Acts of nature often leave me completely awestruck. An image like the one I’ve used in this post makes it easy for me to understand how something so powerful and majestic as a severe thunderstorm could make people look for a divine explanation. In Norse mythology, Thor is portrayed is a large man with flowing red hair and eyes that flashed with lightning. A pretty impressive image. He was considered a protector against evil.
The thunder that is heard during a storm was believed to be caused by Thor throwing his magical hammer while riding through the heavens on his chariot. The end of his story is both joyous and tragic. He is to fight his nemesis, whom he will defeat. However, the price of victory will be his own life.
He was immensely popular and his symbol, the hammer, was often worn. People today are still paying homage to Thor, albeit in a diluted way. Every Thursday is Thor’s day. In some language it translates to Thunder day, also appropriate for the popular and powerful god.
Sometimes it makes me sad that the magic has gone out of the world. The belief in the old gods made personal interaction an immediate experience. I’ll be thinking about that during the next thunderstorm.
Photo Credit: Phatman
August 24th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Gods | Comments (0)
The thing I like about Ishtar is that she breaks life down well for me. To me life is love and war, or maybe it is the mood I’m in. But if you think about it…without love you wouldn’t have hate and without hate you wouldn’t have war. You have to feel passionately about something in order to feel strongly enough to want to kill lots of people (in war) for it, right?
So it’s appropriate (in my world anyway) for the Assyrian goddess of love, fertility, and sex to also be the goddess of war. Yes, I know that she (or rather her followers) were really about sex, but my focus here is love and war. There are lots of interesting stories about love, betrayal, and who was doing what with who. Kind of like modern day drama reality shows, except on a divine level.
Unlike her contemporary gods and goddesses of love, she was just a bit more hard core. For anyone interested in finding out more about Ishtar there are really only two myths that relate to her directly. The story of Gilgamesh tells of Ishtar throwing herself at him and how karma (different culture but you get what I mean, right?) bites her. Another myth describes Ishtar’s decent into hell and then her return trip. All pretty interesting stuff, if you like love and war anyway.
What do you think of Ishtar? Who is your favorite love goddess?
Photo Credit: CarbonNYC
July 31st, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Gods | Comments (0)
You know how I found Thor? I found Thor by watching Star Gate. Yeah, I’m a bit of a science fiction geek, if you define a geek as someone who likes everything science fiction-y (and would prefer the world if it really was that way). So Star Gate… one of the recurring characters is Thor. Thor is an alien (a sweet good guy Asgard alien) that pretended to be the ancient god Thor.
Why is this cool? Well it is cool for numerous reasons, which I’ll probably get into later, but for the purpose of this post it is cool because it got me into Norse mythology. I actually know a bit about Egyptian, Greek, and Roman mythology but hadn’t been all that interested in the Norse until Star Gate.
Thor kind of reminds me of Zeus, what with the lightning bolts and all. Of course, he is more well known for the boomerang hammer, which is also pretty sweet. He was basically the sky god, riding above in a chariot controlling rain and throwing lightning bolts. (pretty convenient for an alien alias, huh?)
Back to those Asgard aliens. Oddly enough, Asgard is also the name of the city where the Norse gods lived. Oh the connections. I love it when writers include elements of history and mythology (the original science fiction).
Who would have thought that a television show could bring in so much mythology? What have you learned from non-educational television?
Photo Credit Kyle May
June 24th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Gods | Comments (0)
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