Norse Mythology and Pantheon

[bruce]

As you know, I enjoy researching the origins of word (etymology) and have been puzzled by two Norse words that are primary in their mythos:

Ásgarðr: The abode of the AEsir gods.
Miðgarðr: The Earth.

It is obvious that "garðr" has the same root as "garden", and that "Mið" is "middle", hence the "middle garden", whereas Ás is normally translated as "god", so Ásgarðr is "gods garden," which was up in the heavens (space).

What does God need, with a garden?

Did some digging, and found that the word "garden" comes from "guarded"--a piece of land that was protected from the outside by fences, walls or other means to keep out the extremes of environment (greenhouse) or predators (fences and walls). Also found that the ancient Norse "garðr" means "enclosure", as in the "enclosed garden."

When you go back further in history, the word "Ás" is a reference to the men of Asia (there is also the 'magical' connotation of a deity, which is why it is conventionally translated as 'god'). Asia is a big place--at least now it is. So I set out to find where the Viking version of Asia was, about 5000 years ago, before we had planes and trains and the world was a much larger place.

Since the Norsemen are seafarers, the majority of the places they visited were on the seacoast, including the Mediterranean Sea (there are records of Vikings in Rome, Egypt and Greece). Places like Rome, Egypt, Africa and Greece all had unique names in the Norse language, so by using a process of elimination, I checked along the coastline to find if there was a missing section of the map that would be "Asia." And I found one--the area of Persia, otherwise known as Iran/Iraq, Mesopotamia, or in the really old days, Sumer. Ás (AEsir) refers to the divine men of Sumer: the Sumerian gods! (AEsir also correlates to the Vedic Asura.)

That means that Ásgarðr is the "celestial enclosure of the Sumerian gods." God has got his spaceship, and it is called Ásgarðr.

Miðgarðr is the "middle enclosure" (not Earth), the location known as E-DIN, where the gods arrived in Mesopotamia, what Christians call the "Garden of Eden."

I just happen to find the correlation between the Norse and Sumerian mythologies rather interesting, and thought I'd relate it. It gets even more interesting, because with that connection, you can correlate the Norse gods to the Sumerian gods, and since the Vedic gods are phonetically close to the Norse, you can connect them up, too, and get a lot more information as to what is going on, as each culture has a different piece to the puzzle.

I've been digging into Norse mythology and just figured out what the frost giant Ymir actually is--that icy ogre that created the Earth. If you read the Thorpe translations, before Ymir was sacrificed and "sliced and diced" to form the Earth:

There was in times of old, where Ymir dwelt,
nor sand nor sea, nor gelid waves;
earth existed not, nor heaven above,
'twas a chaotic chasm, and grass nowhere.

Obviously, Ymir did not create the Earth, as it was there already as a big, dry rock, the "chaotic chasm" of volcanoes and earthquakes. The old Norse did not call the Earth, "earth"--earth was the dirt and stuff. So what it is saying is that the Earth was featureless, no atmosphere and lifeless. Now look at what happens after Ymir arrives on the scene:

Of Ymir's flesh was earth created,
of his blood the sea,
of his bones the hills,
of his hair trees and plants,
of his skull the heaven;
and of his brows the gentle powers
formed Midgard for the sons of men;
but of his brain
the heavy clouds are all created.

Flesh is the largest organ in the body; the substance of Ymir. Being a frost giant, frozen water. Obviously Ymir was not ON Earth, because his arrival changed everything, so... what do we know that is really big (giant), made of ice and snow (frost) and occasionally encounters a planet, initiating some changes to the surface? A comet, perhaps? Like the one that hit Jupiter a while ago?

If a comet hit Earth, the melting water would form seas, the impact creating hills and mountains, the water vapor creates a sky with clouds... and with all that fresh water around and a stable environment, life would spring forth, and creating Midgard (the Norse "Garden of Eden") for the sons of men--not "men" or "sons of god"... the Norse refer to Neanderthals as men, so the "sons of men" would be cro-magnon man, in the Garden of Eden.

A very similar situation to Immanuel Velikovsky's research.

Múspellsheimr, Niflheimr and Ginnungagap

I've gone through some other sources and found a few interesting things regarding the Nine Worlds.

Just as I ran into with the Latin and Hebrew texts, the English translations don't seem to make sense, like someone just stuck words in at random. Guess one cannot understand the Book of G'kar without learning to read Narnish for themselves.

I was looking at the creation mythos, where the world had two halves, Muspellheim (fire) and Niflheim (ice). Ah... looks like the reciprocal relation between yang and yin, or space and time, making Ginnungagap the Norse version of "motion." But, the context didn't fit.

It is said that Muspell is in the South, and Niflheim is in the North, and discovered that there don't appear to be words in Old Norse for "north" and "south." Struck me as odd, because the Norsemen were Vikings and did a lot of sailing, without knowing which way was north???

Discovered it IS related to yin-yang, but in the old Chinese sense of "light side" and "dark side." Muspellheim is the "light side" (yang) of the world, and Niflheim is the "dark side" (yin). Muspell knew no darkness; Niflheim knew no day. They were fixed in this relationship.

That brought me back to old Biblical legend, saying that in the days prior to Adam, there were no night and day. Mercury and Venus are in a gravitational lock with the sun, just like the moon is with Earth--the same face always points to the sun. What if that was the same condition Earth was in, early on?

Consider: the Earth, without a moon and little to no atmosphere, locked in a fixed orbit around a red giant sun and not rotating on its axis, like Venus and Mercury. The side facing the sun, the "light side," would be on fire. The opposite face, having little atmosphere and exposed to the vacuum of space on the "dark side", would be freezing cold. A realm of fire and ice, Múspellsheimr and Niflheimr.

Of course, geologic stress between these two extremes would be pretty high, particularly in the early, planet-forming days so if it was going to crack anywhere, it would probably be along the "terminator," the line where day meets night. This region between Múspellsheimr and Niflheimr is called Ginnungagap in Norse mythology, the "great gap," "the mighty void," or the "great abyss."

This same model appears to work for both the Norse and Hebrew translations. Of course, neither Norsemen nor Hebrews were around then to observe it... both stories are related by the "gods" of old, who apparently WERE around then.

The Comet Ymir

In Velikovsky tradition, if Ymir was an icy comet, which is quite possible given the early solar system, the giant component went supernova, destroying the dwarf component and busting it into pieces to form the cores of the planets. Our sun formed from the remnants of that supernova explosion, along the same sequence as a 1st generation sun (red supergiant, orange giant, yellow main sequence...). So plenty of icy material from out in deep space to come hurtling in, in the early days.

Ymir apparently crashed into early Earth, leaving a mound of ice and rock. This explains much in the Norse legends, as Muspell would have melted some of the ice into water vapor creating an atmosphere of moisture, which would conduct heat around the planet (unlike a vacuum) stabilizing the temperature somewhat, and making a habitable region in Ginnungagap. When you read through the texts, this melting mountain apparently filled the chasms and created 12 rivers and piled up in Ginnungagap (being a chasm), and appears to have formed the ocean basins.

It also discusses the "poisons" that these rivers carried, which I suspect is salt and minerals, as there are numerous references to "salty rime-stones." Non-oceanic life cannot survive on salt water, yet our blood is full of it--man was made from the sweat of Ymir's armpit! Doesn't take much imagination to see what the legend may be driving at.

Something very curious is this:

The trio (gods) explain that the first world to exist was Muspell, a glowing, fiery southern region consisting of flames, uninhabitable by non-natives.

That means it WAS inhabited by "natives" and these gods doing the description, the non-natives, could not survive in that environment.

The environment Ymir created apparently triggered an explosion of life, primarily the jötnar (giants).

Unfortunately, the Norse legends were mainly verbal and there was a tendency to re-use names of entities and things. For example, Ymir also sprang from Ymir, and was also known as Aurgelmir. From this Ymir, the legends start to look a lot like Adam and Even in the Garden, so it can be seen that connections were drawn from different stories.

The creation mythos starts out describing the formation of the world, then gets interwoven with the creation of man. I hope by using mythos from multiple cultures, I can find the pattern that fits all the systems, with the least amount of adjustment.

Some of the conclusions are consistent:

• The Earth did not have a moon, atmosphere and did not rotate--there were no days.
• The Earth has been struck on multiple occasions by comets.
• The oceans were initially no bigger than rivers, filled with salty mineral brine (the Earth was significantly smaller then). Expansion events widened the cracks, and made the oceans.
• Somewhere in the not too distant past, the moon arrived, initially in close orbit, and the interaction between the Earth and Moon established a magnetic field around Earth, protecting it from solar bombardment and allowing life to flourish. I suspect this coincides with the Cambrian "explosion of life."
• I believe the jötnar refers to different kinds of giants, at different periods, being a general term for a giant, not a specific race. As such, the dinosaurs were the original jötnar, and later after the days of Adam, the gods bred with men to produce another race of jötnar (the Philistines).

[Aaron]

Bruce,

Extremely fascinating and interesting indeed. You and I have had discussions about this. I was wondering if we apply the "Calender and Dating" corrections that daniel describes in portions of his next paper what some of these dates would equate to?

Things like:

Some of the conclusions are consistent:

The Earth did not have a moon, atmosphere and did not rotate--there were no days.
The Earth has been struck on multiple occasions by comets.
The oceans were initially no bigger than rivers, filled with salty mineral brine (the Earth was significantly smaller then). Expansion events widened the cracks, and made the oceans.
Somewhere in the not too distant past, the moon arrived, initially in close orbit, and the interaction between the Earth and Moon established a magnetic field around Earth, protecting it from solar bombardment and allowing life to flourish. I suspect this coincides with the Cambrian "explosion of life."
I believe the jötnar refers to different kinds of giants, at different periods, being a general term for a giant, not a specific race. As such, the dinosaurs were the original jötnar, and later after the days of Adam, the gods bred with men to produce another race of jötnar (the Philistines).

and when would have Ymir have hit the Earth therefore spurring the "life explosion"...
-

[aurora]

I find it fascinating how at first glance everything we learn seems so different and yet and we grow and search deeper, things are a lot more similar than they are different. Thank you for sharing your research Bruce.