Heidhin tells Veleda:
"'Best you hold aloof. Few outside the Bructeri have seen you. There is more awesomeness in a tale than in flesh and blood.'" (7, p. 532)
Veleda travels in a beautifully carved, windowless wagon, drawn by four white oxen, in which she sleeps while on the road:
"'To preserve dignity and mystery. I suspect an image of the goddess is in there too.'" (10, p. 553)
Of course, tale, wagon and image can last longer than flesh and blood. And mystery can be preserved in ways that we do not like. Everard remembers, in Tacitus' Germania:
an image drawn once a year around the land in a covered oxcart;
then the idol washed in a secluded lake by slaves who were immediately drowned...
That is what we call: "Going too far."
9 comments:
Well, the proto-Germanics didn't think so... 8-).
Kaor, Paul!
I think you tend to idealize pagans too often. Anderson warned against that in the prefaces he wrote for HROLF KRAKI'S SAGA. Pagan barbarians were often brutal and beastly.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Idealize pagans? I've just quoted them as drowning slaves.
Paul.
As Mary Renault said, Christianity changed the moral reflexes of Western society.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: I know, but at other times you did seem to idealize paganism, to prefer it over even simply philosophic monotheism.
Mr. Stirling: There would have been no West without Christianity. Anderson examined what kind of world we might have gotten in "Delenda Est" and "The House of Sorrows" if Judaism had disappeared.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But that is a different issue. I think that monotheism is logically incoherent because the creator before the creation would be a self without an other which is like a square without sides whereas polytheism is logically possible although unscientific. (At this stage of the discussion, the Trinity is usually evoked...)
Paul.
Paul: the Trinity does encapsulate a truth -- that personalities are made up of separate elements.
Kaor, Paul!
Stirling beat me to arguing that the revelation of the Trinity, three Persons in the one God answers your objection about God.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Well, I don't think that it does but this is another question that we have been through before. The Fourth Gospel in particular deified the Son and, additionally, personified the Spirit while remaining monotheist. Thus, three Persons in one God = Trinity. That doctrine almost writes itself. This was not a response to the philosophical argument that a self requires an other.
How can three subjects of consciousness who have no external objects or environment, no bodies and no spatial distance between them and who exist in an eternal present with neither memories nor duration exist as three distinct self-conscious individuals?
Paul.
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