Science and Heathenry: Instances of Rapprochement in the Vernacular of Science and Heathen Lore

[Aemma]

^^ Not a bad title for an essay eh?

Anyroad as dear Ossi would say, as noted elsewhere, I recently watched, via youtube, some parts of David Suzuki's documentary called The Sacred Balance which is based on the book by the same title.

In one of the segments, the words of cosmologist Brian Swimme deeply resonated within me especially when deep-thinking about Sunna:

"One of the gifts of science is in understanding that life exists by drawing in the sun; one of the gifts of science is to realize that what is surging through us in every moment of our life, with every breath we take, is the sun. So in a real sense the human is the human form of a solar flare. It is surging into the life of the Earth, and in all beings, in the fish, in the mammals, and in the human we have another form of the energy that first was captured by the early photosynthetic organisms. We are the sun in a new form." (from The Sacred Balance web portal)

Have other heathens here come across specific passages in scientific works that have made one think about a particular deity or group of deities or other aspects of heathen lore?

[Grumpy Cat]

Have other heathens here come across specific passages in scientific works that have made one think about a particular deity or group of deities or other aspects of heathen lore?

Well, I always thought of Ginnugagap as outer space, and the fire is the sun while the ice is ice particles mixed with rock from space, which combined to make the galaxy and solar system.

[Psychonaut]

Ooo, nice topic!

I'll submit a passage from Kepler's Harmonies of the World (1618):

...it is not easy for dwellers on the Earth to conjecture...what mind there is in the sun. (241-241)

For as the sun rotating into itself moves all the planets by means of the form emitted from itself, so too...mind, by understanding itself and in itself all things, stirs up ratiocinations, and by dispersing and unrolling its simplicity into them makes everything to be understood...[For,] there dwells in the sun simply intellect, pyr noeron, or nous, the source, whatsoever it may be, of every harmony. (244)

[Liffrea]

I’m primarily an Odinist, the project of science itself is the exploration of the fundamental reality of nature, it is all inspiring.

[Psychonaut]

From Haldane [1]:

It is not inconceivable that such [stellar] systems resonance phenomena of the complexity of life and mind might occur...It is conceivable that the interior of stars may shelter minds vastly superior to our own, though presumably incapable of communication with us.

1. Quoted in David Skrbina's Panpsychism in the West, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007), 190.

[Loddfafner]

The advice in the Havamal to look beyond surface appearances and be prepared to give some benefit of a doubt (see my sig quote as an example) or to remain cautious reminds me of the centrality of uncertainty in the scientific method.

The collision of fire and ice in the Voluspa is a chemical reaction.