, but that it is a good spiritual practice to act as if they were there.

    And, of course, there are those who will see the gods as the honest-to-goodness, mead-swilling, giant-fighting real deal, ready to swoop down and interact with the children of Rig at any time.

    And again, depending on your frame of mind and stage of life, you might hold more than one of these ideas (and that's just a tiny sampling, to be sure) at different times, or even more than one at a time.

    So, what's the bottom line? I'd say they're all equally valid points of view. Mankind's relationship with the metaphysical world are as multitudinous as mankind itself.

    Question: why was this posted here, rather than in the Heathenry section? Just curious!
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    If you're a Heathen, this is just a case of euhemerizing the Gods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euhemerus and specifically http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euhemer...rly_Christians). It was a favorite trick of the Christians, who euhemerized the Gods of the Greeks and Romans as a way to denigrate them, citing that Jupiter was not a God but a deified man from ancient times. I find this contemptuous. If suggests that the Gods of the ancient Pagans and Heathens are merely man-made deities and not true Gods. Saxo Grammaticus used this as a way to explain the existence of Odin, portraying him as a mere mortal magician. Saxo even screws things up iirc, when he says that Thor came from Troy (Thor derives from Troy or somesuch) and that Odin was a descendant of this Thor who came from Troy.


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    Anti-muhammadan Hrolf Kraki's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Octothorpe View Post
    Question: why was this posted here, rather than in the Heathenry section? Just curious!
    Ah you know I probably should have posted it there. I'm just so sick of all this Christian talk and I'd like to divert attention away from these foreign concepts by discussing our gods.

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    IMO the Gods represent beings to strive to rival and beings to properly honor. All of this pap about bending a knee to God(s) is Semitic nonsense, created by ancient Semitic societies (which were typically dominated by aboslute monarchs/autocrats). Is it any surprise that the idea of a tyrant God should arise from societies that had tyrant rulers?

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    Ditto the comments of our comrades above, but for my tuppence, I believe that etymology is the best way of refuting the euhemerists. Seeing how the name of a god developed, as a concept over generations and centuries, how it relates to names of figures in related cultures, languages and traditions, easily topples any ideas like those who referred to in the opening post.

    Wiki says:
    The attested forms of the theonym are traditionally derived from Proto-Germanic *Wōđanaz[2] (in Old Norse word-initial *w- was dropped before rounded vowels and so the name became Óðinn). Adam von Bremen etymologizes the god worshipped by the 11th-century Scandinavian pagans as "Wodan id est furor" ("Wodan, which means 'fury'"). An obsolete alternative etymology, which has been adhered to by many early writers including Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in his Libri tres de occulta philosophia, is to give it the same root as the word god itself, from its Proto-Germanic form *ǥuđ-. This is not tenable today according to most modern academics, except for the Lombardic name Godan, which may go back to *ǥuđanaz (see also goði, gaut, god).

    It should be noted at this point that Old Norse had two different words spelled óðr, one an adjective and the other a noun. The adjective means "mad, frantic, furious, violent",[3] and is cognate with Old English wōd.[4] The noun means "mind, wit, soul, sense" and "song, poetry",[5] and is cognate with Old English wōþ. In compounds, óð- means "fiercely energetic" (e.g. óð-málugr "speaking violently, excited").

    Both Old Norse words are from Proto-Germanic *wōþuz[6], continuing Pre-Germanic *wātus.[7] Two extra-Germanic cognates are the Proto-Celtic *wātus "mantic poetry" (continued in Irish fáith "poet" and Welsh gwawd "praise-poetry") and the Latin vātes "prophet, seer" (a possible loan from Proto-Celtic *wātis, Gaulish ουατεις). A possible, but uncertain, cognate is Sanskrit api-vat- "to excite, awaken" (RV 1.128.2). The Proto-Indo-European meaning of the root is therefore reconstructed as relating to spiritual excitation. The Old Norse semantic split is reflected in Adam von Bremen's testimony of the synchronic understanding of the name as "fury", rather than "poetry" or similar.

    Meid[8] suggested Proto-Germanic *-na- as a suffix expressing lordship ("Herrschersuffix"), in view of words such as Odin's name Herjann "lord of armies", drótinn "lord of men", and þjóðann "lord of the nation", which would result in a direct translation of "lord of spiritual energy", "lord of poetry" or similar. It is sufficient, however, and more common, to assume a more general meaning of pertinence or possession for the suffix, inherited from PIE *-no-, to arrive at roughly the same meaning.

    Rübekeil (2003:29)[9] draws attention to the suffix variants *-ina- (in Óðinn) vs. *-ana- (in Woden, Wotan). This variation, if considered at all, was dismissed as "suffix ablaut" by earlier scholars. There are, however, indications from outside Old Norse of a suffix *-ina-: English Wednesday (rather than *Wodnesday) via umlaut goes back to *wōđina-. Rübekeil concludes that the original Proto-Germanic form of the name was *Wōđinaz, yielding Old Norse Óðinn and unattested Anglo-Saxon *Wēden, and that the attested West Germanic forms are early medieval "clerical" folk etymologies, formed under the impression of synchronic association with terms for "fury".

    The pre-Proto-Germanic form of the name would then be *Wātinos. Rübekeil suggests that this is a loan from Proto-Celtic into pre-Proto-Germanic, referring to the god of the *wātis, the Celtic priests of mantic prophecy, so that the original meaning of the name would be "he [the god/lord] of the Vates" (p. 33), which he tentatively identifies with Lugus (p. 40).

    W. S. W. Anson's 1880 Asgard and the Gods[unreliable source?] surmises that "Wuotan" was originally a fully abstract cosmic force, whose name meant not "fury" originally but etymologically, quite literally, meant "what was pervasive" with the second element, "-an", issuing a meaning that renders it to be construed as signifying a single pervasive principle. According to Anson, wuot- meant " …to force one's way through anything, to conquer all opposition…" and Wuotan solidifying such as "…the all-penetrating, all-conquering Spirit of Nature…". The name Wuotan being related to, in their interpretation "(t)he modern German water, and the English wade". Anson consideres those two words to be more "restricted in meaning" than was wuot itself. The less restricted implications so grew as the attribute inherent in the meaning of the name for the god. The suffix "-an" personifying, but not then anthropomorphizing, the prefix element as the absolute definitive instance, and font-head, of anything thus resembling the meaning that such said prefix element 'wuot-' would have had in nature, toward one unique divine origination of that as a general qualification.[1]
    Old English wōd's Middle English reflex wood is very common in Chaucer, we could add. Means summat like 'apeshit'.

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    The Gods defy proper explanation. I follow Athena so to speak, but I'm aware of Asatru and the revival of the northern Heathenry in the modern world. I'm also a member of the AFA, but mostly as a supporter/observer. Anyways, the best way to go about the business of explaining the Gods, of any part of Europe, is to remember that they are seen mainly via the perspective of Christian interlopers who then handed down the appropriate beliefs (their beliefs, that is) to the modern day. When you understand that much of the native traditions of the north survive via Christianity, you learn to take a lot of the lore with a grain of salt. Who knows what these ancient people in the north truly believed about their Gods and Goddesses. Saxo was writing his Danish history well after the conversion to Christianity, so he had bits and pieces to work with. This is also the case of Snorri. Both men also had Christian biases, so their works can't be called objective.

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    To me the gods are some kind of ancient primordial force. They have a presence, but not necessarily a body. The ancient practice of anthropomorphizing them seems outdated to me.

    The gods can be with-in and with-out and can arise from some external source or arise from with-in the blood of their people.

    If they were truly ancient kings or people of great worth, why did the practice seem to die out after they (the gods) were deified? Why weren't other great kings and people deified as well, centuries later?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Ulf View Post
    If they were truly ancient kings or people of great worth, why did the practice seem to die out after they (the gods) were deified? Why weren't other great kings and people deified as well, centuries later?
    Good point. But I wonder what the feeling is amongst the recreationists about present day deification of worthy heroes from our past? How did the Greeks and Romans find it so easy to slip into this activity, while we refrained from it? Is the Hero high enough in that category he has already made for himself, or is it fitting (and useful) for us to put him a little higher still?

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    Perhaps because nothing in the ancient lore suggests that Odin and Thor were deified wizards, but that they were actually Gods? It's true that ancient European societies deified worthy mortals, considering them to be like the Gods themselves, but this isn't anything really noteworthy if you follow the veiled suggestions of the lore- that anyone can be so deified, assuming they were worthy. For example, the mothers worshipped by the ancient northern Europeans were merely deified maternal ancestors.

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