Sunday, January 9, 2011
Story Euphoria 13: Myths of Odin
This week, Story Euphoria presents two myths about Odin, the All-Father of the Norse pantheon, as retold by Padraic Colum in The Children of Odin: The Book of Northern Myths. Download and listen!
You can follow along or read more myths at Project Gutenberg. You can also check your local library or get this book for your personal collection:
Production Notes:
Creator: Amanda Haldy
Theme Music: Nye Nate by Roger Leighton
Incidental Music: Transgenesis and Mountain by Megaplasma Factory Recordings
Suspense by Stephen Gashler
and One Good Eye by Doug Tapper.
Realms of Myth
Last Week, Story Euphoria contemplated one of the greatest powers of story: the power to illuminate truth. Truth is different from fact. Truth is understood on a more intuitive level than the cerebral cortex can make sense of, and it resists definition by language. Truth is why humanity has the arts at all and why we started telling stories—in a struggle to understand, and to chart the strange roads we all must travel through life and into death. Stories are the signposts of the spirit. And from the first moment a cold, bright-eyed hominid painted the first antelope stampeding on a cave wall, we have been driven to tell stories.
The oldest stories we know of, preserved in tribal memory or graven in clay tablets, are myths—stories of symbol and the world of the unseen. And one of the oldest of these is what remains of an ancient Sumerian myth about the great goddess, Inanna, Queen of Heaven, who heard a call and went on a journey into the underworld, the place from which no traveler returns, the land of the dead. Her sister, Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld, commanded that, as Inanna passed through each gate into the Great Below, she be stripped one by one of her items of power (which can be interpreted each as a me, or tablet of knowledge of civilization): her crown, the lapis beads from round her neck, her breastplate called “Come, man, come!”, and so on until Inanna entered the throne room completely naked. As the Wolkstein and Kramer translation of the epic continues:
Inanna has undergone the most profound transformation we know of on this earth, and she will return from it with powers obtained from Ereshkigal and the underworld. This is a prototypical story of rebirth, of loss and regeneration into something better balanced within the dualities of light and dark: the evolution towards wisdom. This journey echoes time and again throughout mythology and religion the world over.
The renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell theorizes that this journey and return theme is part of the monomyth shared by all cultures, more commonly known as the Hero’s Journey, an element of story which Story Euphoria has visited before. Often heroes embark on these journeys to acquire knowledge of some kind—to help their tribe, or to serve a cause greater than themselves, which is what makes them heroes. Heroes are sacrificed to their greater purpose.
Examples of this cycle are everywhere, and once you are aware of the pattern, you will see it in everything from old fairy tales to modern television shows, but one excellent example can be found in the figure of Odin from Norse mythology. Odin is a journeying hero figure who, like Inanna, possesses powers connected with war and creation, but above all, with knowledge and wisdom. The two ravens who sit on his shoulders and bring him news of the worlds are called Huginn and Muninn, thought and memory, and Odin is responsible for bringing poetry to mankind, which in Norse culture is synonymous with knowledge, history and spiritual power.
Odin’s doings are often motivated from what seems to be an obsession with Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods, when their mythic world and almost everything in it is destroyed. Specifically, Odin is obsessed with increasing knowledge and wisdom as his ideal weapons against adversity, as a means of aiding the Gods of Asgard and the Men of Midgard, and he does not balk at painful and gruesome sacrifices to achieve his goals. You can listen to one journey Odin makes as this week’s Story Euphoria podcast presents two myths of Odin—of how he left to seek the Well of Wisdom, and of the sacrifice he made to drink from it.
Whatever subconscious meaning you may find in these myths, one thing is clear: Odin and eventually all the Gods and Giants must travel the archetypal hero’s journey to achieve revelation and an elevated state of being—Ragnarök, after all, is not only the end of what was before but is also the beginning of a better world: the world we live in now. Odin—as a warrior and a wanderer—takes this journey many times in his relentless pursuit of understanding. There is the moment where, in order to possess the knowledge of runic writing, he hung himself from the world tree with his own spear plunged through him, as Odin himself declares in the section of the Hávamál poem called the Rúnatal:
The image of Odin on Yggdrasil has been compared to the image of Christ on the cross, both of which might also be compared to the Buddha sitting under the bodhi tree, where he decided to meditate until he died or found enlightenment. Certainly, on the mythic level, these moments tell of a similar journey: the hero must travel through death, symbolic or actual, and be willingly stripped of all material assumptions and assertions in the ultimate transformation of self from the finite thing who does not know to the cosmic hero who has obtained the answer, to the benefit of the world he left behind.
The oldest stories we know of, preserved in tribal memory or graven in clay tablets, are myths—stories of symbol and the world of the unseen. And one of the oldest of these is what remains of an ancient Sumerian myth about the great goddess, Inanna, Queen of Heaven, who heard a call and went on a journey into the underworld, the place from which no traveler returns, the land of the dead. Her sister, Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld, commanded that, as Inanna passed through each gate into the Great Below, she be stripped one by one of her items of power (which can be interpreted each as a me, or tablet of knowledge of civilization): her crown, the lapis beads from round her neck, her breastplate called “Come, man, come!”, and so on until Inanna entered the throne room completely naked. As the Wolkstein and Kramer translation of the epic continues:
Then Ereshkigal fastened on Inanna the eye of death.
She spoke against her the word of wrath.
She uttered against her the cry of guilt.
She struck her.
Inanna was turned into a corpse,
A piece of rotting meat,
And was hung from a hook on the wall.
Inanna has undergone the most profound transformation we know of on this earth, and she will return from it with powers obtained from Ereshkigal and the underworld. This is a prototypical story of rebirth, of loss and regeneration into something better balanced within the dualities of light and dark: the evolution towards wisdom. This journey echoes time and again throughout mythology and religion the world over.
The renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell theorizes that this journey and return theme is part of the monomyth shared by all cultures, more commonly known as the Hero’s Journey, an element of story which Story Euphoria has visited before. Often heroes embark on these journeys to acquire knowledge of some kind—to help their tribe, or to serve a cause greater than themselves, which is what makes them heroes. Heroes are sacrificed to their greater purpose.
Examples of this cycle are everywhere, and once you are aware of the pattern, you will see it in everything from old fairy tales to modern television shows, but one excellent example can be found in the figure of Odin from Norse mythology. Odin is a journeying hero figure who, like Inanna, possesses powers connected with war and creation, but above all, with knowledge and wisdom. The two ravens who sit on his shoulders and bring him news of the worlds are called Huginn and Muninn, thought and memory, and Odin is responsible for bringing poetry to mankind, which in Norse culture is synonymous with knowledge, history and spiritual power.
Odin’s doings are often motivated from what seems to be an obsession with Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods, when their mythic world and almost everything in it is destroyed. Specifically, Odin is obsessed with increasing knowledge and wisdom as his ideal weapons against adversity, as a means of aiding the Gods of Asgard and the Men of Midgard, and he does not balk at painful and gruesome sacrifices to achieve his goals. You can listen to one journey Odin makes as this week’s Story Euphoria podcast presents two myths of Odin—of how he left to seek the Well of Wisdom, and of the sacrifice he made to drink from it.
Whatever subconscious meaning you may find in these myths, one thing is clear: Odin and eventually all the Gods and Giants must travel the archetypal hero’s journey to achieve revelation and an elevated state of being—Ragnarök, after all, is not only the end of what was before but is also the beginning of a better world: the world we live in now. Odin—as a warrior and a wanderer—takes this journey many times in his relentless pursuit of understanding. There is the moment where, in order to possess the knowledge of runic writing, he hung himself from the world tree with his own spear plunged through him, as Odin himself declares in the section of the Hávamál poem called the Rúnatal:
I know that I hung on a windy tree
nine long nights,
wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree of which no man knows
from where its roots run.
No bread did they give me nor a drink from a horn,
downwards I peered;
I took up the runes, screaming I took them,
then I fell back from there.
The image of Odin on Yggdrasil has been compared to the image of Christ on the cross, both of which might also be compared to the Buddha sitting under the bodhi tree, where he decided to meditate until he died or found enlightenment. Certainly, on the mythic level, these moments tell of a similar journey: the hero must travel through death, symbolic or actual, and be willingly stripped of all material assumptions and assertions in the ultimate transformation of self from the finite thing who does not know to the cosmic hero who has obtained the answer, to the benefit of the world he left behind.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Story Euphoria 12: The Open Boat
Stephen Crane is often noted as a forerunner of realism, inspiring the spare style of writers like Ernest Hemingway. In this story, Crane draws on a real life experience to explore the strain that so easily appears when modern man is stripped of the comforts of civilization and sees his own death through nature's eyes. Download and listen to The Open Boat, by Stephen Crane.
Production Notes:
Creator: Amanda Haldy
Theme Music: Nye Nate by Roger Leighton
Incidental Music: Fantastic Fly by Electro Wave
If you would like to read more by Stephen Crane, you can peruse the collection I used for free at Project Gutenberg, check out your local library, or buy a copy for yourself:
Truth and Fiction
Story Euphoria is concerned first and finally with fiction, but there is a place where fiction meets reality, a place where real life inhabits fictional characters. Apprentice writers are often told to “write what you know,” and the storytellers we best love are keen observers of life because we expect stories, whether realistic or not, to reflect something true about life—and better yet, about our own lives. Reading a fiction is an experience, and some fictions are real experiences thinly veiled with false names, such as the story in this week’s podcast. Given all of this, why bother with fiction at all?
Real life is full of stories that are no less true than they are fascinating, burgeoning with adventure and strange twists of fate—as evidenced by the popularity of memoirs in today’s book market—and we are all familiar with the old saw, “truth is stranger than fiction.” So what were the first storytellers thinking? Why did they decide to start making stuff up?
To answer this question in a round-about fashion, consider how a person groping to express as accurately as possible a sensation or experience may turn to other languages to find just the right word: “As the French say,” “As the Chinese say,” what have you. Most languages retain a marvelous number of loan words simply to fill in linguistic gaps. Like a foreign language with just the right nuance, fiction is a language of art, and what a language of art provides is the power to express subtle concepts, subconscious understandings that are beyond words, much as spiritual teachers may use a parable to shine light on a mystical concept. The words are not the point: It's what lies behind them.
Much as the myths of the ancients did, modern fiction explores life on a level that goes beyond reporting what happened and how. In other words, fiction allows the storyteller the same versatility of expression enjoyed by the painter or the musician. Instead of pigments or notes, the fiction writer plays with events, emotions, dialogue and images with a kind of freedom that the earnest memoirist can only long for. The deliberate juxtaposition of a fiction’s elements can evoke in the reader a reaction that goes beyond the language itself, and when that reaction reveals something vital, an epiphany of the unseen and subtle world, the power of fiction is apparent.
This is far from saying truth is irrelevant to fiction. Like any art form, the best fiction, no matter how fantastical or outlandish, is infused with the presence of its creator: it flashes with moments of truth. You can’t fake a good story; you can only labor to build a thing with heart, much as Frankenstein toiled over his Monster (though we hope with more felicitous results). So, instead of “write what you know,” a more useful precept may be to “write what you love,” for in passion lives an exulted form of truth.
Real life is full of stories that are no less true than they are fascinating, burgeoning with adventure and strange twists of fate—as evidenced by the popularity of memoirs in today’s book market—and we are all familiar with the old saw, “truth is stranger than fiction.” So what were the first storytellers thinking? Why did they decide to start making stuff up?
To answer this question in a round-about fashion, consider how a person groping to express as accurately as possible a sensation or experience may turn to other languages to find just the right word: “As the French say,” “As the Chinese say,” what have you. Most languages retain a marvelous number of loan words simply to fill in linguistic gaps. Like a foreign language with just the right nuance, fiction is a language of art, and what a language of art provides is the power to express subtle concepts, subconscious understandings that are beyond words, much as spiritual teachers may use a parable to shine light on a mystical concept. The words are not the point: It's what lies behind them.
Much as the myths of the ancients did, modern fiction explores life on a level that goes beyond reporting what happened and how. In other words, fiction allows the storyteller the same versatility of expression enjoyed by the painter or the musician. Instead of pigments or notes, the fiction writer plays with events, emotions, dialogue and images with a kind of freedom that the earnest memoirist can only long for. The deliberate juxtaposition of a fiction’s elements can evoke in the reader a reaction that goes beyond the language itself, and when that reaction reveals something vital, an epiphany of the unseen and subtle world, the power of fiction is apparent.
This is far from saying truth is irrelevant to fiction. Like any art form, the best fiction, no matter how fantastical or outlandish, is infused with the presence of its creator: it flashes with moments of truth. You can’t fake a good story; you can only labor to build a thing with heart, much as Frankenstein toiled over his Monster (though we hope with more felicitous results). So, instead of “write what you know,” a more useful precept may be to “write what you love,” for in passion lives an exulted form of truth.
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