Toward Ecosophy

Oh. My. Goodness! Thanks for broadening this Heathen’s horizons yet again, JMG.

OtterGirl

PS: You suggested over the years that the study of language, including “extinct” language, provides perspectives on a culture unavailable otherwise. I started lightly studying Old Norse several weeks ago, and while fluent is not on my radar, it seems just getting a sense of the grammar and building my vocabulary is opening doors, ever so slightly, that would remain closed otherwise.

A quick scan and ... dang I really need more lifetimes for exploration!

What a delightful treat! As I've been trying to make sense out of the larger cosmology and our incredibly complex place within it, each distinct system of lore I've encountered has helped to illuminate some aspect of my own experience of the unseen world. That intricacy of the soul has reflections in every system — the planes, the chakras, the demons, the gods, etc. But this is the first I've heard of a mythology that posits multiple souls in as complex an arrangement as I experience them myself.

Must be time to start paying a little more attention to those Germanic gods. I guess I've been flailing about as blindly as Hoder up to this point (I hope I didn't kill anybody important!) Hopefully, this will be just the braille map I've been fumbling around for. It's certainly going to be an awfully interesting read. Many thanks for the heads up!

— Christophe

From Winifred Hodge Rose

(....Several hours after reading this, I am still giggling about Winifred Hodge Podge! If I ever sign up for a Discordian discussion group, which is unlikely, I'll have to state that as my user name.)

Thank you all for your kind comments! I'd like to address one thread: the question of how Heathen soul lore as I understand it fits in with other esoteric ideas about the levels of being, energy bodies, and the like. It's a meaningful and interesting question, but it's one that I am deliberately not pursuing in any depth, though obviously anyone can, who wants to.

My approach, from the beginning, has been driven by the wish to understand, as well as possible, how elder Heathens perceived the soul(s). Modern culture is so influenced by the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern religious and esoteric philosophies and viewpoints, that it's quite difficult to step outside that mind-realm and be truly open to esoteric understandings that bear very little relation to those roots. I have had to steep and immerse myself in Germanic languages, history, literature, cultural traces, spiritual practices, for the past three decades, to try to follow the route I set for myself.

For this enterprise, I have felt it necessary to stay away from most efforts to interpret my findings according to modern esoteric theories, though I have made an exception when it comes to applying some basic alchemical perspectives. I view the souls as true persons, individual beings, who form a household within us and together sing our sense of Self, in this lifetime, into being.

For me, personally, it feels like a mistake to try to force-fit these soul-beings into some other structure or system of esoteric categories: it distorts and diminishes the wholeness and complexity of each of the souls, and downplays their personality and individuality. But I do understand the urge others might have, to try to do so, if their main focus is on other ways of perceiving and structuring understandings of the souls, and they want to use Heathen soul lore to reinforce those structures.

That isn't my project; my own path lies in understanding Heathenism on its own terms, within its own cultures and languages, as well as I am able. But I agree that these other questions about how Heathen ideas of the souls (and mine are not the only Heathen ideas; there are other different ones out there) fit into other conceptual structures are interesting and meaningful!