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Everything on Culture and related to the Maier files series. A cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings

heresy

Heresy and Heretics

Heretic Middle English: from Old French heretique, via ecclesiastical Latin from Greek hairetikos ‘able to choose’ (in ecclesiastical Greek, ‘heretical’), from haireomai ‘choose’. In the Encyclopaedia Britannica one can read:“The word heresy is derived from the Greek hairesis which originally meant an act of choosing, and so came to signify a set of philosophical opinions or the school professing them....
twelve night of Yule with Holle

Holle and the twelve days of Yule

Holle the goddesses and Yule. Frau Holle is connected to springs, wells and lakes, where she lives in a land on the bottom of the water. She is also connected with the fog. Holle can be seen as a bright shape drifting in the fog, and her fog maidens are “die Hollen”, who move over the land to come to...
Holle Teich

Holle: a nearly absolute power?

Hella, Hel, known to all Germanic peoples, including the Goths as Hellarunester. A Gothic word for “witch” was Haljoruna. The name itself stems from a root meaning “to hide”. The word Hellirunar describes people who ‘rune’ (Speak, sing, whisper) with Hel/Helja, the goddess and realm of the underworld. “Hell”, in its original meaning is the hidden realm, the dark and foggy place where the dead and unborn dwell. Often the term is used in a sinister meaning. The bishop Wulfila […]...
Holle - Teich - Meissner

Holle’s kitten

Tidbits on the tale of  Frau Holle’s kitzen. There is a mountain in Hessen, Germany called the Meissner where one still can find traces of the central German goddess Holle, Holda or Helja. It’s a place where her cult seems to have survived for a long time. There are roads going to the mountaintop and there are many hiking paths....
Sleeping Beauty

How conscious are you?

Meister Eckhart (the thirtheenth-century German mystic) once said, “if you fight your death, you’ll feel the demons tearing away your life, but, if you have the right attitude to death, you will be able to see that the devils are really angels setting your spirit free. In the ancient belief systems, the being who guides the human spirit through the...
civilization doomsday

Is our civilization doomed to vanish?

Envision for a minute that there is a Very High and amazingly old Civilization. It has achieved the summit of its social and logical accomplishment. At that point, in an erupsion of frenzy and greed, it destroys itself in a Great War. As the untold annihilation achieves its peak and the colossal complexity of its science and innovation — the very science and innovation it has used to wage its war — can never again be maintained because of the […]...
Horselberg

Is this the Tannhauser Venusberg?

Grimm writes that the Hörselberg of Thuringia was still considered in the 10th through 14th centuries to be the residence of the German goddess Holda and her host. He cited legends of night-women in the service of dame Holda.  Those women rove through the air on appointed nights, mounted on beasts. He asserted that they were originally dæmonic elvish beings,...

John Kenny ‘s Dragon Voices: Giant Celtic Horns Of Ancient Europe

John Kenny ‘s fascinating CD “Dragon Voices.Around 1990, John Purser – composer, musicologist, poet, playwright, broadcaster and passionate scholar of Scotland’s music – initiated a project to reconstruct the so-called Deskford carnyx, which was discovered in a peat bog at Leitchestown farm in Deskford, in the former Scottish county of Banffshire, in 1816. Only the boar’s-head bell survives, apparently placed...

Jón Leifs Edda – The Lives of the Gods

The music of Jón Leifs is often inspired by Iceland’s powerful nature and literary heritage. From early on he was profoundly influenced by the medieval tradition of Icelandic literature, preserved in a handful of manuscripts, including the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda. Leifs’ magnum opus is the Edda oratorio, a massive (although incomplete) work in three large parts which occupied him on and off for most of his composing career – from around 1930 to his death in 1968. […]...
Language and Runes

Language is the soul of a people

If we knew how the words in our native language were made and what they have meant to successive generations of the men and women who have used them, we should have a new and very interesting kind of history to read. For words, like all other creations of man, were not deliberately manufactured to meet a need, as are...
Rolf Diettrich and Gudrun

Maier files & Rolf Dietrich

The attentive reader of the first episodes of Maier files will have noticed that the tale once told by Rolf Dietrich and the history of Otto Maier are filled with powerful themes and images that might provide a clue to the real hidden mystery, among them: the Rose Trail (Troj de Reses), web of woven silk, the knights in the...

Meet the Disir

Apart from gods or goddesses, medieval authors often refer to female guardian spirits identified as dísir and sometimes fylgjur. The conceptions under-lying these two kinds of spirits undoubtedly differed initially, however some of the later authors employed the terms interchangeably. Reference is made several times to sacrifice to the dísir, conducted at the start of the winter season. The ritual concerned a festive meal and seems to have been a private ceremony, hinting that the dísir belonged to one household, […]...
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