The Norse Gods Remixed.

The hard truth is that at the end of the post-conversion night, what we mostly have left of the Norse Gods are the Eddas.


And the fact is you want more NorsePlay.



We know from the Eddas' passing references there were tons more stories. And from within an oral tradition, all these tales were surely told & retold in many differing versions with emphasis placed or displaced depending on the audiences' points of interest or the skald's creative leanings. So when Norse Lore believers/followers/fans get bent that so-and-so told it "wrong" or added/subtracted things, there's an ancient & liberal precedent being celebrated with these differences.



In this vein of expansive storytelling license, there's obviously Marvel's 1962 to now superhero take, but during that period Norse lore has been remixed by other daring authors, which we will survey here: Dennis Schmidt's Twilight of the Gods (1985-1987) trilogy as prequel/re-interpretive, and Michael Jan Friedman's Vidar Trilogy (1985-1988) as sequel (all pre-Neil Gaiman's American Gods [2001] & Odd and the Frost Giants [2008]), and well in advance of some conventions of Marvel and internet Rule 63 by decades. A post-Gaiman/Marvel selection also worthy of mention is Greg Van Eekout's stand-alone novel, Norse Code (2009). The first we'll review in detail, while the last two we'll briefly encapsulate.



Twilight of the Gods:

[Borr versus Surt!]

[Voden at Mimir's Well!]

[Unlike the other two, this cover art has nothing to do with the book.]

In a time of legend a la Robert E. Howard's Conan, where all ancient civilizations abide, so the Nine Norse Worlds instead get recast as other kingdoms and the world at large is itself known as Yggdrasil, the books' map going from northern Europe down to northern Africa, around an as-yet-to-be-flooded smaller Mediterranean. For example the desert dwelling Mesopotamians are the hot kingdom of Muspelheim, which makes for an interesting theory and opens one up to rethinking how strictly the stories we know & love are interpreted.




One theory about the Norse Gods is that instead they were prehistoric heroes who were then gradually euhemerized into divine beings, which is the bold step Schmidt takes with his version, but there's enough magic & supernature in his ancient world to go around.



The story starts with Borr going on an ambitious raid with Surt, and later follows Borr's son, Voden (the obvious Odin analog), on his wandering quest for knowledge, explaining along the way the stories behind his huge catalog of names, something any reader of the Eddas has been bound to wonder but never gotten an answer to. This name accruing thread is a clever & winning conceit.



Samples of interesting changes:



• Volund the Smith instead escapes from his captivity in the Jotun's northern kingdom down into Asaheim.



• The forest-dwelling Vanir are explored fully, their matriarchal society & rituals revealed. Lead by a queen Vanadis & counsel of nine Distingen priestesses, it seems their womanly superiority complex proactively causes friction with their northern plainsmen Aesir neighbors.



• Wicked deceiver Gullveig is not repeatedly speared by Aesir men and burned, but literally gang raped & thrown out, thus irreversibly "burned".


• The Mesopotamian underworld dragon Tiamat is likened to Norse Niflheim-dwelling Nidhogg, which shows how two different peoples can view what may have been ostensibly the same cosmological creature.



Schmidt is no religious studies slouch in these choices, having written an Eastern philosophy-based space opera as well, and integrates shamanic experiences, astral travel, and anthropology in his tellings. Legendary figures from other cultures also appear contemporaneously alongside Voden on his learning curve. Of note is Lao Tzu who wanders into the second book and becomes one of Voden's mentor figures. (And for you "purists" who think the Norse developed in a vacuum, think again -- they traveled the world, met Buddhists, got decorative arts & early shipbuilding from the Celts, and set up house in coastal Portugal.) And with all the dark Mesopotamian demon-summoning know-how, one questions if Schmidt had much exposure to Simon's version of The Necronomicon (1977) ... ?



Delightfully unexpected explanations for the myths we know are given, a joy of revealing the reasons behind the stories throughout all the books:

The water churned and splashed, sending a fine spray high into the air. If one crossed the ford at a certain time of day, when the sun was in the right position, a magnificent rainbow arched across the sky. ~ [p.55, on Bifrosti's Ford (the analog to Bifrost, the rainbow bridge to Asaheim.)]

There are moments where the philosophy floats on the very top of the story, but always as a pertinent aspect of world/character-building as opposed to a deep abstraction.



Included is a homage to Dune (1965) with highly detailed ritual knifefight in Jotun culture, a veiled but profound reference to William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow", and even a nod to the cult film Phantasm (1979)!



While The First Name & Groa's Other Eye seem more well paced with Schmidt re-visioning the murder of Ottar & the marriage of Thor, the stories seem more heavily piled on in the third book as the end approaches as though a checklist were referred to more in the last part of the author's process. One wonders if Schmidt had given himself the leisure of a fourth book whether this might've resulted in pacing those stories deserved, but this middling issue's a small one.


Schmidt's ambitious trilogy covers Voden's story from child to epic hero/magician/legend/apotheosis. At any time one wouldn't look twice at these books which appear just like any other pulp paperback gathering dust to be thrown out for new stock at a used bookstore, but we implore you that if you are a fan of Norse Mythology and fantasy in general, these long-hidden gems should be rescued and added to your library's treasure hoard.



Vidar Trilogy:

Michael Jan Friedman fearlessly remixes the Norse Lore by writing a sequel to the story long after the Eddas end. Odin's son, Vidar, survives Ragnarök and reacts to the war to end all wars by leaving the Aesir behind for a more creative & peaceful life on Midgard. We find our god of vengeance, now inconceivably old but still eternally young, making & selling sculpture as a bohemian artist in NYC. Of course, his past comes back to slowly but surely interfere with his new life.



As things unfold, we discover that Vidar spent much of his intervening lifetimes as a skald, and the narrative is interspersed with flashbacks that show the "true" versions of the great events of Norse legend he remembers from actually being there, versus the ones we got in diluted & altered form told by others, and these variants prove interesting, revealing the gods as different from the ones we know ... .



There are shades of Roger Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber (1970–1991) in the Aesir, which adds an interfamilial complexity worth discovering.



Norse Code:

[Yes, a smart neo-valkyrie would select a katana.]

Greg van Eekhout's one-novel take on Norse lore finds our present world in strange days: political unrest, extremely weird weather, and the evident erosion of society itself. But the covert NorseCODE genome project knows better, and valkyrie Katy Castillo secretly finds & gathers the descendants of Odin for recruitment into the Aesir's final army that will hopefully save us all.



Along the way she finds wayward god Hermod, now a sort of vagrant wanderer L.A. dude who she enlists to help her go off the reservation and find out what's happened to her sister. There's a modern black humour reminiscent of wry Scandinavian sensibilities, while prophetic world doom quickly races them to the book's very rewarding end.





Unlike the lately released Rick Riordan's Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard or the less developed The Blackwell Pages trilogy by Armstrong & Marr, both for the lucrative young adult market, the above selections don't go for a shallow modern adolescent commentary, but celebrate & admire the original material while building soaring structures with newfound aspects on top of the Eddaic foundations.



This Norseplay shows the unshakeable constitution of these influential stories, their polyvalent nature, and the timeless endurance of the Gods.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

NorsePlay: ideas from the Odin Brotherhood.

When Professor Mark Mirabello published The Odin Brotherhood (1992) surely many dismissed the idea of a surviving secret society of religious Norse practitioners as an attractive fantasy, or thought the dialog in the book only an Edda-like delivery system for a revival.



Understandably any sort of unearthed esoteric knowledge revealed after hundreds of years using unconfirmable sources opens itself up to scrutiny & examination, especially by reconstructionists who've had to weed out and re-plant structures in their religion, and we leave it up for those better versed in the archaeology & attestations in Asatru lore to do so.



What can't be argued is that Mirabello serves up some interesting ideas & perspectives onto the Asatruar's table, which we will present & ourselves extrapolate on here from the 5th edition (we don't have the current 6th edition [but if the publisher wished to send us one, we'd be happy to examine & revise this survey in light of the additional 50 pages, and even comment on Jack Wolf's complimentary The Way of the Odin Brotherhood {2013}, if included]).

[Bifrost to Asgard backdrop in Richard Wagner’s "Das Rheingold", directed by Otto Schenk (1990).]

The gods are presented throughout the text with unheard of epithets & cognomen, so much like the lore in using metaphorical descriptors & narrative associations to speak about the Aesir, which makes for some new additions one could use in writing or ritual.



Unlike in the Eddas, where it's the death of only a few of the gods that are detailed during the cataclysmic Ragnarök, we get a very grim additional description of the deaths of Frigg & Iðunn: "Freya will slay several trolls before she herself is killed, Idun [sic] will be soiled and raped and murdered" (p.102). There always seemed to be the implication that frost giant Þjazi perhaps did more than hold the youth-giver for her apples, but here the brutality upon her is made explicit & final.



As per the Brotherhood's origin story, a lead tablet will communicate to a dead person if buried at their grave in the winter (p.17). It's the exception that the dead answer, and it was a reply that formed their secret society.


The OB claim there are three types of death that lead to three different afterlife realms: Death in battle, the straw death of old age/sickness, and death by sorcery. Death in battle is a requirement in order to psychologically face death again when Ragnarök comes. In stark contrast, death by magick is bad since that ending denies the final army better numbers, thus giving us a longterm applied reason to avoid using magick for fatalities in the first place, which the OB states is "killing with words" and used by "all who thrive on malice" (p.74). The need for battle death also makes a fitting justification for Odin's grand plan to prepare for Ragnarök.



"Some men become terrified and dizzy at great heights. According to an old legend, it is the proximity of the gods at great heights that makes people afraid." (p.50) This passing detail jibes with citations that meditations to seek clarifying visions took place on high places, much like Odin camping on high seat Hliðskjálf to gain the best perspective.



All the gods cast a "light shadow" more like a reflection, as opposed to our conventionally dark shadow; therefore they'll only visit Midgard at night so as to conceal themselves (p.33).



Time between Asgard & Midgard passes at different rates: "An instant in the reality of the gods is an epoch in the reality of men." (p.61) This temporal difference could account for divine superspeed, seeming multi-locatant, and the need for special apples to offset aging. If men enter the reality of the gods, aging occurs, a reversed principle similar to the fairyland tales where visiting/kidnapped mortals don't age, while time passes much faster back home.


As for other realms, the OB locates Alfheim "where every river begins": "Rain is where every river begins, so the Elf-World is somewhere in the architecture of the clouds" (p.67). 


Frost giants & fire giants "exist in oblique corridors" (p.43), implying a nearby plane or dimension where they lay in wait for those barriers to break down when the universe ends. Sort of Lovecraftian, yes?

Death is hands-on sexy:

"AUTHOR: From the Odinist perspective, what is death?

THE ODIN BROTHERHOOD: In poetic terms, death itself is personified as beautiful females who exist in an endless variety of exquisite forms. These females are called the valkyries.

AUTHOR: And these valkyries extinguish life?

THE ODIN BROTHERHOOD: Yes. The gentle hands of the valkyries softly and voluptuously do the work of killing." (p.71)

Well, if you're putting it like that, death is a welcome pornography.


Endtimes update: Baldur is already dead (p.82). As the forerunning prophecy for Ragnarök, this places a greater urgency on the current state of things as far as the OB see it.



The text also presents the idea of time as an eternal cycle, similar to science's oscillating cosmology theory where the universe big bangs out (like Niflheim's ice mixing with Muspelheim's fire to explode matter into being), then gravity stalls the expansion and draws it back to collapse onto itself, only to bang out again, but the gods return with every universal genesis, like the lore mentioning Baldur's return after the sturm und drang of the current world's end is finished and everything resets. 



As for fate, it is something that's already woven out for us (p.93): "We cannot choose the joys or the terrors we must face, but we can choose to face them calmly. That is our freedom." Ergo, the inevitable's going to happen, but how we deal with it makes the difference.



And finally, the OB claims that when honor & heroic action are no longer found on Midgard, the separate worlds will break down, and Ragnarök will happen. So in the very act of honouring the old gods, we stave off Ragnarök indefinitely, and that alone is reason enough to venerate the Aesir. It's in our interest & the gods' interest to blot, for these interests of preservation, celebration, and recognition are one in the same.



Whether one buys the Eddaic adornments of what the OB's secret lore says or not, they provoke us to rethink what we know, and their last and most important point reminds us that in honoring the gods, we also honor the potential for our best selves and the world around us, all in the same horn, and that alone is worth listening (and drinking) to. 

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+. 

Byatt's Ragnarök: re-purposing mythology.

After reading trendy Eggers' underwhelming recent essay on the D'Aulaires' childhood classic Norse Gods & Giants (which one already knows is wondrous all-ages magic without his stamp of uninsightful approval), running across celebrated A.S. Byatt doing her take on Norse lore was an offering Nine Worlds better.



Known for one of the most refined epistolary novels, the Booker Prize winning Possession (1990), which will rip your heart out and make it pump tears of saddest sad sadness, one can only imagine the Wagnerian angst & pathos such a talent could lend to the verses of the Gods. Yet the tender Possession and the Icelandic skald Snorri Sturluson's mythopoeic collection are also worlds away from each other, and the gap shows at times.

[Friedrich Wilhelm Heine's "Kampf der untergehenden Götter" (1882).]

In Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (2011), Byatt brings her own modern insights into the built-in eschatology of the Northmen. While she's hardly the first one to do this academically or creatively, having her mind turned toward a personal interpretation gives one surprising perspective on Asgard and its gods. While many dismiss Loki as an antagonist for antagonism's sake (or conversely worship him [semi- or even non-apologetically] as a divine medium of difficult change & transformation), Byatt presents Loki less as a god of mischief and more as an explorer of the patterns found in chaos theory, an outsider by nature of his extremely inquisitive, and possibly superior, mind. This also lets us to see how the higher functioning Odin continues to allow his both disruptive but useful presence as a blood brother and travel companion, as Odin may have more in common with Loki on intellectual levels than the others of his heavenly house. Byatt also puts forward the theory that Loki is part of the original triumvirate who creates man & woman from an ash & elder tree, and specifically is able to contribute to the miracle of mankind by transmuting the tree's sap into blood, making him far more integral to humanity's story. She also explains that Odin ascends to be the ruler over his two man-making peers as he sacrifices himself, his eye, and identity, for ecstatic knowledge.



Byatt also a offers a psychological take on the monstrous wolves who chase the sun & moon across the sky as "wolves of the mind", an ever-present built-in idea of the intellect's potential for self-destruction manifest as the ravening creatures that threaten to swallow the sources of illumination in ourselves & the world. Plus she posits that if the wolves weren't there as the clockwork that drives day into night and night into day, there would be no demarcations of time or season without them, and no universal/internal motivators to keep ourselves achieving instead of descending into darkness or lassitude.

Framing all this re-appropriation of the lore is Byatt herself presented as "the thin, pale child", a nameless girl displaced into the countryside by the Blitzkrieg of World War II (much like a Pevensie of Narnia), with naught much else but a copy of a Norse mythology book to give her some strange & fantastic comfort. The child's voice is hardly that of a child, but of our 75-year-old authoress looking back at herself, and at the Heathen legends that fascinated her far more than the compulsory trips to monotheistic church or a secular schoolhouse.



Outside the lines, Ragnarok succeeds as a commentary of amazement with a wonderfilled personal embellishment, an ambitious filling out of the cosmology. Most inventive is Randrasill, the undersea skeletal analogue to Yggdrasil, her construct equally full of life, giving the reader a deepwater survey of the aquatic legion that surrounds Midgard. Exiled into this world by Odin, Byatt also performs another first by presenting a POV from world serpent Jormungandr, and adding scenes of Loki's fathership in raising his daughter from simple sea snake into an ominous ouroboros.



Less than these two inventions, Byatt lends her explanations to the Baldur story. One always questions that if Baldur's death means the worlds' end, why would the gods make a game of throwing potentially deadly things at him? Yet once the gods come up with it, "Hit the Baldur" isn't just an afternoon novelty but the best-game-ever invented, and they find they can't stop from playing. One also questions why if Frigga went through the trouble of ranging the whole of the Nine Worlds to obtain a promise from everything animate & inanimate, how did mistletoe get neglected? We find that mistletoe appeared in the world just after this infinite contract was closed, that it was still childlike and "too young to make a promise", leaving its innocence open for Loki's manipulation into a weapon.



When Ragnarok does unfold, another in-battle perspective Byatt presents is that Thor doesn't realize he's been poisoned until it's too late, turning to brag to the Aesir that he bested his nemesis and lived, only to fall to the venom on his ninth & very last step.

[Marvel Thor is not amused.]

Vocabulary of note is the repeated use of the fatalistic word "ineluctable", and the admirable neologism "ur-book". ("Ur-book"! Wow!)



Conclusions? Ultimately there's no payoff with the Nazi threat, or the conflict inherent in her Germanic heritage, or a ratification of a Heathen worldview, so the framework for the storytelling's inconclusive as it never comes back around to the pale child who is Byatt in any satisfying way. There could've been a sort of Teutons versus Angles call-forward, an examination of the "wolves" that drive the conflict of war, like natio/tribal fascism, and comment on the necessity of preparation for war, but none of these ideas are ever truly exercised.



Byatt uses parts of Ragnarok as an allegory on our inability to save the world, to change our story, and in her afterword goes so far as to place her interpretation's concern for the world as an ecological one, which is a thoroughly modern use. The disconnect here's evident: Byatt's contemporary purpose is not the timeless purpose of the lore. Not to say that the Norse creation/apocalypse doesn't contain everything (oh it surely does), but the tenuousness of physical existence more reflects man's barely sustainable grasp in a world of forces that defies his daily living with an unrelenting ice & harsh frost that deny him resources and its impact on him, as opposed to his impact on it. If one can bypass this mis-inversion, there's alot of other grand exploration to be had in Byatt's otherwise earnest rendition the Norse lore. Like in Possession, there's a strong lifelong and even more cosmic love here that cannot be denied.

#   #   # 

While a
mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena
IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for
employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan,
airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a
craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally
interesting endeavours, do contact him.

the arc of mythology.

Since I was seven I'd intended to read the source texts. I remember checking the Eddas out of the public library, big blue hardbacks, alternate potential bibles for living clutched to my chest as though I was the first to discover them. Compared to Catholicism with its guilt and its faceless god, his nearly passive son, and inexplicable holy spirit, the three-in-one trio of whom were content to just be self-satisfied watchers, there was an allure in distinct polytheism, a group of gods that were do-ers: lovers, warriors, sowers, movers and earthquakers, embodiments of worldly forces, involved in the lives of their creations, gifting favour to those who earned it in their lifetime.



The infinite paths of other reading led me away from that intention, finding the Eddas inaccessible to my gifted but young mind. As yet unschooled in poetry or archaic language structures found in Dante or Shakespeare, instead I started reading the staples of fantasy -- Tolkien, Leiber, Moorcock -- but still knew at root of all that high adventure, mythology was that genre's foundation, and that base would one day await me when I was ready. And while I was ready decades ago it's only now I've since walked the labyrinth, drank mead in Valhalla, witnessed geneses and apocalypti, and have much to report of unexpected disappointment, ancient wonder, and the revelations of the gods themselves in these first-hand sources.



Enuma Elish

(~7000-1100 BCE)

Possibly the earliest mythology, there's precedent of the flood, a washing away that occurs in many other myth cycles, but may very well be remembered from a flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates, or even Mediterranean tidal waves. The Elish is moreso a Babylonian story of creation and generational change that ends in fire god Marduk's victory over a more primal Tiamat, his grandmother and ancient she-dragon/water-serpent bent on revenge and destruction. Reading of sky-god Anu (Ah-nu) and company feels representational and there's alot of speculative prehistory that speaks of these deities being ancient aliens or advanced astronauts, but if it's really there it's not overtly apparent. We could possibly spend the same amount of millenia guessing what else may have been at play behind these stories, but we may never know short of finding The Tablets of Destiny hidden away somewhere next to a lightning gun and levitation harness.



The Library of Greek Mythology

(~100-200 CE)

Less a storybook and more of a primer, it's like reading a genealogy with addenda interspersed in the family lists. As a reader this was rather disappointing, though it delivered small delights for me from time to time in versions and variants of tales I'd read about before. Historically this document's priceless and lends itself to comparing with other surviving classical works, like the royal dramas of Sophocles and Aeschylus, or the Homeric epics and hymns. The Greek writers and scholars saw no difference between history and mythography. To them, it was the same, sacred as if automatically channeled from a muse, and given the overall consistent structure of the stories it may very well have been. 



Prose Edda

(~1200 CE)

The big surprise here is the recontextualization of Norse myths into classical Greek works by stating that the Aesir were descended from the house of Ilium at the beginning of the book(!). Given then-Christianity's recent ascent in Scandinavia one might imagine the author as ruler of Iceland had to cover his hind by couching the Norse beliefs in an already accepted body of ancient religion or otherwise be branded a heretic. Pragmatically he did it to gain favour with the regional rulers in Denmark by adding a genealogy to tie their royal house to the Aesir's lines of descent, granting them a legendary legitimacy and thus cementing his alliances to the Danes by presenting the work. But all this effort in setting down these stories also raises the question if he still believed in the Norse deities. Sturlusson died in a basement, discovered while hiding from his enemies. He was 70, which was quite old for a man in the 13th century. Maybe he had a cane in one hand, but I hope he had a sword in his other when they found him waiting for them, which would be answer enough.



Poetic Edda

(~1200 CE)

This Edda's made up of surviving verse poems, much of which is retold and filled in more completely by the aforementioned Prose Edda.



Odin's "Sayings of the High One" could easily be repackaged for contemporary management and business schools, the same way one reads Sun Tzu's "Art of War" or Musashi's "The Book of Five Rings". The God of Wisdom's advice holds to this day, a timeless counsel for handling negotiations of any sort.



The 19 spells of Odin could have be metaphors for social and leadership skills, but I'd like to think of its runes, magick swords, and elixirs as literal. In our quantum world the truth is that they are both at once.



A scientific rationalization of Ragnarök (the Norse end of the universe) implies that the all-consuming fire of Surt over the Nine Worlds may have been a volcanic cataclysm that happened in Iceland, which would seem a final soot black sunblotting winter and rolling lava fire over nearly everyone and everything on the small island nation.



What's startling is how recently the Codex Regius (the Edda's manuscript) comes to us, only widespread into English in the mid-1800s, possibly on the coattails of the Gothic literary movement with its taste for doom and grim tragedy.



The tragedy seems to be that it isn't inevitable external forces that bring about the end: It's an internal lack of integrity and honour. Over and over the lays (especially in the Sigurd/Völsung/Nibelung cycles where family strife destroys whole kingdoms) show that dishonesty and oath-breaking not only weaken the operational fabric of society but show a decay in the fiber of the world wrought by the gods through compacts and agreements, and when these given words are rendered worthless the resulting existential void proves real and the world seals its own physical destruction.



The Zohar

(~1300 CE)

Not really the occult tour-de-force I'd expected from "The Book of Splendour", or a hidden pre-genesis account, but more of a secretive religious commentary on the Torah. It's insight comes from an edgy exploration of the nature of YHVH, and its emanations from spirit to material as it flows through its ten aspects in the kabbalistic tree of life. These ten Sephiroth are somewhat akin to a pantheon, but are also rungs in the overall ladder to the Ein Sof (the Infinite). The heart of YHVH's divinity is that it needs us to manifest, to actively hold the four-fold meanings of the Torah in our hearts so we may share completeness with our partners, families, and selves to reclaim the illumination that was lost but can be refound through the practice of kabbalah. That sounds rather mamby-pamby but it's really a pretty profound approach to actively connecting to the divine. One could spend a lifetime delving into the workings of this body of knowledge and many scholars throughout the generations have.



Codex Boturini

(~1500 CE)

In the wake of The Conquista, the Spaniards burn the codices, condemning them as books of black magick and idolatry. More significantly they were the repositories of Mesoamerican culture and learning, the myths, academia, astronomy, religious ritual, and histories, and, to finalize their conquest, the Spaniards destroyed them to subordinate the surviving Aztecs and other peoples of the Mexica Empire.



Of the innumerable codices crafted by the scribe class (yes! A whole class of writers from which I'm descended!), a mere 500 (only 15 of these authentically being pre-conquest) survive, the conquest's subordination even now reflected in many of them being named after whichever European's collection they ended up in. The Borturini would more accurately be called "The Migration of the Aztecs", and was probably made during the early Spanish colonial period just after the conquest. 



A codex was originally painted on a shredded and pressed sacred fig tree bark paper (called amatl) horizontal scrolls, which were then folded accordion-style and bonded to a top and bottom cover.



The "Migration" is the legendary pictographic history of the Aztecs leaving their lagoon homeland at the behest of their deity Huitzilipotchtli, the hummingbird god of war, whereafter they wandered for 100+ years! One always thinks of the Aztecs being the gloriously ascendant rulers of the central Mexican valley, but here is a tale of faith, separation, ritual, disease, defeat, and perseverance that is truly epic. The unfortunate bit of this story is that on page 23 it ends in a torn page! We obtain the rest of the story from other records, fragments, and ethnographic accounts, but "The Migration" reveals a wandering nation's long quest for hard-earned dominance.



Codex Borgia

(~1500 CE)

This 76 plate codex of stunningly painted panels is at its simplest a 260-day perpetual calendar made of 13-day weeks, with 20-day signs, but if you think of our calendar with its seasons, equinoxes, holidays (holy days), astrological breakdowns, and other annual periods, this codex reveals cycles in the lives of the Aztecs.



This tonalpohualli (book of days/destiny) presents the calendar in repeated forms and fashions, associating the weeks and days by turns with cardinal directions, particular deities, trees, offerings, celestial bodies, or legendary and supernatural events and locations, all interchangeably, compatibly, astrologically and prognosticatorially. And given the accordion form of the codex it can be opened as wide or compressed and tesserated into many different page combinations, adding even more complexity into how it could be read.



While much of the pictography is subject to interpretation, like tarot, tea leaves, dreams and visions, all these permutations not only prescribe ritual for the individual and society, but also actually divine the future. One is named in Aztec culture after the day they where born, and from this one's tonal (soul/spirit/self) is given direction.



Academically, alot of supposition by linguists and anthropologists has been put together in figuring out the Borgia. Odds are that the meanings in these arrangements are for the initiated priests of the particular temple the codex was housed in, and this codex may very well have been a regional or even one-of-a-kind document.



Depicted in bright iconographic colors were the gods and goddesses of the Aztec pantheon: god of games Macuilxochitl, goddess of flowers Xochiquetzal, and the messianic Quetzalquatl, the feathered serpent, who stood for civilization itself.



And like an ancient graphic novel, eight pages host the enigmatic adventures of initiate "Stripe Eye" and the black priest "Smoking Eye" as they cross sacred boundaries, interlope through temple districts, and deal with a curious bag full of supernatural darkness. Also mentioned in a few places is Chalchiuhtotolin, "turkey of the precious stone" (WTF?), along with other compelling and unexplained references.



From this and other sources, the Aztecs lived in a dream of beautiful horror where sacrifice wasn't just representational, it was literal as there are illustrations of bratty children being drowned to make it rain, noble kings piercing their genitals to show they had a pair tough enough to lead, and devout priests cutting hearts out of many, many, many human sacrificial offerings. The universe didn't provide for us, we provided for it -- or the sun didn't rise, the gods turned against us, and the cosmic gears that ran on blood & hearts would just stop. Which begs the question of 2012 ... and the coming of the sixth world. Perhaps Quetzalquatl will return to save us all. Or god of sorcery Tezcatlipoca will show up to save us from him.

[Tezcatlipoca vs Quetzalcoatl.

Credit to Patrick Charles.]

After reading through these seven mythologies what hurts most are their implications of greater bodies of myth that have been lost through conquest, fire, and genocide, these tales of irreplaceable insight that might never be found again. But what has come down to us might yet serve as models for other value systems, other rituals, different worldly goals and heavenly rewards, showing us that the modern secular world we smugly think we know may reveal a hands-on pro-active divinity in it yet. And since that divinity is as varied as the stars are numbered, those same divinities still cast their shine & shadow through us.





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Addenda from 9/4/2012 response to inclusion of other mythological sources:



Thanks for the praise.



Outside of Budge's pieced together interpretations, there doesn't seem to be much Egyptian source material, plus when one goes to Egypt you find out alot of the stories tend to be socio-political metaphors for Upper versus Lower Nile conflicts and resource squabbles, and more attention's focused on the dynastic legacies of the pharaohs which makes it all much less compelling, but I find their death-centric architecture & design of deities aesthetically wondrous. Just scored a Set statue this week, which is way weird because in Egypt he's really nowhere to be found, except in relief at Abu Simbel.



The Indian Mahabharata, Upanishads, and Vedic literatures just seem to be a daunting & lifetime undertaking. And where even to start such a bottomless body of study? And with whose translations? A girl recently told me a terrific story from Upanishads where a boy, via his father's offhanded dismissal, unintentionally gives his son to Yama, the lord of death. That narrative's totally my flavour of ice cream, but unsure if the overall system speaks to me on an intuitively truthful level, truth being personal and relative, (oooh, big cans of worms there. Yeah.) or it could just be it's just so outside of my cultural bias that I can't wrap myself around it spiritually. Am watching a Bollywood movie featuring re-incarnation as a central plot-point mechanism, so maybe it'll learn me something.



Right now I'm drawn again toward Norse Reconstruction, which I gather you're also curious about with your Odin post. There's some really good podcasts out there where they discuss modern paganism and the ancient lore. Ravencast's done by a well spoken East Coast professional couple who do a nice job of presentation, and Raven Radio's an unedited technical glitchfest but nearly every show there's some great perspective being issued forth from a Kindred in New Mexico with members who have completed all the serious mythology homework and aren't afraid to apply it to the now. They're all about drinking as ritual, too. Got mead?

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.