To those that may know about Norse Mythology, with the Midgard Serpent, have you ever wondered if there could be a connection to "Leviathan" that is reference in some places in the Bible?
Norse Mythology - Midgard Serpent
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SigurdReginson
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As far as I'm aware, the midgard serpent represents one of the beings unleashed during Ragnarok as written by Snorri Sturluson in the Prose Edda, but it's also described in the Poetic Edda (Dr. Jackson Crawford has a wonderful and plainly written translation) from the Codex Regius manuscript.
Almost all we have for information on the norse traditions are the Icelandic variants, since all the other Scandinavian nations destroyed their old stories after their Christinization; but every local area had their own version of the mythology (including the English).
As for a connection between the laviathon to the midgard serpent, it's very doubtful. Norse traditions have their roots firmly planted waaaay back with the proto-indo european speaking peoples. The midgard serpent vs. Thor stories share their similarities to the hydra vs. Hercules or the dragon vs. Indra. Stories of this nature always contain a "striker" god (Perkwunos - Wikipedia) fighting some kind of serpent.
The Bible has it's roots in Judaism and with Semitic speaking peoples which are firmly planted in Africa and the middle east. If you are looking for connections, that's where I'd look.
Almost all we have for information on the norse traditions are the Icelandic variants, since all the other Scandinavian nations destroyed their old stories after their Christinization; but every local area had their own version of the mythology (including the English).
As for a connection between the laviathon to the midgard serpent, it's very doubtful. Norse traditions have their roots firmly planted waaaay back with the proto-indo european speaking peoples. The midgard serpent vs. Thor stories share their similarities to the hydra vs. Hercules or the dragon vs. Indra. Stories of this nature always contain a "striker" god (Perkwunos - Wikipedia) fighting some kind of serpent.
The Bible has it's roots in Judaism and with Semitic speaking peoples which are firmly planted in Africa and the middle east. If you are looking for connections, that's where I'd look.
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Petros2015
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Probably closer in nature to Revelations 12:9 then
9 And the great dragon was cast out — that serpent of old called the Devil and Satan, who deceiveth the whole world. He was cast out onto the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
(wikipedia)
Jörmungandr - Wikipedia
According to the Prose Edda, Odin took Loki's three children by Angrboða—the wolf Fenrir, Hel, and Jörmungandr—and tossed Jörmungandr into the great ocean that encircles Midgard.[2] The serpent grew so large that it was able to surround the Earth and grasp its own tail.[2] As a result, it received the name of World Serpent. When it releases its tail, Ragnarök will begin. Jörmungandr's arch-enemy is the thunder-god, Thor.
Seems to me the proper analogy for the Midgard serpent is Satan, not Leviathan.
Midgard in Norse mythology is the Earth.
The Midgard Serpent is literally "the world serpent"
The arch-enemy of the Midgard serpent is Thor, son of Odin.
Interestingly enough:
Yggdrasil - Wikipedia
Hávamál
Odin sacrificing himself upon Yggdrasil (1895) by Lorenz Frølich
In stanza 138 of the poem Hávamál, Odin describes how he once sacrificed himself to himself by hanging on a tree. The stanza reads:
I know that I hung on a windy tree
nine long nights,
wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree of which no man knows
from where its roots run.[7]
Sound familiar?
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Quid est Veritas?
In Memoriam to CS Lewis
The Dragon vs Storm god motief is present in Semitic peoples, too. Notably Marduk and Tiamat, Baal and Lotan, and even amongst broader Hamito-Semitic groups such as the Egyptian Ra vs Apophis. It is not just an Indo-European thing, though this is an Indo-European variant of the myth. In general, the Serpent is associated with water or the Sea, so we have the Rain vs the Sea. More broadly though, we have an image of Order vs Chaos, most explicitly in the Tiamat form, where the world is ordered from the remains. It is the same narrative function as the Superhero vs Supervillain of modern storytelling, actually. If you look up comparative mythology, or the broad variants, you'll see a sky god facing a water serpent is quite common. You'll even find it in the Americas, such as Cipactli vs Texcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl amongst the Aztecs.
This is one of the reasons that certain schools of Anthropology hypothesised an Ur-monotheism or High God around such broadly shared myths and imagery; or why Jung though a collective Unconscious exists from which imagery is drawn, which can be taken to exist in a more concrete or abstract form depending on author.
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SigurdReginson
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Oof... I have seen the Jesus to Odin comparisons before, and that's a stretch too far IMO. One was sacrificed to save mankind, the other was sacrificed to gain insight into the runes.
The ways they were sacrificed do have their similarities, though; especially with the spear in the side.
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Petros2015
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Yeah it was the "myself to myself" that caught my eye - I am not familiar with the rest of the mythology and poems beyond some comic books, roleplaying and some skims of wikipedias. Seems like the norse poetry referenced was also of a post-christian era, like 1300AD or further forward, and a lot of Germanic tribes (kinda Norse? Or is that a Norse of a different color?
would have bumped up against the Romans and gotten Arianized'ish Christian conversions as early as 300'ishAD which might have blended existing Odin stories and concepts with Christian ones. (Odin might have been around pre-Christ (?) not sure, but maybe he wasn't hanging on a tree sacrificing himself to himself with a spear in his side until 500AD or so, after he got the idea from someone else is what I am saying)Likewise, if Revelations is dated ~100AD and the Midgard Serpent didn't appear earlier but rather appeared centuries later, then it could be a Nordic interpretation of what they heard from conversion/scripture introductions grapevined over a few centuries.
Norse mythology - Wikipedia
800AD... pretty young, really... 700 years post Revelations (or Ragnarok, if you prefer)
Rök runestone - Wikipedia
Possibly a little was lost in translation
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Petros2015
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ouroboros - Dictionary.com.
The ouroboros is an ancient symbol of a snake or serpent eating its own tail, variously signifying infinity and the cycle of birth and death.
WHERE DOES OUROBOROS COME FROM?
mythologian.net
Ouroboros derives from a Greek word meaning “tail-devourer.” While the word is not attested in English until the 1940s, the concept of the ouroboros is very ancient, used across many cultures as a symbol of cosmic harmony, eternity, and the cycle of birth and death.
The earliest known ouroboros symbol comes in a 14th-century BCE Egyptian religious text found in the tomb of King Tutankhamen. The symbol appears in a passage about the origin of the sun god Ra through a union with the death god Osiris, meant to illustrate creation through destruction. Ancient Egyptians also used the ouroboros to symbolize the flooding of the Nile, which occurred in seasonal cycles and was of great importance to ancient Egyptian agriculture and society. Other ancient cultures also incorporated the ouroboros symbol. Norse legend tells of the great serpent, Jörmungandr, who encircles the earth and bites its own tail. Hindu cosmology features an ouroboros as helping to prop up the Earth.
The ouroboros was specifically adopted by Gnostic philosophers in the 2nd century BCE. For them, it symbolized the dual nature of existence, marked by life and death, male and female, light and dark, mortality and divinity, or Earth and heaven.
===
I'm not sure the Midgard Serpent is really a proper ouroboros; he's not really eating himself, he's just big and wrapped around the earth and biting his own tail, maybe like an anchor, like he really wants to hold onto it no matter what. And he may be willing to starve himself to death while doing it. Commitment!
Some people look at an ouroboros and see a symbol of life, infinity, cycle.
I look at an ouroboros and I see just the opposite.
I see "what NOT to do" lol.
I mean seriously, this thing can't accept any reality or sustenance except itself.
So it eats itself.
... "A for effort"?
*facepalm*
Worst Pet eVER.
The ouroboros is an ancient symbol of a snake or serpent eating its own tail, variously signifying infinity and the cycle of birth and death.
WHERE DOES OUROBOROS COME FROM?
mythologian.net
Ouroboros derives from a Greek word meaning “tail-devourer.” While the word is not attested in English until the 1940s, the concept of the ouroboros is very ancient, used across many cultures as a symbol of cosmic harmony, eternity, and the cycle of birth and death.
The earliest known ouroboros symbol comes in a 14th-century BCE Egyptian religious text found in the tomb of King Tutankhamen. The symbol appears in a passage about the origin of the sun god Ra through a union with the death god Osiris, meant to illustrate creation through destruction. Ancient Egyptians also used the ouroboros to symbolize the flooding of the Nile, which occurred in seasonal cycles and was of great importance to ancient Egyptian agriculture and society. Other ancient cultures also incorporated the ouroboros symbol. Norse legend tells of the great serpent, Jörmungandr, who encircles the earth and bites its own tail. Hindu cosmology features an ouroboros as helping to prop up the Earth.
The ouroboros was specifically adopted by Gnostic philosophers in the 2nd century BCE. For them, it symbolized the dual nature of existence, marked by life and death, male and female, light and dark, mortality and divinity, or Earth and heaven.
===
I'm not sure the Midgard Serpent is really a proper ouroboros; he's not really eating himself, he's just big and wrapped around the earth and biting his own tail, maybe like an anchor, like he really wants to hold onto it no matter what. And he may be willing to starve himself to death while doing it. Commitment!
Some people look at an ouroboros and see a symbol of life, infinity, cycle.
I look at an ouroboros and I see just the opposite.
I see "what NOT to do" lol.
I mean seriously, this thing can't accept any reality or sustenance except itself.
So it eats itself.
... "A for effort"?
*facepalm*
Worst Pet eVER.
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ouroboros - Dictionary.com.
The ouroboros is an ancient symbol of a snake or serpent eating its own tail, variously signifying infinity and the cycle of birth and death.
WHERE DOES OUROBOROS COME FROM?
mythologian.net
Ouroboros derives from a Greek word meaning “tail-devourer.” While the word is not attested in English until the 1940s, the concept of the ouroboros is very ancient, used across many cultures as a symbol of cosmic harmony, eternity, and the cycle of birth and death.
The earliest known ouroboros symbol comes in a 14th-century BCE Egyptian religious text found in the tomb of King Tutankhamen. The symbol appears in a passage about the origin of the sun god Ra through a union with the death god Osiris, meant to illustrate creation through destruction. Ancient Egyptians also used the ouroboros to symbolize the flooding of the Nile, which occurred in seasonal cycles and was of great importance to ancient Egyptian agriculture and society. Other ancient cultures also incorporated the ouroboros symbol. Norse legend tells of the great serpent, Jörmungandr, who encircles the earth and bites its own tail. Hindu cosmology features an ouroboros as helping to prop up the Earth.
The ouroboros was specifically adopted by Gnostic philosophers in the 2nd century BCE. For them, it symbolized the dual nature of existence, marked by life and death, male and female, light and dark, mortality and divinity, or Earth and heaven.
===
I'm not sure the Midgard Serpent is really a proper ouroboros; he's not really eating himself, he's just big and wrapped around the earth and biting his own tail, maybe like an anchor, like he really wants to hold onto it no matter what. And he may be willing to starve himself to death while doing it. Commitment!
Some people look at an ouroboros and see a symbol of life, infinity, cycle.
View attachment 294668
I look at an ouroboros and I see just the opposite.
I see "what NOT to do" lol.
I mean seriously, this thing can't accept any reality or sustenance except itself.
So it eats itself.
... "A for effort"?
*facepalm*
Worst Pet eVER.
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0
Petros2015
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Psalms 74:13-14
13 You divided the sea by Your strength; You smashed the heads of the dragons of the sea;
14 You crushed the heads of Leviathan; You fed him to the creatures of the desert.
Sounds like Leviathan is not around anymore and may have inferred the multi-headed dragon Tiamat...
RIP Leviathan/Tiamat/Ghidorah *sobs*
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Petros2015
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I never looked into it before but it looks like some commentaries are implying "Leviathan" used in Psalm 74:13 was symbolic of Egypt / Pharoah and his armies and "fed him to the creatures of the desert" is what happened after the Red Sea bodies washed up.
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Petros2015
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That's a good thought; I hadn't considered it before. Interesting.
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Quid est Veritas?
In Memoriam to CS Lewis
Oh, I don't think they got the idea from Christianity. In my opinion, this is a representation of Praeparatio Evangelica.Yeah it was the "myself to myself" that caught my eye - I am not familiar with the rest of the mythology and poems beyond some comic books, roleplaying and some skims of wikipedias. Seems like the norse poetry referenced was also of a post-christian era, like 1300AD or further forward, and a lot of Germanic tribes (kinda Norse? Or is that a Norse of a different color?
Likewise, if Revelations is dated ~100AD and the Midgard Serpent didn't appear earlier but rather appeared centuries later, then it could be a Nordic interpretation of what they heard from conversion/scripture introductions grapevined over a few centuries.
Norse mythology - Wikipedia
800AD... pretty young, really... 700 years post Revelations (or Ragnarok, if you prefer)
Rök runestone - Wikipedia
Possibly a little was lost in translation
Odin sacrificing himself is a form of the Indo-European triple death motief, a part of the repetition of Triads. Odin hangs, gets impaled on a spear, and starves. This usually has to do with the threefold division of society into Jarls, Churls and Thralls; or alternatively Priests, warriors and workers. Odin gains the Runes, ie hidden wisdom, and he hangs on Yggdrasil - which means something like Gallows. This is imagery akin to the Tree of knowledge of Good and Evil, but also of Life.
Here is something I wrote on it before:
Odin is a vague sussuration of Christ, as is Baldr, or many other such narratives. After all, there is only one God, so any other religious impulse would be directed to that God, even if mutated and mistaken - akin to the Golden Calf. There are sufficient differences and parallels between other Indo-European religious traditions, that adoption from Christianity seems unlikely. True though, that our literary sources are much younger than the Passion, and mediated through later Christian writers, so if you want to, you can always hang that question mark over it. Norse mythology was still in flux, as we can trace how Odin displaced Tiw as head of the Pantheon, although Tacitus already places 'Mercury' as the most important Teutonic god. The Christian elements in the Eddas and such aren't strong though, and the penetration into northern Europe probably minute prior to Adam of Bremen and such. I am fairly confident this represents a parallel religious tradition, and thus a cultural 'prefiguration' of Christian imagery.
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Petros2015
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I have to read this more in detail later, it looks great (I'm a little rushed now).
Actually, I kind of took him more as a pre-image or distorted image of Father; I think one of his traditional titles was All-Father. But sometimes within trinity doctrine the lines get a little blurry between father and son "show us the Father - don't you recognize me?". "Of one essence with the Father". So the sacrifice line, "myself to myself" caught my eye that way, and I wasn't familiar with the sacrifice story for Odin at all or even that there was one. But as for the rest of it, runes vs redemption, yes I agree, doesn't match much or at all.
Yep. I do agree with this. Even with "the Unknown God" of Acts. Even with Mr. Wednesday
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Quid est Veritas?
In Memoriam to CS Lewis
The interesting thing about Odin is that he is the head of the gods at all. Generally, Indo-European religion has a Father of the gods or King and a subsidiary thunderer - the Dyaus Piter and Perkwunas of the hypothetical reconstructed proto-form. The former in various ways came to be sidelined, as High gods often are, or combined. So Jupiter (maintaining the Piter) or Zeus (from the Dyaus) absorbed the thundering role, with many of those aspects brought to the demi-god Hercules/Herakles; or Indra in India.
Now Thor is the Norse thunderer, but Odin is not the High god. We don't see it in English, but the Old English form of Woden looks like the Dutch and Afrikaans word 'woede' meaning anger; and Odin is related to Norse Othr, meaning rage or frenzy. Essentially, Odin is a god of battle frenzy, like Deimos the attendant of Ares in Greek, or the aspect of Pan from which we get the word panic. This is why he has a psychopomp function, gathering the dead. At some point this relatively minor god displaced the Father of the gods in importance. His psychopomp function also brings wind-god aspects, as spirits are usually conceived as breath or airy (which is what spirit itself is derived from, Latin spiritus).
Now the original Norse Father of the gods was likely Tyr/Tiw, which is easier to see in the alternate form of Ziu (ie Zeus). In this case, he seems to have absobed the war-god, before Odin dethroned him - which is probably how that presumed attendant of the war-god became so prominent to eventually become the King of the gods himself.
But there is another layer to Odin, in his function of Magic. Here, we can see his Woden related to Latin Vates for a seer. The idea being a frenzy of visions, the idea of the mad consorting with the gods, or the trance, or the gods overpowering the senses into an Other state. Here lies his gained function as prophet, from which the Romans equated Woden with Mercury - a Roman god of magic, and the way the Roman day of Mercury came to be Woden's day, Wednesday.
So Odin came to absorb aspects of the High god, onto a history of a god of Battle Frenzy, of Death, of wind, and seemed to have developed an Appolonian Prophet function as well. A very interesting combination of roles, which has secured the ongoing interest in him, as your clip makes clear. But he is clearly not the High god, as he dies in Ragnarok, and has to sacrifice an eye for wisdom. The High priest function and the prophetic function he does quite well, and having absorbed some High god function, sacrifices himself to himself; all in all, this looks more suggestive of Jesus in my opinion, than the Father. But then, we are dealing with underlying human religious ideas that came to fruition in Jesus, so Odin will of course be a deficient model to look at.
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