Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's almost midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. With certain exceptions, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note:  Any question received after then will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. (I've been getting an increasing number of people trying to post after these are closed, so will have to draw a harder line than before.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says. 

The picture?  I'm working my way through photos of my lineage, focusing on the teachers whose work has influenced me and the teachers who influenced them in turn.  Like Allan Bennett, who we discussed last week, this week's honoree was a teacher of Aleister Crowley. George Cecil Jones was the man who introduced Crowley to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and later on helped Crowley found the Argenteum Astrum (Order of the Silver Star, or A∴A∴), the first of the two magical orders the Not-so-great Beast headed during his lifetime. (The other, the Ordo Templi Orientis or OTO, will be discussed next week.) Jones was a working chemist and metallurgist as well as a serious student of the occult. He practiced the magical virtue of silence more effectively than most of his contemporaries, however, and very little seems to be known about him.

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I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com.

With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***

Comments

[jprussell]

Hi Luke,

Thanks for the shout out! As for books on the Vanir, hmmmm. One difficulty is that we're not totally sure how much the distinction between Aesir and Vanir was relevant to worship in pre-Christian times - we have the myths about the war, we know some Gods have "Van" in their kennings (like Freyja being "Vanadis"), and modern thinking and gnosis suggesting a common thread in what these Gods and Goddesses care about (intellectually likely traceable to Dumezil's tripartite hypothesis and its association of certain Gods with different functions, but as I said, also seemingly correlated by a lot of Heathens' gnosis). Further, as I was reminded by deketemoisant in a comment on my "List of Books on Germanish Belief" (https://jpowellrussell.com/#list_of_books_on_germanish_belief_with_thoughts), in myth, pretty much every Van we have is "acting as" an As - married in, traded as hostages, and so forth.

Anyway, that's all a way of saying that most discussion of the Gods that I know about doesn't get into the Vanir "as the Vanir" in a lot of detail, or as a stand-alone subject. With that caveat out of the way, on to some recommendations like you actually asked for:

1) Gods of the Ancient Northmen This is Dumezil's book about Norse mythology. I haven't read it yet, but from a quick skim, it looks like it might have the closest thing to an overview of the Vanir in the books I had handy/was familiar with: the first chapter is "The Gods: Aesir and Vanir". Throughout the rest of the book, he examines myth and cultic practice through the lens of his tripartite hypothesis, which again, is hugely influential in how most folks these days conceive of the Vanir.

2) Freyja, Lady, Vanadis I haven't read this yet, but some folks around here have spoken well of the author. Likely narrower than you're looking for, as it focuses on only Freyja, but since she's the best-attested and arguably most widely-worshipped of the Vanir, it might come in handy.

3) Northern Tradition for the Solitary Practitioner This more of a "How to Heathen" book, but it contains some discussion of the different "tribes" of the Gods, and in the back lists the Gods by which tribe they belong to along with suggestions for altar decorations, color symbolism, and suitable offerings. Includes information for the slightly-controversial worship of the "Rokkr" (Jotnar, Loki, and his offspring)

4) A Guide to Modern Heathenry This lacks a specific section that's something like "Overview of the Vanir", but its discussion of cosmology and of individual Gods and Goddesses does a pretty good job of highlighting which are Vanir and what things they have in common. Includes meditation suggestions for each God and Goddess, which is nice.

5) The Hidden History of Elves and Dwarfs So, this one is coming at things a bit sideways. The Elves and Dwarves are not *exactly* the same as the Vanir, but there are obviously at least sometimes overlaps with the Elves, so a discussion about them might shed some light on the Vanir. Briefly, the thesis of this book is that Elves are something to do with the "higher" spirits of dead ancestors, whereas Dwarves are something to do with the part(s) of ancestors that go in the ground. I've had the thought that comparing this with JMG's discussion of barrows and other tombs in Secret of the Temple, but I haven't looked into it at all or thought very hard about it.

6) The Goddess Idun in Myth and Poetry While not an overview of the Vanir, this includes a pretty thorough sampling of epithets for the "Matronae", Goddesses that were apparently worshipped by Germanish folks living in the late Roman Empire. Many link the Matronae with the Vanir, and with Nerthus specifically. Perhaps especially relevant is Kvilhaug's discussion about how the idea of a "fertility Goddess" is maybe overly narrow and more of a modern invention.

7) Essays on Germanic Religion This is a collection of essays by a comparative Indo-Europeanist who was firmly in Dumezil's camp for interpretation. I haven't read it yet, but skimming through, it looks like the final essay, "Germanic Religion: An Overview" might have some helpful bits.

Hope some of these help!
Jeff

[(Anonymous)]

I would also say that at least two of the Vanir are also tied to the Jotuns, as Freyr is tied to Gerda and Njord was married to and divorced from Skadi. While we know little about the husband of Freya besides the name Odr, this might be a name for Odin or a name for another deity entirely. But there is another Jotun who has her heart, in a matter of speaking, and that might be Loki. If Freya has the byname Gulveig, and if She was the one trapped in Odin's Hall at the outset of the war, it would have been Loki who ate her heart. So each Vanir deity is tied to the Jotun pantheon in very intimate ways, I would say.