Norse Mythology For Smart People
"This cycle – from birth to life to death to rebirth – is the same cycle that we see repeated in the course of the day, the year, the phases of the moon, and the life cycle of any organism. For the pre-Christian Norse and other Germanic peoples, these myths expressed the invisible meaning they perceived within the visible phenomena that follow these cycles – which is to say, all visible phenomena.
These tales linked everything that one might encounter during the course of one’s life back to the sacred realities at the heart of life. The heathen Germanic peoples could therefore say, along with the poet William Blake, that “everything that lives is holy.” They had no need to long for a distant Heaven or to dread a distant Hell; this world, here and now, is where the sacred reveals itself, in all its wonder, beauty, and terror."
"This cycle – from birth to life to death to rebirth – is the same cycle that we see repeated in the course of the day, the year, the phases of the moon, and the life cycle of any organism. For the pre-Christian Norse and other Germanic peoples, these myths expressed the invisible meaning they perceived within the visible phenomena that follow these cycles – which is to say, all visible phenomena.
These tales linked everything that one might encounter during the course of one’s life back to the sacred realities at the heart of life. The heathen Germanic peoples could therefore say, along with the poet William Blake, that “everything that lives is holy.” They had no need to long for a distant Heaven or to dread a distant Hell; this world, here and now, is where the sacred reveals itself, in all its wonder, beauty, and terror."
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