f5b555f6   
   XPost: alt.religion.druid, alt.traditional.witchcraft, alt.religion.asatru   
   XPost: alt.religion.shamanism   
   From: nospam@this.addy   
      
   Darwin123 wrote:   
   > On Apr 5, 11:19 pm, "1X2Willows" wrote:   
   >> Darwin123 wrote:   
   >>   
   >>> The Midgard serpent is a global evil, not one of those local evils.   
   >>   
   >> And your near Eastern, pre-biblical undies are showing.   
   >   
   > ??????????   
   >  Please expand on this. BTW, I like it. It makes me appear far more   
   > profound than I really am. I thought I was just shooting the breeze.   
   > According to you, I recite Eastern wisdom in prebiblical panties. I   
   > like the image.   
   >      There may be something to what you said. I was thinking of an   
   > Indian legend about Rama killing the beast that threatened the world   
   > at the beginning of mankind. According to Heidi Davidson, an   
   > IndoEuropean precursor to this story may have led to the idea of a   
   > "Midgard serpent" and Thor. I don't think it was specified that the   
   > beasts were snakes. In other words, some IndoEuropean deity is the   
   > common ancestor of Rama and Thor.   
      
   Semantics. Evil in its popular exegesis is meaningless without the   
   dualistic concept of sin preceding it. The term implies a component   
   of moral judgment which was foreign to original Heathen myth and lore   
   before they were recorded in writing, primarily by non-heathens, using   
   their own biased terminology, perhaps even without meaning to.   
      
   Also, the notion of strict linear progression and a common ancestor to   
   everything is most likely driven by the sort of personal desire which   
   already gave rise to the infamous Interpretatio Romana, yet still this   
   phantom is being chased by a lot of modern scholars. Go figure.   
      
   If anything else, such expectations disregard the more plausible   
   parallel development of individual cosmologies all over the globe and   
   also the possibility that various independent cultures and societies may   
   have well come to the same conclusions, therefore adapting similar   
   metaphors for quite obvious reasons, when we come to think of it.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)