Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Ralph Metzner
RALPH METZNERImage source: Wikipedia
Today we’re going to dip back in time to 1988 and the recording of a talk by Ralph Metzner at the Transpersonal Vision Conference. Ralph has been mentioned by several or our past speakers, but this is my first podcast in which Ralph is the main speaker.
Ralph was a German-born American psychologist, writer and researcher, who worked with Leary and Ram Das at Harvard. Sadly, Ralph died in 2019. In addition to being a psychotherapist, he was also Professor Emeritus of psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.
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Transcript
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Three-dimensional, transforming, musical, linguistic objects.
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Alpha Shades.
00:00:16 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:18 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:22 ►
And today we’re going to dip back in time to 1988
00:00:26 ►
and a recording of a talk by Ralph Metzner at the Transpersonal Vision Conference. Now,
00:00:33 ►
Ralph has been mentioned by several of our past speakers, but this is my first podcast in which
00:00:38 ►
he’s the main speaker. As you may know, Ralph was a German-born American psychologist, writer, and researcher who worked with Lirian Ramdass at Harvard.
00:00:48 ►
Sadly, Ralph died in 2019.
00:00:52 ►
In addition to being a psychotherapist, Ralph was also Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.
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As you will hear, Ralph begins by talking about the connection of Germanic
00:01:07 ►
mythology to the Nazis. He then goes on to say that if you can’t deal with the story of your
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ancestors, you can’t really deal with your ancestors. And considering the rise of the
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neo-Nazi movement here in the States, as well as in Europe, this message may be even more timely today than it was in 1988.
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On a more positive note, however, I suggest that you pay close attention to Ralph’s idea of the
00:01:32 ►
New Berserkers, warriors of the earth. If nothing else, it’ll remind you of how long people have
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been calling our attention to the planet’s environmental problems. Now, here’s Ralph Metzner.
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Questions about Germanic mythology and the fate of Europe.
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Most of us are of European or partly European ancestry.
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And the fate of Europe and the fate of North America are closely intertwined.
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This particular line of investigation began for me several years ago when I had a dream in which I saw one of the giant Olmec Mesoamerican stone-carved heads.
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And as I looked at this head face in the dream,
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and I had at that time no knowledge or connection
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to Mesoamerican myth or art or architecture.
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As I looked at this stone head in the dream,
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I realized to my amazement that the face, the head, was alive,
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that I could sense a little bit of breath coming through the nostrils,
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and I could sense a kind of a flicker behind the eyes, which were closed.
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And I got a thought in my mind, very distinct, that said,
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the old gods are awakening again.
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The old gods are awakening again.
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And that dream began a series of synchronistic events with which I was led into a deep interest in the Maya
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and the meaning of the Maya hieroglyphs and the Mayan calendar
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and the kinds of investigations that some of you may know the work of José Agüelas
00:03:44 ►
who has taken this line of work very much further than I have.
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And this was very intriguing to me,
00:03:52 ►
particularly because I had no connection with the Mayas or the Mexicans in my own ancestry.
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And simultaneously with that work, then I also began to realize, through the kind of work that I’ve been doing with shamanic practices and studies,
00:04:11 ►
and studies in various altered states of consciousness and in therapy, realizing that the importance of connecting with one’s ancestors.
00:04:49 ►
with one’s ancestors. And since my ancestors were Germanic and Celtic, my father being German, my mother Scottish, I turned my attention more to the Germanic and Celtic and old European stories and mythology and began to ask myself questions about well, what is the shamanism
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or was it the shamanism
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of the ancient Germanic or European peoples
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and what remains of it
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and what can we learn from it
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and what can we learn from the mythology
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of these peoples?
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Because I’ve come to understand mythology as the stories of our ancestors.
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Our myths are the stories our ancestors told about their journeys,
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about their shamanic journeys, about their quests for knowledge and healing,
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about their battles and wars,
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their love relationships, their discoveries, their triumphs, and their failures.
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And I began to understand how the European ancestry includes not only the ones that I was brought up with and most of us are perhaps most familiar with,
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the Greek and perhaps the Mesopotamian
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and the Egyptian and the Semitic
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and the Celtic and Germanic.
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And due to most recent discoveries
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about the pre-Indo-European peoples
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that existed and had cultures, high
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cultures in Europe, prior to the invasions of the Indo-Europeans, the Aryans from Central
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Asia who invaded India, the Mediterranean, and Western Europe, in wave after wave of invasion from about the 5th millennium B.C. onward.
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So I want to focus today particularly on Germanic mythology
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out of this whole complex of our ancestry, of our European ancestry.
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And Germanic mythology has, as you well know, a rather bad reputation.
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This reputation is associated, an interest and involvement,
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and deep involvement of Germanic mythology is associated with the figures of Nietzsche and Wagner,
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of Nietzsche and Wagner, and the Nazis, who basically appropriated certain themes from Germanic mythology to their own ideological and propaganda purposes.
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It is, however, the case that in Germany to this day, and people of Germanic extraction feel a considerable uneasiness about any interest in Germanic mythology.
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similar uneasiness about interest in Wagner’s music, because Wagner himself was interested in Germanic mythology, as you well know, and the Nazis themselves also liked Wagner.
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So there’s almost a kind of a feeling that I’ve actually heard expressed in Germany from
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friends there, that we don’t want to go that route because look where that route led before.
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And it dawned on me, and I’m sure it’s something that can easily be appreciated,
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is that what that means then is that if you can’t deal with the stories of your ancestors, you can’t really connect
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with your ancestors. There is like, as if it were, a barrier at the generation, one
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generation back, the generation of the parents of people my age, born either during or right
00:08:40 ►
after the war, who had no direct firsthand experience of the Nazi regime
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and the genocide that it imposed and the Holocaust that it imposed on the European situation and the world.
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And so there are groups now that I’ve had some association with in Germany who have begun to do some, what to my mind is very important work, in closing this rather extraordinarily acute generation gap, but in Germany it’s of a very particular nature. And there are
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people beginning to do very important work in this. For example, last year two books
00:09:31 ►
were published. One is interviews with Jewish survivors of the Nazi regime, and one is children,
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and one is interviews with the children of Nazi families.
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And in these group processes that I know of,
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they have developed something that could be called rituals of reconciliation.
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Reconciliations with the first generation of ancestors,
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our parents, our first generation of ancestors. Our parents are our first generation of ancestors.
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If we can’t communicate it with our parents,
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we can’t communicate it with any ancestors further back than that.
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It’s pretty obvious.
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So first, the barrier of communication with that group
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has to be broken down,
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and very significant steps are being taken now.
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And I think these steps are important for all of us,
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not only for Germanic or European people,
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and those of us that are directly or indirectly related to them,
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but for all of us because they are an example for all of us of the kind of reconciliation
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between people of different cultures, races, religions, ethnic origins that needs to take place
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because the world, as you know,
00:10:49 ►
is in a state of permanent warfare between peoples.
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So the religion of the ancient Germanic peoples
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was an animistic religion.
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It was a pagan religion,
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and it was a panentheistic religion.
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Animistic means that all of nature was seen as alive.
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It was pagan, meaning it was a religion of people that lived in the country.
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Paganism means the religion of people that lived in the country.
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Paganos is a country dweller, like Paisanos. Like heathens are the people that live on the heath. The country dwellers are the people that preserve the
00:11:36 ►
connection to nature and the awareness of the aliveness of nature spirits much longer
00:11:41 ►
than the people that went into the cities and put walls of stone around the cities like we all do. We have lived in cities for five or six
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hundred years, that’s twenty generations or more. How long most of us have been
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disconnected from living in the country. Religion of the paganism is simply the religion of the country folk
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who preserved the animism, the knowledge of nature spirits much longer.
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And thereby, of course, incurred the wrath and the disapproval of the established churches.
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So the religion of the ancient Germanic peoples was a religion that venerated the spirits of nature.
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The deities, the gods and goddesses were the gods and goddesses of mountains, of forests, of rivers, of sky, of wind, of fire, of ocean.
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They were nature deities. the temples were sacred groves
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as among the Celtic people
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a similar kind of situation
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there were four kinds of classes of beings
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that were recognized to exist
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there were human beings
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there were gods
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there were actually two families of gods
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which I’ll come back to a little later
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because it’s very important there were giants and There were actually two families of gods, which I’ll come back to a little later because it’s very important.
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There were giants and there were dwarves.
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Giants were the people, were beings, great forces, immense energy beings that lived in areas where humans did not live.
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They lived in the wild, frozen north.
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They were sometimes hostile
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or generally unrelated to humans.
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Unlike the gods, the gods had an intimate intercourse,
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communication with humans,
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two-way communication with humans. Two-way communication with humans.
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The dwarves were beings that lived under the earth.
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They were the masters of metal and iron and mineral.
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And they were capable of fashioning weapons
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and tools and jewelry
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with great skill.
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In this animistic, pagan, panentheistic religion,
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panentheism meaning religion in which God is seen in everything,
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there is great ecological relevance, therefore,
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to the project of reconnecting with the religion of our animistic ancestors.
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Many people have, such as the historian Lynn White,
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have pointed to the fact that
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Christianity is at least in part to blame for,
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or responsible for, a kind of theology
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that encourages an exploitative, domineering attitude towards nature.
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And so this ancient European animistic religion and worldview was wiped out
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by a combination of Christianity and technology,
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and technology, a double-headed assault from which effectively killed and wiped out the ancient religions because the Christians came in and made the old gods.
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Odin, the chief of the old gods, was made a devil, equated to the devil.
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Freya, the goddess of love and fertility, was equated to the chief of the witches.
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The sacred groves were cut down. Charlemagne cut down a famous tree, the Irman Zul, which was the tree
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that represented the world ash, the central axis of the ancient Scandinavian Nordic religion
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in the 8th century, signaling the demise of the ancient beliefs.
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So the ancient gods were forced into retreat by this practice.
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by this practice.
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And this double-headed attack on the ancient religion
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was culminated, of course,
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in the Inquisition,
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which was also partly motivated
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by religious reasons,
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the domination of the church,
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and partly by the domination
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of the rising scientific medical establishment,
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which feared the competition of the witches
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who knew the herbal wisdom of the ancient peoples.
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And the genocide of the witches equates to, in numerical terms,
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easily and perhaps exceeds the genocide of the Jewish people in the 20th century.
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People have described this attitude, this attitude of Christianity
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combined with the rise of technology,
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as an attitude that is biophobic and necrophiliac,
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life-fearing and death-loving.
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I’d like to focus on the figure of Odin Wotan
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because this figure is very interesting,
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the central figure, really, of the Germanic pantheon
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and a figure that the Nazis, interestingly enough,
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did not deal with at all
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and did not understand,
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as they didn’t understand really
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Germanic mythology. Even although Jung, at the beginning of the war in 1936, wrote an
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essay on Wotan, Odin Wotan, it’s the same figure, in which he warned and said, well,
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here’s Wotan, the old Germanic storm god, and he’s again storming through Europe.
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And I believe, however, that this was a misinterpretation on Jung’s part.
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The storm god aspect of Wotan is an aspect, it is a relatively minor aspect.
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And in any event, the Nazi phenomenon, when you look at it, really has very little resemblance to the cult or the religion of Odin Wotan. Odin is more the Nordic name, Wotan more the
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southern Germanic people’s name for it. Odin is a name that means something like
00:18:19 ►
friendly or auspicious God, Huldfall as the Germans say, friendly, auspicious god, Hultfall, as the Germans say, friendly, auspicious,
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and also the word Od has something to do with inspiration.
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He was the god of poets and seers
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and soothsayers,
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prophets,
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poets, the skulls,
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the god of inspiration.
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It was said that Odin, that poets and seers were seized by Odin
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in a kind of inspirational, not trance, not channeling,
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but inspiration, really, inspired, I think would be the appropriate term.
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Wotan, on the other hand, does, that term is related to the German word
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Wut, which means rage. So there you do have the aspect of storm. He was also the god of warriors.
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The warriors themselves, the warrior castes among the ancient Germanic peoples, were people that
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looked at the warfare as a kind of trance, practiced warfare as a kind of trance.
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There were the berserkers.
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The berserkers, which means people that wear bear pelts,
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bear sarkas, bear skin carriers.
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So this ties back to ancient Asiatic shamanic practices
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of adopting, putting on a bear pelt or a wolf pelt,
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a pelt of an animal in order to attain the strength of that animal, whether for hunting or for warfare.
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And the berserkers had the reputation of putting on these bear pelts
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and then going into battle and being completely fearless.
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And also drinking some kind of intoxicating mead
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which may have been the fly agaric mushroom
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or some mixture involving that
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and then there is the later figure of Wotan
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then as the storm god
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who rides with his warriors
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and his Valkyrie maidens
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who were the battle maidens
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who took up warriors that fell in battle,
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threw the sky on his eight-legged horse and so forth.
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So this is an aspect of Votan Odin
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that I want to mention
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because there is that feeling that somehow
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maybe there’s a connection there to
00:20:41 ►
the later phenomena. There’s no doubt that the Germanic people were definitely into
00:20:51 ►
warfare. They were into warfare in a big way. Tacitus already pointed this out, the Roman
00:20:58 ►
historian, and they have continued to be into warfare for a long, long time.
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The kind of warfare, the kind of mass warfare where you have millions of people organized in a uniform way,
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marching, is a very different kind of warfare
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from the warfare of these berserker warriors. This
00:21:26 ►
is a very individualistic kind of path. Why did the berserker warriors, why were they
00:21:31 ►
so fearless? The clue to it is that they had the belief that if they died in battle, they
00:21:39 ►
would be taken by the Valkyries straight up to Valhalla, and they would live then in Valhalla with Odin
00:21:47 ►
till the end of time, the twilight of the gods, where they would have one big final battle.
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So that was actually their goal. That was what they desired. If they didn’t die in battle,
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if they died of sickness or injury or accident in some other way, they would go to hell,
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the underworld, a very undesirable way of dying.
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So therefore they did not fear at all, they did not mind if they died.
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This was the secret to their life, that’s why they could not use their shield,
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not put on any armor, and just ride into battle totally unafraid of any wounds,
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because if they were killed, that was it, that was what they wanted.
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It was a kind of a self-sacrificing. It was a fanatical willingness to sacrifice oneself
00:22:27 ►
for the sake of the battle, kind of a battle trance,
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or Rausch, as the Germans would have Rausch,
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as kind of a combination of ecstasy and intoxication.
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I do think that there is such a thing
00:22:41 ►
as the new berserkers. And this is a vision that has come through from
00:22:51 ►
several different sources. Transformed warriors. I believe that the new berserkers, the transformed
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warriors will be warriors of the spirit, warriors of the earth. They will fight for the earth, to preserve the
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earth, to protect the earth, not against each other. And they will have that same kind of
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fanatical devotion to the preservation of the earth, which I personally happen to think is something that is needed. And I also
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think that in that image of the transformed berserkers who are warriors of the earth is
00:23:32 ►
the key to the question that plagues the whole issue of nuclear war and war and disarmament,
00:23:40 ►
the question of economic conversion. How are we going to turn the swords into plowshares?
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How are we going to turn a heavily militarized economy around
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so that millions of people will not be out of jobs?
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If we can’t figure out how to do that, we will never abolish war.
00:24:00 ►
And I see that the potential is in converting the technology of war into the technology of preserving and restoring the environment, the earth.
00:24:12 ►
This is what’s needed.
00:24:16 ►
So, I want to go on to the story of Odin.
00:24:27 ►
Three stories of Odin.
00:24:29 ►
Odin is equivalent to the Greek Mercury and Hermes.
00:24:34 ►
He’s the seeker for knowledge.
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He’s the god of poets, truth-sayers, seers, prophets, as well as warriors.
00:24:42 ►
He has affiliations to Mercury, to Hermes.
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as well as warriors. He has affiliates to Mercury, to Hermes. He’s therefore also the planet Mercury,
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which is where we still have the word, our word Wednesday is the Mercury
00:24:55 ►
day is Woden day. See the Germanic people, Celtic people called it more
00:25:00 ►
Woden, Woden, Wotan, Woden, and Odin.
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It’s all the same figure.
00:25:16 ►
He was often pictured as a man wearing a long cloak and a wide-brimmed hat,
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which he had to disguise the fact that he only had one eye as he walked among humans on earth. He only had one eye, a wide-brimmed hat, a long cloak, a staff,
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accompanied by two wolves and two ravens who sat on his shoulders
00:25:35 ►
called Hugin and Munin, meaning thought and memory.
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These two ravens’ thought and memories went around the world and brought him information, knowledge, thought, into the future, memory, into the past.
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Odin wandered around the world, consorting and conversing with humans, dwarves, giants, gods and goddesses.
00:26:06 ►
He was insatiable in his thirst for knowledge.
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He was known to consult with dead people.
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He would sit under gallows and wait for people to die.
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It was said he had a way through magical formulas and magical herbs
00:26:21 ►
to be able to get the dead to speak to him.
00:26:23 ►
formulas and magical herbs to be able to get the dead to speak to him.
00:26:33 ►
The insatiable quest or thirst for knowledge is a key to the European psyche. It’s the same myth as the Faust myth, which is the later central myth.
00:26:40 ►
The one who understands that, believes that, seeks knowledge,
00:26:47 ►
and is willing to pay the price for that.
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Realizes that a high price has to be paid.
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Faust, of course, would be the example of the one who pays too high a price.
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There were these two families of gods.
00:27:00 ►
Odin was one of the Azir, and then there were the Vanir.
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gods, Odin was one of the Azir and then there were the Varnir.
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The Azir
00:27:05 ►
included Odin
00:27:07 ►
and Thor and Odin’s
00:27:10 ►
son Baldur and Frigga,
00:27:12 ►
Odin’s
00:27:13 ►
wife, the kind of Hera figure.
00:27:16 ►
Varnir included Freya and
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her brother Freyo, who was the god of the
00:27:20 ►
sea, Freya the goddess of the
00:27:21 ►
land and so forth. Interestingly enough
00:27:24 ►
these two families of gods kind of coexisted.
00:27:27 ►
Actually, the stories are that they often kind of had struggles and battles
00:27:31 ►
and fights with one another.
00:27:33 ►
The one theory is, which I lean towards,
00:27:35 ►
is that the Vanir were the gods of the old Europeans that lived,
00:27:40 ►
that were the agriculturalists that lived in Europe
00:27:44 ►
before the Indo-Europeans invaded.
00:27:47 ►
The Aziah were the Asiatic sky gods,
00:27:51 ►
analogous to the Aryan Vedic gods that invaded India
00:27:55 ►
and the Olympian gods that invaded the Mediterranean.
00:27:58 ►
The patriarchal sky god figures
00:28:01 ►
and the other ones were the original remnants of the mythology of the ancient goddess cultures.
00:28:11 ►
Some of you may know the work of Maria Gambutis who has uncovered this old European
00:28:15 ►
cultures that date back to 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 BC
00:28:21 ►
that were goddess cultures living peacefully in Europe prior to the Indo-European
00:28:27 ►
invasions. So Germanic mythology as Greek mythology as Mesopotamian mythology is actually a blend
00:28:34 ►
of these two cultural myth stories. And so the stories of the conflicts of the Aziur and the Vanir really plays out this continuing conflict,
00:28:47 ►
which was not only, I mean, a great deal of it was suppression of the goddess cultures
00:28:51 ►
by the male sky god cultures, patriarchal things,
00:28:55 ►
but there was obviously also, this went on over hundreds and hundreds of years,
00:28:59 ►
intermarriage, blending, hybridizing, and so forth.
00:29:03 ►
Okay, three stories about Odin that illustrate his role.
00:29:08 ►
The first story is where Odin hangs himself voluntarily on the tree Yggdrasil,
00:29:14 ►
the giant ash tree that’s the central axis of the world,
00:29:18 ►
that holds the lower world, the middle world, and the upper world together,
00:29:22 ►
and is the mainstay of the world. He hangs himself on this
00:29:27 ►
tree and there is a song in the Edda in which he sings this song. I know that I hung on the
00:29:35 ►
windswept tree nine days and nights, pierced by the spear, sacrificed to Odin, myself to myself. On that tree whose roots are unknown, myself to myself,
00:29:52 ►
an extraordinary line, the lower self to the higher self. Self-sacrifice, in the true meaning of the
00:29:59 ►
term, a voluntary crucifixion. Neither food nor drink did they give me. I leaned downwards and took up the
00:30:10 ►
runes with a cry, and then I came down. Nine great songs I learned from my mother’s brother and of odreir, the noble mead I drank.
00:30:27 ►
The mead of inspiration. Odreir means the drink of inspiration.
00:30:33 ►
So Odin hangs himself on the tree, sacrifices himself,
00:30:39 ►
and is able to, this is basically a shamanic initiation,
00:30:45 ►
an ordeal type of initiation, no food, no drink,
00:30:49 ►
pierced by the spear, hanging, nine days, nine nights.
00:30:54 ►
And then sees the runes.
00:30:57 ►
On the ground, he sees the runes.
00:30:59 ►
He discovers that there is a secret language of nature.
00:31:02 ►
Runes is the secret language of nature.
00:31:04 ►
It’s like the I Ching trigrams or hexagrams.
00:31:08 ►
The runes symbolize animals, elements, plants, trees.
00:31:14 ►
They are the secret language by means of which we can communicate with nature,
00:31:17 ►
by means of which we can do divination and oracular prophecy.
00:31:22 ►
For knowledge is his search for knowledge
00:31:26 ►
through studying the language of nature.
00:31:29 ►
The second story is the story that he went to this well.
00:31:33 ►
It was called Nemea’s Well.
00:31:34 ►
Nemea was a giant who was one of his ancestors.
00:31:37 ►
He was descended from giants.
00:31:40 ►
Nemea guarded this well at the foot of the tree, Yggdrasil.
00:31:44 ►
And it was said that if you drank from this well you would obtain great knowledge.
00:31:48 ►
He wanted to get that knowledge. The price that was demanded for the ability to drink from this well was he had to give up one eye.
00:31:55 ►
He gave up one eye, voluntarily. This is what he was willing to pay.
00:32:00 ►
So this is what Odin’s challenge to any truth seeker is. Are you willing to pay the price?
00:32:06 ►
He figured, I only need one eye, basically, to see the outer world.
00:32:12 ►
I want to have this mead, this drink from the well that will give me the ability to see the inner world.
00:32:19 ►
Subsequently, the Vanir killed the giant, Mimir,
00:32:28 ►
who was the guardian of this well,
00:32:30 ►
and sent the head of the giant to Odin.
00:32:35 ►
Odin, it was said, preserved the head, the skull,
00:32:38 ►
by means of herbs and magical formulas.
00:32:41 ►
He used it as an oracle.
00:32:43 ►
He would have it sitting on the table next to him,
00:32:45 ►
and he would talk to it.
00:32:47 ►
It would talk to him. So what is that?
00:32:53 ►
There are Asiatic shamans who will use the skull of their ancestors as an oracle thing.
00:32:55 ►
This is knowledge of the ancestors.
00:33:02 ►
The second story of Odin points to the thirst, the quest for knowledge through connection with the ancestors.
00:33:05 ►
Mimir, the giants, were Odin’s parents and grandparents.
00:33:08 ►
And the skull was a way of connecting the knowledge of the past
00:33:10 ►
and the future, because the ancestors have knowledge
00:33:12 ►
of the past and the future.
00:33:15 ►
And Odin
00:33:16 ►
learned
00:33:17 ►
oracular divination, which he then
00:33:19 ►
in turn, he was the god who
00:33:21 ►
inspired, he learned it actually from the Vania
00:33:23 ►
in this way, and from Mimir’s head.
00:33:27 ►
And he then was, among the Germanic people,
00:33:31 ►
very interestingly, there was this class of seers.
00:33:33 ►
They were women.
00:33:34 ►
The women were believed to have a special aptitude for seership.
00:33:39 ►
So there was this class of seers called vervas,
00:33:41 ►
who were professional seers, seeresses.
00:33:49 ►
And they originally, they were also odin was their god but also originally was actually from the old goddess freya and the vania that that
00:33:57 ►
was learned the third story is in is a very interesting and complex story, which I’ll only just indicate very briefly.
00:34:06 ►
The time came when the two families of gods
00:34:09 ►
decided to make peace
00:34:11 ►
and stop their warfare, the Asir and the Vanya.
00:34:15 ►
They sat down together in a large circle
00:34:17 ►
and they each spat into a great vat or cauldron.
00:34:23 ►
And from the combined spittle or saliva
00:34:26 ►
in this
00:34:29 ►
cauldron
00:34:30 ►
a being
00:34:34 ►
was born, referred to as
00:34:36 ►
Quasir.
00:34:38 ►
And this being was said to be
00:34:40 ►
incredibly wise.
00:34:43 ►
And
00:34:44 ►
I think personally that this is a code. There are no other references
00:34:48 ►
to this figure Quasia in Germanic mythology. Some friends of mine and I now actually believe
00:34:56 ►
that this may have been a drink, a plant. So this being Qu, was said to have great wisdom and great insight and knowledge.
00:35:09 ►
The dwarfs kill the being, it is said, and make this drink out of the blood of this being and they then squirrel it away somewhere and they give it to some
00:35:29 ►
Giants and the Giants take it away and guard it. Giants often you know guard
00:35:34 ►
things whether it’s a pearl or treasure or maiden or whatever and they don’t
00:35:39 ►
really know what to do with it they just guard it and they keep it. And so Odin then has to get it.
00:35:52 ►
So he goes through this incredibly complicated series of maneuvers in order to get it.
00:35:56 ►
The first series of things he does is he breaks all the rules.
00:35:58 ►
He kills and murders a bunch of people.
00:36:01 ►
He makes some oaths and promptly breaks them.
00:36:09 ►
He uses deceit, treachery, tries to steal it, breaks all the rules in order to get this drink of great wisdom which he feels we the gods
00:36:16 ►
must have this. And he also wanted to have it for gods and for humans.
00:36:23 ►
But it doesn’t work. None of this treachery, murder, deceit,
00:36:28 ►
breaking the rules, none of it works, although this is what he feels he has to try. He finally
00:36:33 ►
comes to this mountain, and behind the mountain are the giant, the giantess who holds this
00:36:40 ►
drink, this mead made from the blood of this being Quasia. So he turns himself into a serpent
00:36:48 ►
and screws through the mountain like a
00:36:51 ►
serpentine kind of screwing, turns himself into a screw
00:36:56 ►
bit and bores through the mountain
00:36:59 ►
in order to get to the giantess. He finds the giantess and he
00:37:04 ►
seduces the giantess
00:37:05 ►
and sleeps with her three nights.
00:37:09 ►
And then she allows him to have the drink,
00:37:13 ►
which is in three big pots, to have a drink from it.
00:37:16 ►
But he drinks the whole thing
00:37:17 ►
and turns himself into an eagle and flies off,
00:37:22 ►
carrying the thing in his mouth in the eagle’s mouth
00:37:25 ►
and dropping some of it to the ground on his way back to Valhalla for the other
00:37:34 ►
gods and those where it falls onto the ground certain plants come up and this
00:37:38 ►
is where the humans get it from so it goes back to the gods so this is a
00:37:42 ►
shamanic story turning into a a serpent, then an eagle,
00:37:47 ►
boring through the mountain, the unification with the female.
00:37:51 ►
But what’s the essence of that story?
00:37:53 ►
This is the quest for knowledge that comes from peacemaking,
00:37:58 ►
from harmonizing, from reconciliation of the warring opposites.
00:38:03 ►
Remember, it came from the Vazia and the Anya,
00:38:05 ►
the former enemies getting together,
00:38:07 ►
combining their life juice, their life force.
00:38:10 ►
This all-knowing being came out of that.
00:38:14 ►
Then it was squirreled away and fought.
00:38:17 ►
It has to be one. It has to be one.
00:38:20 ►
You have to work for it.
00:38:21 ►
So, three lessons that we can learn from these three great stories.
00:38:29 ►
One is, Odin learns the language of nature.
00:38:34 ►
We need to learn the language of nature.
00:38:36 ►
The old nature gods don’t die.
00:38:38 ►
Gods don’t die by definition.
00:38:39 ►
They’re immortals.
00:38:41 ►
What happens is that they go into retreat.
00:38:43 ►
They withdraw when humans, you and I,
00:38:47 ►
no longer talk to them. We no longer talk to them because we no longer believe they exist.
00:38:52 ►
Because other priests came along and said those gods are no good, they’re evil, they’re bad,
00:38:56 ►
and they don’t exist anyway. First they’re evil and then they don’t exist.
00:39:04 ►
So the gods retreat.
00:39:05 ►
The Gata Demerong, the twilight of the gods, is not the death of the gods.
00:39:09 ►
It’s the sleep of the gods.
00:39:13 ►
So if they are consulted,
00:39:17 ►
see, our language of nature is purely scientific.
00:39:19 ►
It has no spirit.
00:39:21 ►
It has no religion.
00:39:22 ►
Religion and science are completely separated.
00:39:24 ►
So the language of nature, the runic language of nature, is the spiritual language of nature. It has no spirit. It has no religion. Religion and science are completely separated.
00:39:25 ►
So the language of nature, the runic language of nature, is the spiritual language of nature.
00:39:30 ►
It’s nature as spirit, is in-spirited.
00:39:33 ►
The second story tells us, connect with our ancestors.
00:39:38 ►
Know the stories of your Germanic, your Celtic, your pre-Indo-European ancestral roots.
00:39:44 ►
The ancestors have a vested interest in helping us.
00:39:47 ►
Just like we would have a vested interest in helping our children and our grandchildren.
00:39:51 ►
Of course we want to help them.
00:39:52 ►
Especially when we know that we’ve screwed up.
00:39:55 ►
Our ancestors know they’ve screwed up.
00:39:58 ►
We’re trying to undo the karma,
00:40:01 ►
the bad karma created by our own ancestors’ misguided actions,
00:40:06 ►
and we’re trying to do it without their help.
00:40:08 ►
They’re very willing to help, but we have to connect with them.
00:40:11 ►
We have to ask them.
00:40:12 ►
This is the importance of connecting with the ancestors.
00:40:16 ►
And towards a world where we can honor the cultural and ethnic pluralism
00:40:21 ►
and diversity that exists in this world,
00:40:23 ►
so everyone can be seen to contribute something.
00:40:26 ►
Every unique individual, every tribe, every people
00:40:28 ►
has some unique part of the overall tapestry of life
00:40:32 ►
that it wants to contribute, needs to contribute,
00:40:34 ►
for this whole global planet to work as a planet.
00:40:39 ►
And finally, the lesson of the third story
00:40:41 ►
is the lesson of reconciliation.
00:40:43 ►
The knowledge that comes from
00:40:45 ►
love, from loving instead of fighting, from love and reconciliation and harmonizing instead of
00:40:51 ►
killing and worrying, whether it’s between different religious sects, religious wars,
00:40:56 ►
and so forth. So Christianity, I feel, needs to go back and do a reconciliation with animism, the animism that it wiped out.
00:41:06 ►
It didn’t need to do that, you know.
00:41:08 ►
Buddhism, when it went into various countries such as China, Tibet, Japan,
00:41:13 ►
did not wipe out the local animistic religions.
00:41:16 ►
On the contrary, it reconciled with them.
00:41:18 ►
It blended, it harmonized with them.
00:41:20 ►
Christianity wiped it out.
00:41:21 ►
It tried to wipe out the Native American religion, same way same way South and North it didn’t need to do that and it has a major karmic
00:41:30 ►
debt and situation to undo it’s not a matter of going back and becoming
00:41:36 ►
Vodin worshippers again that’s not the point the point is to integrate those
00:41:41 ►
two traditions and the Judaic and Islamic, all of the ones that have existed.
00:41:45 ►
They’re all part of it, all part of our history.
00:41:50 ►
And out of that then may come the drink, the juice,
00:41:53 ►
whether this is an actual psychoactive chemical or not,
00:41:57 ►
we don’t know, that’s not important.
00:41:58 ►
It’s the essence, the essence that comes out of that
00:42:01 ►
harmonizing, peacemaking quality
00:42:03 ►
that then becomes the mead, as it was called,
00:42:06 ►
the mead of poets and soothsayers,
00:42:08 ►
of those who know the truth and can speak the truth
00:42:11 ►
and who can have the inspiration.
00:42:14 ►
The twilight of the gods, Ragnarok,
00:42:18 ►
that was foreseen and prophesied by the ancient Germanic peoples
00:42:21 ►
is to me the events of the past
00:42:26 ►
2,000 years.
00:42:28 ►
That’s the twilight of the gods.
00:42:30 ►
The combined onslaught of
00:42:31 ►
Christianity and science and technology
00:42:34 ►
wiped out the old cultures,
00:42:36 ►
the old religions, killed them,
00:42:38 ►
wiped them out. Genocide on
00:42:39 ►
a major scale. The ancient
00:42:41 ►
visions of the Ragnarok say
00:42:44 ►
there will be a great wolf who will devour the
00:42:47 ►
sun and there will be a great serpent Midgard that will strangle the world. Perhaps these two animals
00:42:54 ►
are Christianity and the technology which is destroying nature
00:43:05 ►
and destroying the spirit of nature of which we are a part.
00:43:11 ►
And the Ragnarok ends in a giant conflagration.
00:43:15 ►
We’re now in the midst of a planetary heat wave, as you know,
00:43:20 ►
which may end up turning vast areas of the planet into desert.
00:43:27 ►
After the Ragnarok, the old visions say,
00:43:30 ►
there is a resurrection.
00:43:32 ►
It’s not final, the whole thing comes around, it’s cyclical.
00:43:37 ►
Baldur is there again, the old sun god.
00:43:44 ►
There is a line where it says,
00:43:47 ►
the daughter of the sun will travel through the sky in her path.
00:43:54 ►
So the feminine principle, the solar feminine principle,
00:43:59 ►
and a new race of human beings living in a green and beautiful land,
00:44:05 ►
it is said in the old sayings.
00:44:07 ►
So this is the story of the Ragnarök,
00:44:11 ►
which to my mind has already happened.
00:44:13 ►
We’re at this present time, I believe, in the last phases of it.
00:44:18 ►
And the new and green earth will come out of that
00:44:21 ►
if we can just stay with it long enough.
00:44:26 ►
Thank you very much.
00:44:36 ►
Considering the fact that Ralph began
00:44:38 ►
by bringing up images of the Nazis,
00:44:40 ►
well, I must admit that I was very pleased
00:44:43 ►
with his positive ending.
00:44:44 ►
At least it was as
00:44:46 ►
positive as we can get these days when thinking about our environmental problems. As you may know,
00:44:51 ►
I’m no fan of organized religion, but Ralph’s suggestion just now about bringing animism back
00:44:58 ►
into Christianity is, well, it’s the best suggestion for Christians that I’ve heard in
00:45:02 ►
many years. I hope that this idea begins to maybe seep back into our culture before it’s too late.
00:45:09 ►
And just a little personal side note here,
00:45:11 ►
the first time that I heard Ralph give a lecture was at the big Ayahuasca conference in San Francisco
00:45:17 ►
at the end of 1999.
00:45:19 ►
His topic was about not giving up on our expectations about a psychedelic experience
00:45:24 ►
if they don’t come about quickly.
00:45:27 ►
He talked about an experience during which he attempted to reconcile with the death of his son.
00:45:32 ►
It was a powerful story in which it took six months for his intention to be realized, but then it happened in a major way.
00:45:40 ►
At that time, I didn’t know the story about his son’s death,
00:45:44 ►
At that time, I didn’t know the story about his son’s death,
00:45:50 ►
but several years later, I became friends with Cactus Phil, who was in our ayahuasca group.
00:45:55 ►
Many years earlier, Phil and Ralph and their families were living in an intentional community,
00:46:00 ►
and one day their sons went on a bike ride, but Ralph’s son didn’t make it back.
00:46:02 ►
He was hit by a train.
00:46:06 ►
What struck me when Phil told me that story was that for over a decade or more, Ralph wasn’t able to shake the black memory of that tragedy. Yet all those years
00:46:13 ►
later, Mother Ayahuasca finally healed Ralph Metzner. For me, the moral of that story is that
00:46:19 ►
if you don’t give up on psychedelics, well, they won’t give up on you. Ralph was an amazing man, and if anyone has more recordings of his talks,
00:46:28 ►
I’d love to borrow them and post more of his wisdom here in the salon.
00:46:32 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:46:36 ►
Namaste, my friends.