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From Alec comes this topic idea:
“For the topic idea do you think you could talk about mythologies and how they can still fit into our modern days? For example a lot of Greek myths have a lot of things that people today know aren’t right, but it seems like people are so quick to judge the Gods based on stories that human’s wrote.”
This is a topic that comes around quite a few times, but I think this may be the first time I am going to address it head on.
I have said on this blog, on Around the Grandfather Fire, and in workshops that myths are part of the map and not the territory. Myths tell us things about our Gods. Where They came from, what got Creation started, but what myths are not is the relationship we carry with a given God, Goddess, Ancestor, vaettr, or group of these Beings. This is especially true in religions such as Heathenry where the sources for our myths are filtered through a monotheist lens.
Myths are powerful. They are ways of relating to, understanding, and thinking about how we live with the Gods, Ancestors, and vaettir. To literally interpret myths as so many are wont to do, often through a monotheist/atheist lens, provides so many more hurdles to what is going on, and what a given myth is trying to say. The content of our myths matter, as do their context. Given I am not a Greek polytheist I cannot speak much to those myths, but I encounter this often enough in Norse and Icelandic myths that I do get it.
There is also something to be said for retelling. Each time we tell a story it lives on and is experienced. It is why telling the Norse Creation Story is one of my favorite things to do, especially around a Sacred Fire. When a myth is lifted off the page, comes out of the mouth, when a story is a lived experience that is when it transcends being a mere story. Myths contain cosmological and other truths, even if we have to dig for them a bit. Every time I tell the Creation Story some aspect of it comes forward in a way different than the last time I told it. Its telling becomes a lived experience.
‘Fitting’ these myths into our lives is the wrong approach. Rather, we need to bring these myths into our lives. When we bring them in they need to come into our lives. Our myths have to come off the page, inform our practices, and we need to understand them well in content and context. They need to be well told, and they need to feed our understanding of our Gods, Ancestors, vaettir, World(s), ourselves, and our place in things.
Sarenth Odinsson 