Odin, the ruler of the gods.One thing that has started to interest me lately is the idea of historical events influencing religions and working their way into sacred texts.
Since people who partake of a religious structure tend to assign absolute truth to it, any and all experiences can and must be worked into a context which is compatible with their religious views.
On a small scale this can lead to ideas like "Rich people are rich because God wills it so" or "It's raining because you forgot to propitiate the Spirit of the Rain."
Some events however, are just so huge that rather than being explained in terms of a religion, they go the other direction and alter it. An eclipse at the right time or a battle lost can have an immense influence on the think of those effected.
A relatively well known example comes from the bible, specifically the Plagues with which God afflicted Egypt prior to the Exodus. These events (which basically boil down to plagues, ecological disasters and astronomical occurrences) would have been so earthshaking in their effects on the population that they would have been declared acts of God and forever altered the relationship of the faithful with their deity.
The specific example which first brought this to my mind comes from a mythology which is now more or less defunct but which still holds a great attraction. Ancient Norse myths, which form the basis for a great deal of Western fantasy and mythology (along with the Greeks) features not one but two tribes of gods (the Aesir who the Norse actually worshiped and the Vanir) which start by making war on each other and finally seal a peace treaty by exchanging hostages. The Vanir who are thus exchanged actually become established members of the pantheon, meriting worship in their own right.
A little extra info about the war between the Aesir and the Vanir.
This is interesting because that method of hostage exchange is very similar to those used to seal peace between warring clans the world over, not just among the Norse. Whether or not an actual historical formed the basis for this myth, the political conflicts thus resolved were important enough to the Norse to actually warrant a place in their mythology.
I think you are seeing here the way we human beings habitually locate our social habits and structures in the upper world of the gods. In any religious tradition God becomes a mirror for a power structure on earth.. and then that upper world gets taken as a defense for why the human social structure should remain as it is. It all gets kind of circular.
ReplyDeleteI agree with professor Smith, this ties in well with your post about the psalm 18 and how it portrays God as somehow 'lesser' than an all powerful being. Humans attribute many human characteristics to their Gods. We make them in our image (old man with a white beard etc.) give them our words and our emotions in addition to our ways of life.
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