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The Creation in Paganism
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The creation of the world. What did our forebears believe in that context?
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Let's find out.
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I believe that the pagans of the past had different views on that.
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Because in ancient Greece, for example, you do see a talk about a demiurge, a creator of this world.
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Or rather, something that has been interpreted as the creator of this world.
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But I think the original pagan European view is that there is no creation.
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The world, the cosmos, has always been here.
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You cannot reach the edge of the cosmos, because there is no edge.
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It continues forever.
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Just like PI [pie].
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Or PI [pee], as I would have said.
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While there is no creation, you can also naturally assume that there is no end to the universe.
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It will never cease to be.
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There is no Armageddon or anything like that.
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Ragnarok is a description of something completely different.
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And I have described that in my book "Sorcery and Religion in Ancient Scandinavia".
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Sources using Völuspá, by the way.
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Völuspá is not a myth about the creation of the world, but a myth about the creation of the world on a subjective level.
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That is for you, as a human being.
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The perception of the world as having a beginning and an end is, I think, very much Christian.
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And very much foreign for the pagan European.
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And when it comes to the ancient Greeks and their possible talk about the creation,
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I think that is because in ancient Greece, at that time, they had already lost connection to nature,
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because they were living in a civilization.
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And when you lose this connection, when you lose the contact with nature,
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you also lose contact with paganism,
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because you distance yourself from it.
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You cut yourself off from it and start to imagine that you are above it or different from it or somehow independent of it.
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And this is a very civilized idea that we see very much in Judeo-Christianity.
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The idea that there is something divine beyond the universe, the cosmos, is a thoroughly Christian idea.
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The original pagan conception is that the divine is a part of nature.
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You cannot separate the divine from the cosmos.
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You cannot claim that it is beyond cosmos, because the cosmos is the divine.
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And the divine is our cosmos.
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And it is eternal and timeless.
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If you think animism is a type of atheism, please press dislike.
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If you understand that animism is not atheism, please press like.
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If you think paganism is based on having faith, please press dislike.
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If you think paganism is perfectly explainable, please press like.
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If you think it's okay to call other people's interpretations, lower interpretations,
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when you yourself are unable to interpret the myths at all, not even lower explanations to them,
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please press dislike.