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Mythology

Everything on Mythology and related to the Maier files series. Posts, Articles referring to myths, mythology, ancestral tales, folklore, gods and goddesses

Freya’s Day: The Goddess Who Could Not Be Buried

If you wanted to erase a god from history, which one would be hardest to kill? Not the god of cunning — you could outlast him by being patient. Not the god of thunder — you could cut down his oak and build a chapel. But the goddess of desire itself? The goddess whose domain is not belief or ritual or sacred mountains, but the body — the need to be fertile, to be loved,...

From Ancient Rites to Modern Revelations

Initiation—an evocative term that conjures images of secret rites and profound transformations—has intrigued anthropologists and scholars of religion for generations. As Joseph Henderson wisely noted in his seminal work, Thresholds of Initiation, “Initiation more than any other body of knowledge has suffered throughout history from the fate of continually being forgotten and having to be rediscovered” (Henderson 2005: 1). In 1909, a remarkable resurgence of interest in initiation rites occurred, thanks to Arnold Van Gennep...
Albruna Gudrun

From Ritual to Romance

Like in all ancient Norse myths codes and messages are hidden within. Mainstream scholars like us to believe that these myths are just simple stories to entertain or to describe natural phenomena our dumb forefathers were too ignorant to understand. But these tales are like riddles and intellectual challenges to be solved and contain real wisdom and knowledge. Ms. Jessie L. Weston, after more than thirty years of study, wrote a little book entitled From Ritual to Romance (London: Cambridge […]...
House of the Chalice

Gards Aúirkeis, a very ancient society

Warning: Major spoilers ahead for “Maier files” Somewhere in central Europe dwells a very ancient society known by its Gothic name: Gards Aúirkeis, or the house of the Chalice.  Some claim that its members protect an ancient knowledge and they have access to the wisdom of a lost civilization, others claim they form an ancient witch coven with roots going back in time as over 2000 years to the ancient Goths and even far beyond...
Hexen kommando

German Witches

It’s almost Walpurgisnacht, no better moment to have a closer look at our witches or Hexen. Where did this cruel hatred against women and the ancient pre-christian sanctuaries start? When Pope Innocent VIII (1484–92) professed his belief in witchcraft, he condemned it, and dispatched inquisitors to Germany to try its supposed practitioners and punish them unimpeded. Singling out Mainz, Cologne, Trier, Salzburg, and Bremen, the papal bull declared that “some parts of Northern Germany” were...

Hamingja and the supernatural guardians of the North

Hamingja, as used in the sagas, stands for an abstract conception, that of something belonging to an outstanding person which is partly a matter of character and partly of personality, and partly something more than either—that strange quality of ‘luck’ or luck-lessness’ which attaches itself to certain individuals more than others. It is something which can be handed on after death, and it usually remains within one family. It is usually connected with the name, so that if a child […]...
Harvest festivals

Harvest festivities

Harvest festivals celebrated more than finished work for the season; they celebrated the capacity to survive the winter. The best known of these harvest festivals was the Eleusinian Mysteries, a weeklong celebration in ancient Greece that fell close to the Autumn Equinox. The equinox is not just a one-day event It can happen over a span of two to three days depending on the location. Since Fall Equinox traditions center on the work of the...
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. As so used the term was neutral, but once appropriated by Christianity it began 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 […]...
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 underworld and helps negotiate the way past the guardian demons is the god of planet...

In the Hall of Shadows: Vardøger and the Mirrors of the Soul

You walk alone through a silent corridor, the hush broken only by your footsteps echoing against stone. Yet—pause—a chill runs up your spine. Did your stride ring out an extra beat? The sensation is ancient, primal: the eerie awareness that someone—something—has walked these steps before you, wearing your very face, cloaked in your gait. This is not déjà vu. This is the whisper of the unseen double, a phenomenon stitched into the myths of ancient...

Irminsul: The Pillar Charlemagne Had to Destroy

772 AD. A military campaign pauses. Charlemagne’s army doesn’t press the advantage — it tears down a wooden post. Why? You don’t stop a war to demolish something unless that something is the war. The Column That Carries Heaven Around 850 AD, the monk Rudolf of Fulda wrote down what the Saxons had believed before the conquest. He described a “wooden trunk of no small size, erected under the open sky.” In their own language they called it the Irminsul. […]...

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