(November 29, 2011 at 5:00 pm)Rhythm Wrote: Once we've gone down the rabbit hole of myth as a retelling of some actual thing or time or place in each and every case, especially when we try to get specific...anything becomes possible.You are right about the reversal of good/evil and of the role of the monks and everything. Still, there is no need to get specific because it is the older myths, the older legends that count. Mythology is based on a solid unmovable base: the Mother, The famous Cow.
Audhumbla, the enormous cow who uncovered Buri, the grandfather of the Aesir, is not an invention of the monks because they did not now (and they still don’t) what Cow means in mythology. Even modern translators of ancient texts have serious problems in translating “cow” as “Mother”.
It is true that we were very unlucky as regards recording of the tradition of Northern Europe. Yet, as humanity, we have the texts of the ancient Near East which serve as a guide in understanding cultures of which the tradition was recorded recently
In the Pyramid texts there is a description of the Mother that matches the depiction of the Mother in the statuette of the Venus of Willendorf and at the same time it solves the problem of the head gear of the statuette by describing it as a blindfolding hood.
Neither the Cro-Magnon nor the Norsemen recorded their legends, but they produced lots of Mother figurines.
These figurines, which were constantly produced for about 35k to 40k years, the scientific community is unable to tell us with certainty what they stand for.