Tales and spiritual reality (1)

Mythology

Most, if not all, mythologies tell about how the world was created, and how gods or other non-human and human beings exist and interact with the world. For our modern culture, these are just stories, tales to explain the world around that couldn’t be explained by just human actions. Things like weather, seasons, the stars. But for the modern, materialistic mindset, these stories aren’t real, they don’t have value for physics, maybe only for psychological understanding of the past.

For the spiritual view, mythologies are in two ways somewhat real. One way is that, spiritually, the world, the whole cosmos, was created by spiritual beings. And the mythologies tell this in a somewhat symbolic way. This can be found out by spiritual research.

A clear description of this spiritual creation is in Rudolf Steiner’s ‘Occult Science’. And according to Rudolf Steiner, the Norse and Germanic mythology describes the creation of the earth the best. It started with a giant void, the Ginnungagap (yawning gap). Then two regions appeared on the sides of this void, a very cold one, Niffleheim, and a very hot one, Mispelheim (or Muspelheim). They filled the void with water and then ice, from which, in short, beings like giants came, and gods, who created the earth, Midgard (I might expand on this in the future) Stories from later on in the Norse mythology and, for example, Greek mythology happened during the Lemurian and especially the Atlantic period, in which humanity was still clairvoyant enough to see spiritual beings. The second way in which mythologies are real, is in our human soul. The developing human soul, from conception through childbirth to adulthood and on, repeats the world and human history. The growth of an embryo is like the two regions, Niffleheim and Mispelheim, the head and body, where then the hearth is formed in between. (Midgard)

All the development which is then told in the mythologies, all the adventures of Odin, Thor, Freya, or Zeus, Apollo, Venus and Athena, those happen in our soul. Thor, for example, is the symbol for our early ‘I’, or ‘Self’ development, wrestling with giants (natural forces), the worldsnake (lies), and Utgard-Loki (materialistic illusion, Ahriman).

What the gods and beings experienced, our soul experiences. In a way, we’ve got the beings of the mythologies in our souls. Certain forces we could, for example, call centaurs, gnomes, fauns.

Sources (besides own spiritual research)
‘Occult Science’, by Rudolf Steiner
‘The Mission of the Folk-souls’, by Rudolf Steiner
‘Tussen Wodan en Widar’ by Allice Woutersen-van Wierden (sadly only available in Dutch.. I’m curious when I feel obliged to translate it).

More:
Yggdrassil and chakra’s (my own research).
Yggdrassil (Dutch, inspired by Tussen Wodan en Widar)