Month: April 2003

Voluspa (translated by W.H. Auden and P.B. Taylor), from an Asatru site. Astru sites can be a bit spooky, but here’s one that shows a sense of humor: Loki: A Paean in Progress.

Why do I say that Asatru is spooky? Well, it compounds the general spookiness of religion with the fact that the objects of worship are ones I originally ran across in a Marvel comic.

To understand how The Mighty Thor messed me up, consider that I created my own character as an imitation (like I did with many of my favorite superheroes) and made him the son of the Hebrew god, like Thor was the son of Odin, king of the gods. Now, the Thor comics don’t mention that Odin is king of the Norse gods only, and apparently I wasn’t even acquainted with Zeus (or I was, but somehow reconciled the two, just like the comics did), so I spent time explaining to myself the relationship between Odin and Big J, the god we were learning about at school.

Anyway, for a refresher on Norse mythology, here’s a quick summary page, with multiple diagrams. It’s all in Norwegian (I think), but it’s easy to follow if you know the names. I need to make something like this in Hebrew.

Ankou’s Page of Runes is an excellent source of information about Runes, and includes a mapping of the runes to the magic spells described by Odin in the Hávamál.

The site also describes some interesting variant Rune sets, including one by the Austrian racist mystic (and neo-pagan) Guido List, who claimed to have seen the “original” set of runes in a vision while blinded by cataract. The best pages about List seem to be in German, but some info appears in this dissertation about the roots of German national socialism, this distasteful rant about the ties between Homosexuality, Occultism and Nazism, and this article about Nazis and the Occult, which is part of a site that covers overall weirdness but has a special section on occult conspiracies and mystic societies.