The Teutonic Pantheons

Teutons were described by Romans to be a people living in some parts of Denmark, but more generally in Scandinavia; about a century before the birth of Christ. They spread across the northern parts of Europe and became the Germanic tribes. Not much is known about them, their culture and religion, or what was before. Eventually the Teutonic tribes in present day Sweden, Denmark and Norway became the Vikings.

Origins & Peoples

The Proto-Indo-European people emigrated from an area north of the Black Sea, probably from a time around 4000-1000 BCE; and brought with them a class of warriors, a patriarchal society structure, metalworking, brewing of alcoholic beverages, and a religion with gods of such nature. For this reason we can see a similarity between the Greek, Roman and Teutonic pantheons: they originally came from the same people.

In the most northern parts of Scandinavia there is the Sami people, they immigrated around 10.000 BCE; there are archaeological findings that old at least. There is also the Finno-Ugric people which may be among the oldest of the European peoples. Archaeologic findings in south of Sweden date as far back as 12.000 BCE, but there is no way of knowing which people it was; perhaps some unknown and now extinct paleolithic people?

The Worlds of Yggdrasil and the Races of Gods

Teutonic religion, also called Norse Mythology, consists of several races of gods; which comes from entirely different worlds, each world being part of a great tree called Yggdrasil. There are nine worlds in total: Midgard (Miðgarðr) is the physical world of humans; Asgard (Ásgarðr) is where the Æsir gods lives; Vanaheim (Vanaheimr) is where the Vanir gods lives; there is also the world of the light-elves (Ljósálfr), which is called Alfheim; and there are dark-elves (Svartálfar) and dwarves (Dvergar) in the world called Svartalfheim (Svartálfaheimr); there are three worlds where the giants (Jotunn, Thursar) lives: Jotunheim (Jǫtunheimr), Nifelheim (Niflheimr), and Muspelheim (Muspellsheimr); and there is the world of the fallen dead called Helheim (Helheimr), where the daughter of Loki rules: Hel.

Why is it that there are many races of gods in one religion; why did it develop in such a way? There have been some speculation concerning this, and a theory is that they were worshipped by different peoples who intermingled and so merged into one consistent religion.

The Æsir and the Vanir

The Roman historian Tacitus tells of a cult dedicated to the goddess Nerthus, which of course is a Latin spelling; during Teutonic times, around the first century AD. In the cult of Nerthus male slaves were sacrificed by drowning, and Tacitus described her as being Mother Earth. Some believe this early Mother Earth worshipping people were matriarchal.

Later the god Njord (Njörðr) appear, which is a male sea deity of the Vanir. The Vanir are primarily fertility gods, while the Æsir are primarily war gods. Njord was probably the non-Latin version of Nerthus, which Tacitus wrote about, but strange enough Njord was male while Nerthus was female; how come? Could it be that a matriarchal society changed the gender of their deity when they became patriarchal? What happened that made such a change?

In Norse legend there is told of the Æsir–Vanir war, and many believe it represents a real war between two peoples, with two different religions: the agricultural people worshipping the Vanir, and the invading warrior people worshipping the Æsir. Apparently the people of the Æsir won, and the gods Njord and his children Freyja and Freyr became hostages of the Æsir and moved to Asgard. Not many other gods of the Vanir are known, unfortunately.

Other Gods

Giants

The different races of the gods met and mingled and married and had children, so they were generally of the same kind. This also included the giants, the elves and the dwarves/dark-elves. Njord, Freyja and Freyr were not the only hostages taken by the Æsir, there were also a few giants, the most famous of them being Loki; and they were all considered equal to the Æsir.

If the Vanir and the Æsir originally were worshipped by two peoples, would it be reasonable to assume the giants were worshipped by a third people? The giants were powerful and magical nature gods, and often they represented an anthropomorphic personification of some natural phenomenon, or a physical object: such as a mountain. Perhaps the giants were worshipped by a nature people, of hunters and gatherers? The enmity with the giants perhaps came from that this people were not very cooperative and would not submit to the dominion of the people worshipping the Æsir gods?

Among the giants there were also several different types; the Jotunn lived in Jotunheim, the Rimthursar or "frost giants" lived in Nifelheim, and the "fire giants" also called Thursar lived in Muspelheim.

Elves

What then of the elves, were there a fourth people worshipping them? Possibly. As stated in the beginning of this text, there were many peoples who moved about for a very long period of time; many thousands of years. Their religions were polytheistic, which means they did not have to compete for superiority the way monotheistic religions has; because monotheistic religions say there is only one god, but which of them is it? And so they demonise all competing gods.

The elves were like the giants associated with nature phenomenons; unlike the Æsir and Vanir who were associated with more human activities. The lord of the light-elves was Freyr, a Vanir god. This means that if there were once a people worshipping the elves they would have mixed with the Vanir worshipping people, who became their masters; before the Æsir–Vanir war.

The Art of Dreaming I

I love dreaming, and so I love sleeping; it is one of my favourite activities—an interest I share with my cats, who've definitely mastered sleeping... and snoring... yes, one of them snores noisily. Whether they dream, I believe so; the snoring cat, Gersimi, sometimes wake up complaining and shouting and looking angrily at me, possibly she'd had a dream in which I didn't feed her: the worst of all nightmares perhaps; and I've met them in my dreams from time to time.

Mostly my dreams are normal unconscious images and emotions, but now and then I have lucid dreams where I am aware and can direct my will and explore the world in which the dreams take place. The lucidity of the dreams tend to vary between almost unconscious to near awake: where the near unconscious dreams usually return to the unconscious state and are highly chaotic and without much continuity, and the borderline awake state rarely remain dream-state before waking up and tend to have blurred vision with awareness of my physical body. Optimally a state in between unconscious and awake is to prefer in which the vision is clearer and more detailed than the physical world.

Hypnos the God of Dreams

The dream god is the mind which creates the dream world, upholds its laws and invents its story. I choose to call it "god" because that's what best suits its function and description: it is the creator of worlds. There is some kind of mind behind the dreams, it is possibly some aspect of the unconscious or super-conscious; maybe it's an angel, who knows? The Greeks had such a god, and they called him "Hypnos"; whether he was understood as I describe the dream god here is unclear however. Hypnos had three sons: Morpheus, Phobetor and Phantasos; who helped him in governing various aspects of dreams, e.g. Phobetor handled nightmares. Neither of seem to have been handling lucid dreaming: perhaps the Greeks had no concept of lucid dreaming, or that lucid dreams were considered a vision rather than dream? We don't have to believe in any gods to conclude, that there obviously is a mind creating the dreams, and we may as well call this mind Hypnos.

The Natural Laws of Dreams

"It seems" is a phrase best applied to any description of dreaming, because to every conclusion there seems to always be the contradiction; and this should also be considered one of the dream-laws: i.e. when there is a law there is also a balancing anti-law.

The reality in which dreams take place, seems to have some kind of dream-laws similar to the natural laws of the physical world, not in how they work but in that they are there. For example, gravity exists in such a way that objects remain on the ground. It is possible to fly or levitate and to lift objects, but it takes some mental effort. Also, matter in the dream world is solid to some extent, i.e. it's difficult to walk through a wall, but there are tricks how to break the laws: e.g. walking through a wall backwards when you can't see it might work sometimes. Breaking the dream-laws usually requires some element of surprise, so a trick may not work a second time; however for years I've been using Douglas Adams' method of throwing myself to the ground and miss, until flying became second nature and now I usually fly without effort.

An idea could be that the dream-laws are only how Hypnos interprets how the dream reality should be, to make it comprehensible? He imitates the waking reality, as we experience it; yet, we can change the dream-world, so the imitation is only to a degree.

One law that seems to be persistent is to change the dream by focusing the will for a duration of time. This means that there may be some resistance in manifesting a change in the dream: such as materialising an apple in my hand; but by concentrating the will it will eventually turn up one way or the other. The key is focusing for a sufficient amount of time. A great difficulty in this is to avoid waking up because focusing the will also tend to heighten the consciousness.

Dream Energy

Flying often eventually result in some kind of running out of fuel, where I slowly lower to the ground and when landing even walking becomes heavy until finally I lay on the ground incapable of moving at all before awaking. This has nothing to do with ordinary dreaming where it could have some secret meaning, such as fear or insecurity; on the contrary, lucid dreaming contain very little of such symbolic content. My conclusion is that some kind of dream-energy does exist has been confirmed many times when by various means I've succeeded in also invigorating the energy&mbdash;not only raising clarity of vision and potency of will, but also causing a sensation almost similar to taking some very strong drug, with ecstatic emotions and sexual arousal. The sexual arousal make me think that the driving energy in dreams is the sexual energy, and so by raising sexual energy it could possibly also bring more vital lucid dreams; it is at least a theory.

Some Thoughts on Memory

Reasoning in dreams usually is a bit dim, perhaps this is because of the memory which tend to contain memories from the dream reality but far less from the waking reality. There may be some communication between the waking memory and the dream memory, but often it requires a bit of mental effort. For exactly the same reason the dream memory isn't as easily accessible to the waking memory. It might be that the memory is organised so that each mental state has mostly access to the memory of this state; so that when we are happy we mostly remember having always been happy, and when we're depressed we have mostly access to the memory of the depressed state and feels like we've always been depressed. In the dream state I often remember other dreams long since forgotten in the waking state. So, even if we wake up and forget a dream, the dream is still somewhere in the memory, and we may remember the dream when in the dream state again.

Universal Intelligence

Translation of a blog-article from November 2008.

There are billions of stars that we can count in a galaxy, and there are billions of galaxies we can see with our telescopes. These numbers doesn't say much about each individual star, how their planetary systems look, and it says absolutely nothing about everything that exists between the stars the telescopes cannot see. The vastness of Universe is all this and 28 billion light-years of it, from one end to the other, as far as we know.

Let's say you've been fortunate enough to construct a computer with infinite amount of memory, and infinite speed because of an infinite number of processors; which are able to compute infinitely small variations (or close to it) in each single point of the infinitely large memory. First of all, this computer would be able to combine all letters and numbers in such a way that all written and unwritten books appears in no time at all. The computer would also be able to read all the books and understand their meaning from all imaginable angles faster than they would be printed.

Since this computer could calculate and combine all possible program-sequences in all possible ways; an AI would appear in a relatively short time. Consider now giving this computer the task of calculating the creation of a Universe; during which the AI would have some time to adjust to the environment and how to handle this magnificent computer.

In this virtual reality, every snowflake is completely unique, as is every sand-grain, and probably every atom. Imagine the imagination this computer must have that it puts so much effort into it, for every little detail to be entirely real.

So far we have only thought of the atoms, but there are so much more that is calculated by this computer; all the waves and vibrations, magnetic fields, radiation, all the wavelengths that we know of, which are only such a small part of what's really there. Add more dimensions too, for both space and time; this computer of yours is really amazing!

In this virtual universe that your computer has created, for a virtual fourteen billion years in virtual universe time (which in our world is just a few moments because of it's infinite processor capacity); galaxies and solar systems with planets which have evolved life and finally living creatures similar to ourselves, because of convergent evolution. These beings have brains and can think, reason and philosophise about life, their universe and everything. They say: "only we exist because we cannot see anything else, and only we are intelligent because all other creatures in our world are lesser than us".

The AI we spoke of earlier is an integrated part of the operating system governing the creation of the universe and its development and evolution; through precise calculations over billions of years it has developed the physical and natural laws of its world—it being the result of these laws upheld over time. The AI does not actively interfere or tamper with the evolution and is not visually manifested—except as the laws and matter in itself, therefore these intelligent creatures are not aware of the AI, though a few communicate with it internally. Some would perhaps call the AI "God"; on the other hand what would that make you, the creator of the computer?

Of course, our universe isn't a computer, as far as we know or as we think of a computer, but all the aspects and infinitely fine detail is there and among all subatomic vibrations radiating through cosmos it seems quite improbable that an intelligence would not have appeared; upholding natural order and law.

Full Lotus Position

I've been stretching and preparing for full lotus position for some time now, and recently was ready for getting into it while meditating. It was the first time I actually meditate in full lotus, previously I've been sitting in half lotus position, and the difference is definitely quite vast. It is required to make stretching exercises for some time before becoming ready for the full lotus without straining, aches and risk of injuries. One of my knees was injured during martial art practice many years ago, and was never fully recovered, and so I still have some ache in it, and therefore it is vitally important to be extra careful not to cause more injury by carelessness.

The meditation in full lotus is amazing, the clarity and the focus of the mind is much greater than in half lotus or other positions, and I experience it as pleasurable even. This is truly something I recommend others, but learn to do it properly, do the stretching exercises and let it take the time it needs for your legs to be ready. After a little longer period of meditation in full lotus, I still need a bit of stretching and awaking the legs, before continuing with ritual practice.