Tag Archive for: gods and goddesses
Heimdal
Circle of Ostara Articles, Deities & LoreThe Van, Heimdal, is a god of peculiar significance for our folk. He, it is said, stands sentinel at Bifrost Bridge and guards the realm of Asgarth from invasion by evil. With his armour of silver, his golden helmet and his great gleaming sword he is a shining figure in our mythology.
Balder and Nanna
Circle of Ostara Articles, Deities & LoreThe story of the death of Balder is an archetypal pagan myth which echoes through the folk tales of many peoples.
Ostara
Circle of Ostara Articles, Deities & LoreLike Odin himself, the mother of people bears many names - Ostara, Frigg, Freya, Hulda, Mother Cary, Frau Holle, Tara and many more. She is the most well-loved of our divinities. So well loved that even the malice of the Christian usurpers could not force the people to turn from her.
Odin – Allfather
Circle of Ostara Articles, Deities & LoreOdin is the High One, the Father of our gods, the creator of our race. In the threefold aspect of Odin-Honir-Loður he breathed the spirit of thought and magic and awareness into us and made us human, the upright animal, with a spark of high divinity that makes us question and create and reach for the stars.
The Æsir – An introduction
Circle of Ostara Articles, Deities & LoreIn our attempts to write about the characteristics of our racial gods and goddesses, it is all too easy to fall into the trap mentioned in other articles in this series - that of seeing them as literary figments, characters in old stories and not as beings actually existing in a wider reality than that of the material world.
Giants and the reliability of received mythology (from the Eddas, Snorri and Saxo)
Circle of Ostara Articles, Deities & LoreThere appear to be two main classifications of deity grouped together under the term "giant": great creative spirits, and the powerful guardians of certain localities - mountains and rivers, for instance.
The Old Gods, the Vanir and the Three Worlds
Circle of Ostara Articles, Deities & LoreTo our understanding the archaic divine forces who shaped the Living Stream when it first started flowing, continue still to shape it within the biological microcosm. The one-celled creatures and the cellular colonies which make up "higher" life forms are still controlled by these great (yet remote from us) spiritual beings and will be in their care as long as life continues on the Earth.
The Earth
Circle of Ostara Articles, Deities & LoreThe Earth is of the utmost importance in the ethical, mystical and magical system followed by the Circle of Ostara. Not the Earth as a literary abstraction to be discussed in smoke-filled city rooms but the Earth as an actuality - our living planet.
Sun
Circle of Ostara Articles, Deities & LoreAnyone who has delved into the numerous volumes written on the lore and wisdom of the ancients will realise that in epochs far more distant in past time than any touched by historical records there was an accurate knowledge of the stars and the solar system and the Earth's place within it
Buri
Circle of Ostara Articles, Deities & LoreThe conception of a great and universal Sky Father has been part of the collective unconscious since before the advent of mankind. It is a basic intuitive knowledge that appears in some form in the mythology of all the races of man.
Audumla
Circle of Ostara Articles, Deities & LoreIn the mists and distances of the All and Forever Audumla has her being, a shadowy figure, the first Great Mother. She stands at the gateway of Change.
Wyrd
Circle of Ostara Articles, Deities & LoreWe live in an infinite and eternal cosmos that contains everything that exists, both matter and spirit, a cosmos that is "intelligence", "awareness" and "will" that brings about all change. This Great Being, of which we are a part, we see as Wyrd, the weaver of Fate.