Sunday, 7 July 2013

Havamal Snippets 69: Everyone is blessed with something

This is one in a series of very short posts containing snippets from the Havamal text (which can be found in full here - http://www.beyondweird.com/high-one.html)

Why post snippets of an old pagan text here, in a blog that's supposedly about the Androsphere?  I’m posting them because they contain helpful everyday advice that is applicable in the modern world e.g. being aware of your surrounding environment, drinking alcohol responsibly, how to score with women.  And for many of us, it is part of our heritage that goes back to Proto-Indo-European (PIE) beliefs that stretch back 4000 years or more.

Christianity and demi-nihilism offer the only other dominant philosophical view points in the Androsphere, the former represented by bloggers like Vox Day and Simon Grey, the latter by many PUA bloggers.  Christianity, and indeed the other monotheisms from the region draw, from the mythologies of the PIE culture.  For instance Noah’s flood is a replication of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the story of the Angels rebelling against God in the bible is just a copy of the Giants rebelling against the Gods, which is present in both the Greek and Norse religious traditions, as Arthur Schopenhauer pointed out in the eighteenth century.

So, instead of offering you snippets of second-hand wisdom from the Bible, I will offer you snippets of first-hand wisdom from the (probably) older and much more concise Havamal text (roughly 5,000 words compared to the 190,000 words of the New Testament).

(My own thoughts/comments are in italics).

Every man, poor though he may appear to be, has some form of riches.  This is another testimony to the duality of the cosmos: for every good there is bad, for every bad there is good.  For every life there is death adn for every death there is life.

69
Erat maðr alls vesall
þótt hann sé illa heill
sumr er af sonum sæll
sumr af frændum
sumr af fé œrnu
sumr af verkum vel

A man is not wholly wretched,
though he be in rotten health;
one is blessed with sons,
another with kinsmen,
another with plenty of money,
another with deeds well done.
 

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