Norse Mythology

by Jodie Forrest
(First published in THE MOUNTAIN ASTROLOGER)
The Norwegian artist Edvard Munch's painting, 'The Sun,' shows a huge, radiant solar disc rising over a fjord, where a diminutive house clings to a rocky cliff overlooking the water. Munch's sun emits kaleidoscopically multicolored rays of pulsing, almost animate, light, all streaming out from that immense central core, illuminating and virtually setting fire to the landscape below. The original hangs in the Festival Hall at the University of Oslo. A print hangs in my office and often stops first time clients in their tracks.

A Quest for Wisdom and Balance
by Douglas "Dag" Rossman
This article first appeared in Scandinavian Press, Vancouver, B.C. (American offices in Blaine, WA),
fall 1996; http://www.nordicway.com, tel. 604-731-6381; fax 604-731-2292; This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Reproduced here with permission of the author and Scandinavian Press. Dag's five audiocassettes of Norse myth and legend can be ordered from Skandisk, Inc., 1-800-468-2424.   Scroll to the end of this page for links to Jodie Forrest's Nordic-Celtic historical fantasy trilogy and to her articles relating the Norse pantheon to the astrological planet. See Steven & Jodie Forrest's definitions of the Norse Runes.

by Jodie Forrest
First appeared in The Mountain Astrologer. The ideas grew from Jodie's research on Norse mythology for her Nordic-Celtic historical fantasy trilogy, beginning with The Rhymer and the Ravens . For more about the Norse Runes, click here.

Do you give astrological readings? What planet are you most likely to hurry through if time is pressing? Mercury, most likely. And little wonder: the Mercury-Hermes of classical Greek and Roman mythology could be passed over as a message-carrying youth, a glib and quicksilver lightweight. Mercury is a quick-witted deity of logic and order--lord of the logical left brain, as it were.

Certainly that can be an accurate description astrologically. Accurate, but incomplete. Even the classical world also saw Mercury as a psychopomp--a guide of souls to the Underworld--and as the ruler of crossroads and other transitional states. The planet Mercury rules how we perceive and communicate--yet the left brain isn't our only perceptive mode, and linear reasoning or the body's five senses aren't the only methods of apprehending reality. What the classical world more or less neglects in Mercury--the path of the right brain, the truths of the psychic or the shaman--is preserved in the Northern European tradition's god, Odin.

Wouldn't it be grand to be able to use our Mars function as easily as we can learn to understand it? At first glance, Mars, the warrior planet, seems to rule some pretty basic, organic and instinctual material. Fight or flight. Assertion and aggression. Boundaries and self-defense. Courage. Initiative. Drive. The ability to act. Knowing what we want, and doing what we have to do to get it.