Repeating Cycles of Violence in the Lore
This morning Sannion wrote a beautiful and powerful breakdown of some of the devotional prayers he’s been writing of late. One of those prayers was to our God of sacred vengeance Váli. I’ll share my comment about all of that here. I’ve written before about Odin and Rindr, but I”d never really considered how Their son fits into things. As I said on his blog, I love his breakdown of the prayers he’s written. wow. Re. Váli’s hymn…I am glad it exists. I think it is an incredibly potent and powerful piece and…I cannot ever honor this God. I want to see Him honored absolutely, but I myself stand with Sigyn and Loki and the slaughter of Their children was something beyond the pale for me. There’s a particular brutality there (though going back to our creation narrative, (I firmly believe that moment of creation is reified again and throughout out mythic cycle.) I can’t help but consider that again, on a theological level, as with Odin and Rindr, there is a reification of the violence and brutality of two opposing forces grinding together to create something new) and…I think this will be one God where I nod in respect …from a distance. Some people see both Váli’s as the same God, but I don’t think that is supported in any extant lore.
Brutality and Violence serve a creative purpose in our tradition. The act of creating is an act of destruction, of transformation and maybe that’s why Váli’s story also involves a God, Loki, Whom we sometimes call the World Breaker. Making and Breaking and Making again is embedded in our sacred stories. What can we learn from this?
Posted on January 24, 2023, in Uncategorized and tagged Heathenry, Northern tradition, theology. Bookmark the permalink. 14 Comments.
Gangleri's Grove 
The “Lugal-e” of Sumer with Ninurta fighting with Azag seems to result in the annual recreation of the world for humans. I believe from my reading of it is that order and chaos are needed to break and remake the world. We have to seek a balance between them.
I think that modern Neo-Pagans tend to leave behind the brutality and embrace the modern order of things. Messes do not seem to be tolerated.
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that’s why so many of them gravitate toward very fundamentalist political positions. Dealing with devotion and Gods and cultus is messy and inconvenient and forces us to grow and look at places within ourselves we may not wish to explore. Creation is messy. Life is messy. Instead of dealing with that, they become the wrong type of zealot imo. I should point out also, that Heathens do not generally consider themselves Neo-Pagan. That’s a term we leave for those who don’t center the Gods in their practice (which is a bit hypocritical, because I have seen way too many Heathens who have no respect for the Gods). Btw, I’ve been enjoying your posts on the Sumerian Gods.
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Live is messy and so are our Myths. Unfortunately, most myths get tamed and translated into academic goobly-gook. It is also as if the moderns want everything to be neat, clean, and civilized. The Gods can be that, but They are also messy as well.
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This reminds me of the somewhat bitter joke I hear from some of my friends whenever something notably unpleasant happens in the news, “Time is a flat circle”. I know this is a joke, but I’m quite literal and I’ve always thought of time as being more of a wheel, or a spiral: the same things might come around again, but the context will continually change.
With that in mind, I think that the continual breaking and making of worlds we see in our myths is a huge part of that turning/cycle. I understand the violence of some myths as part of what builds momentum to facilitate that change. Whether we’re talking about interpersonal-type conflict, natural disasters, or necessary predation or some other kind of violence, it’s all necessary movement. The destruction of things like rot or disease might be “slower” but I think that it works similarly, ultimately nourishing life through breaking down in order to support future movement of the cosmic whole.
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I think this is quite a profound way of looking at it. I agree with you about cyclical restoration via destruction…and I’ll add this. We tend to center ourselves in the narrative of creation but we are part of the worlds not a separate creature. we were carefully constructed, worked into being by the thought, will, and holy power of three Creator Gods. We’re not an afterthought but neither were we necessarily the first thing created. We’re part of the whole. The virus, the bacteria, the worms, the birds, the lions, the trees, the four legged critters, the amoeba…they are part of the Gods creation too, and as an animist, I think the Gods tend them with as much care as They do us and our needs. it’s a balance, and sometimes the predator/prey cycle is difficult but it is a natural and moreover, imo, holy thing. “Necessary movement” as you put it—YES YES YES.
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This comic from Humon Comics seems especially relevant to the conversation of “humans aren’t the center”: https://humoncomics.com/mother-gaia
The world and our place in it changes a lot when we don’t put humanity first– and honestly I think many, many manmade systems would benefit from de-centering humanity.
The extreme discomfort I see in some NeoPagan spaces with the natural cycles of the world– particularly the rot and violence that are so essential– feels really, really colonial to me. Maybe it’s a part of the idea that humans can/should exist outside of or “above” the “ugliness” and unpredictability of the natural world, that these things are somehow inferior. It’s very Enlightenment Era, yknow?
Like, just because we can (and should) get vaccinated doesn’t mean that we should also continue relying on fossil fuels and failing at land management. Not all human-driven responses to the nature are good and not all have equivalent impact on the world. I think that the polytheist has a necessary duty to understand that humans do not always need to be humanity’s top priority– and that we are also not always going to be the gods’ top priority. The world is much bigger than us.
(That said I am starting to get the impression that “neopagan” and “polytheist” aren’t actually synonyms, depending on who you talking, which is something I find terribly confusing.)
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They/re not synonyms at all. I don’t think most polytheists would consider themselves “Neo-Pagan.” And the issue is centering the Gods and spirits in our practice. This came to a head in 2012 and we fought over these terms for awhile. I would never, ever call myself a Neo-Pagan. I”m not Neo-anything. I’m restoring very old traditions, traditions in which the Gods and Their veneration hold prime of place. have to run now — have a meeting and sorry for being so terse. but I’ll post more on this later. 🙂
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No apologies needed— I would hardly call this terse! And in any case we all have lives away from the keyboard. 🙂
I see exactly what you’re saying the more I read into the online, recent history of assorted polytheistic-adjacent spaces. I admit, being quite literal, “neopagan” always struck me as odd. It seems to imply some kind of singleness, the reinvention of one tradition. But if “pagan” means “anything not sufficiently Christian”, then it leaves room for … so many religions. Which is to say: the term doesn’t resonate much for me either lol
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I use Neo-Pagan to denote modern Pagans who are not Polytheists or consider themselves Polytheists but regard themselves to be modern pagans as well.
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I like your take on this. The forces breaking and re-making worlds.
I have some devotion to Vali. He seems to reach out to people who are trying to make sense of multigenerational cycles of violence.
For me, there are also echoes of his story in the sagas which depict so many brutal and long-running blood feuds. Vengeance in these stories never seemed glorified, just tragic.
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I really think this is quite a powerful way to approach Him, a powerful area of expertise. I can see that very strongly: that He may help devotees make sense of multigenerational cycles of violence. Thank you for this — I hadn’t really delved into it before. Vengeance may be sacred in some cases, but I think it’s always, always tragic.
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You know, that’s what I don’t like about
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Sorry. I clicked send by mistake
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Here’s the entirety of what I was going to say:
You know, that’s what I don’t like about a lot of ostensible Pagans: they’re so willing to throw out parts of our traditions that they don’t like just because it doesn’t match with their modern sensibilities and so unwilling to try to see the value in those parts. Our Gods are in all things. They instituted the natural world we live in and a part of that world is violence and brutality. These aspects of life are profound. Death is profound. The acknowledgement that we as heterotrophic organisms exist at the expense of other beings is profound. The very atoms in our body have undergone countless transmutations ever since they emerged from the hearts of dying stars and they will continue to do so even beyond when the last stars have become dim. This is profound. To reject the more brutal aspects of the worship of our Gods is to reject Their very work. To reject everything we are as worshippers of these Gods are taught to value. To be Polytheist is to embrace all that the Gods created no matter how brutal or violent. In these things do we see the raw power of the Gods
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