Living
To Honor the Gods
|
If we really believe in practicing world-affirming religions, then we should affirm the world we live in by working for the good of the planet and all that live upon it.
The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/thor/page/3)
If we really believe in practicing world-affirming religions, then we should affirm the world we live in by working for the good of the planet and all that live upon it.
Maybe it’s not such a great idea to turn to writers from 1,000, or 2,000, or 3,000 years before the United Nations publicly published the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for teachings on the universality of human rights.
As we perform the enchantment of mythicization on our world, we lift people, places, and things from the mundane to the meaningful. The trivial becomes tremendous and the ephemeral becomes enduring. Myth, regardless of veracity, can have more power than any truth. This power is not always used for positive ends.
Here is the lesson. Without positive action, comparative mythology is (at best) a dry academic amusement and (at worst) an exercise in colonialist cultural appropriation. Rather than taking from Hinduism and calling it Heathenry, I suggest that we learn from a closely related tradition that has much to teach us.
As in the Ziggy Stardust song from more than a half-century ago, we’re simultaneously surrounded by evidence of catastrophic climate change and absolutely unwilling to make the necessary changes to mitigate it.
Notifications