I am currently reading Orson F. Whitney's book-length poem Elias: An Epic of the Ages. In Canto II, Elias himself appears, as the Soul of Song, and is compared to a hermit (eremite):
The spirit's garb -- for spirit so he seemed --Fell radiant in many a flowing fold;A robe antique, by modern limners deemedBefitting monk or eremite of old.
This reinforces the Odin connection, since both Elias (Elijah) and Odin are typically depicted as accompanied by ravens. Searching just now for images of Odin walking, I found several with ravens and one with something even more synchronistically apropos:
This (non-traditional, and presumably algorithm-generated) depiction has Odin not only accompanied by a hart but wearing antlers of his own, making him one of those "humanoid deer creatures" we've been hearing so much about.
An interesting coincidence is that Canto VII of Elias (which I have not yet read) is titled "The Arcana of the Infinite." Given the tradition of referring to the cards of the Tarot as the Major and Minor Arcana, and given that many dictionaries give "God" as one of the definitions of the noun Infinite ("Endless is my name," Joseph Smith has him say), this corresponds pretty closely to The Tarot of the Divine, the name of the deck whose Hermit card has recently been at the center of the sync-web.
Another coincidence is that the part of Elias I read today included "thy desert blooms" (an allusion to Isaiah 35, whence also "Then shall the lame man leap as an hart"), followed a few lines later by "One and Pure in Heart." One suggests the Hermit, a solitary, while Pure in Heart could be symbolized by a white heart (see "White harts").
Another Odin link is "The Hermit Portal and the Well Thing," which emphasizes the runes on Laura Bruno's Hermit Portal painting. Odin is supposed to have been the one who discovered runes. Bruno explicitly compares her hermit to Odin and also suggests that the man who taught her runes may have been Odin in disguise.
4 comments:
The association of Elijah and Odin, partly due to the ravens which accompany each, is a great catch. The raven has been in the sync-stream lately, principally in the guise of Poe's eponymous poem, where the raven is a messenger of despair. In the case of Elijah or Odin ravens are messengers too, though not of despair. I do recall that, in "The Passion of the Christ," a raven pecks out the eye of the unrepentant thief crucified on Jesus' right. Is it a sidelong correspondence to one-eyed Odin and his quasi-crucifixion upon Yggdrasil?
I suppose this is a good place to remark the fact that Laura Bruno's hermit has a white heart faintly outlined on his chest.
William,
Symbolically Odin's One Eye suggests, at least to me,that
he was a 'Balancer' of Duality. Two eyes into ONE.
The Third Eye.
The knowledge Odin sacrificed his eye for is
the Sacred Science Knowledge aka
The Emerald Tablet aka The Siddhis Powers,
aka, The Universal Knowledge,
aka the Language of the Birds. ( see Odin
in the second illustration in the wiki article link below )
Also you speak of Odin but you forgot Odin's
wolves? Recall I shared my wolves experience
I had in 2003. Recall I recently sent you
the photo of the wolf painting on the doorway
of the Burgandy SUV in the parking lot
of the restaurant which was parked 2 cars
away from the blue SUV with the Ohio vanity
license plates HMERT Z.
Symbolically a restaurant is 'food for thought'.
The heart is the balancer in physical matter
in this duality dimension where everything
is in matter.
The soul is the balancer in the cosmic order
where the Sacred Science Knowledge is held,
accessible through the pineal glad ( which of
course is 'trapped' in the physical body while incarnation).
As I have commented many times,
I personally believe we all have the ability
to transcend matter ( linear time
and space).
However what is required to access that knowledge is
(and IMHO) that we
sacrifice duality ( chaos ) which means going
through the darkness
in the cave alone where we become the Hermit.
By transcending duality
we raise our frequency ( Hertz) which is how
we evolve.
Hope is just a possibility of a future event.
Hope is a quest or a pursuit you might say.
Much like the pursuit of happiness.
Happiness is also fleeting.
In this duality dimension love and hate are
two sides of the same coin.
Peace and contentment is attainment
for a 'job' well done i.e. not succumbing
to the chaos of the ego. In other words; slaying
the dragon.
The movie Wizard of Oz ( which I recently made
mention of) makes that point.
Recall in the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy, the Scarecrow,
the Tin Man and the Lion, and Toto too, skip
happily through the poppies towards the Emerald City
thinking they had found the light but they hadn't,
because they hadn't yet gone
through the darkness.
The poppies were symbolic of duality's illusion.
Copy and paste: Optimistic Voices ( Wizard of Oz )
asterisks mine.
"Keep straight ahead for the most glorious place
***On the face of the earth or the sky
Hold onto your breath
***Hold onto your heart
**Hold onto your hope
***March up to the *** gate and bid it open
~~~~~~~
A gate is a portal.
Dorothy and friends were naïvely happy
and hadn't gone through the
dark night of the soul and slain the shadow.
Recall Dorothy was taken to the Wicked Witch's
cave/castle where she was
reminded that she was still bounded by time/Saturn
and duality/matter, symbolic of the hourglass.
It was only after Dorothy ( who wears a blue and white
dress and ruby slippers ) and the scarecrow, tin man and lion slay
the dragon that they were truly free.
That Sacred Science knowledge we earn is peace.
Peace is eternal as is hOMe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_the_birds#History
Optimistic Voices
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2nykc_gvpg
1/2. In order to find out how many times The Hermit from Tarot of the Divine has been featured on the blog, I scrolled back to June 10, the date of its debut here, taking note along the way of every instance of same; by my count, it's made eight total appearances from then until now. Yesterday, I once more carefully scrutinized the image. There are nine trees pictured; this correlates to the nine bands of concentric rings that we see in the Western sky (on the plausible assumption that the image represents nightfall, rather than daybreak). The lowermost of those bands, conveying the Sun's fading light, we might style some shade of wheat, but the higher remaining bands are each increasingly darker shades of teal; thus, the sky overall has a teal coloration. That sky is dotted by thirty-one stars. This time, I noticed that one star is considerably larger than the others; presumably, it is the evening star, Venus. It can be seen between the first pair of trees to the right of the hermit, at the top. The hart's eye is the same ice-blue color as every star.
While the Tarot of the Divine has a teal color theme, The Hermit card gives off more of a dark vibe, the turning sky notwithstanding. There are five trees in the foreground distinguished by being almost pitch black; four more trees populate the background, and are visibly of a lighter (than black) shade of dark blue. These can serve as reference points whereby to discern the color of the hermit's cloak, which proves to be dark blue itself. There is shading of a lighter color to be seen in the cloak; it serves the purpose of depicting the cloak's folds as draping, but it's reasonable to assume that the cloak is all of one dark blue color. I did, however, discern one notable exception: the cloak's hood is bordered by a teal hem. So, both the hermit and the hart have a color link to the sky as it's depicted here; the hart's eye accords with every star, and the hermit's cowl's hem, the sky as such. (Just so you know, when I clicked on the image at the blog, and then zoomed in for a closer look, the image resolution was inferior to downloading the image to my computer and then viewing it that way. In the case of the latter, the teal hem is crystal clear--as it is too on my phone.) I also noticed that the bottom of the hermit's cloak is frayed, tattered into a pattern of shapes that resemble shark's teeth.
2/2. Now, what's more, if you look at the picture's upper left corner, you'll see a dark semi-circular object. I assume it's meant to represent the crown of a tree in the distance. Just below, two branches of either it or another tree curve upward and merge with the semi-circle. This has the effect of creating an impression of a mouth and a face. In fact, if you look at it carefully, it seems to be a skull with a dangled jaw. From our viewpoint, we see only one eye or socket, on our left; the other must be blocked by a tree. (There is a leaf that could conceivably serve as the other eye, but it's somewhat akimbo.) There are three stars in the maw of the skull. Is it a coincidental array of depicted elements in the card that were randomly placed; or is it rather intentional? In either case, we are within our rights to perceive it to be another figure of the "nevermore" abyss, the "star swallower."
According to Google, Odin is known by his dark blue cloak, so it's entirely possible that we have in this Hermit card less of a link to Odin than Odin himself outright. Whatever the case, there is apparently an affinity of Odin for the color blue, which might explain the choice of blue that suffuses the post's second image. That picture abstractly reduplicates the Hermit card, with a hart overhead and a god or man or man-deer below. Odin is the chief of the gods, and in the limited googling I've done concerning him, he has often been styled the "Allfather," which sounds more or less monotheistic. So it's possible to see in Odin a figure for God. Yet even the "chief of the gods" is an exalted station, so we must ask ourselves in the case of either of these images, what is it that this lofty being seeks from the harts depicted in both illustrations? Are the moments which each image relates, similar or different?
It seems to me that the only thing that Odin could be seeking is cooperation, freely assented. In the lower screenshot, we see perhaps the moment, fraught with consequence, when Odin asks the spirit of the forest to cooperate with him in going forward with the project of creation. In The Hermit from Tarot of the Divine, we see the happy aftermath of the hart having assented to cooperate with Odin. They--God and creature, if you like--now journey together in happy defiance of the all-devouring star swallower, creation's enemy. One effect of this interpretation is that we rethink the event shown in the Hermit card as Odin, in his guise of the hermit, bestowing a blessing upon the white hart; it's really the white hart who ought to be seeking the hermit, rather than vice versa. It's the hermit who possesses the power to open the door to another world, and he wants to show the hart, and us, the way. We might even say that, all along, the hermit--including Odin, Gandalf, Elijah, and who- or what- ever else--have figurated the person and spirit of Jesus. These figurations ARE his spirit. Thus might it behoove us, if only for a moment, to reconsider the sentiment of our Bible verse to be: "Then shall the hart leap o'er the flame man, who is Elias, who is Odin , who is Jesus."
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