Mythic Meanderings 2: Revelation, Ragnarok, and Reality

An Eclectic Humanist

In the second part of the Mythic Meanderings sequence, I dig into two end-of-the-world myths: the biblical narrative culminating in Revelation, and the Norse Ragnarok tale. These myths, and the differing understandings of human nature, the divine, and time underlying and articulated in them, have a certain amount of common ground, but oppose each other in important ways. They present quite different notions of human worth, and of the source and possibility of meaning in life. As an atheist and metaphoric pagan, I lean toward the Norse myth, and honestly, one of the reasons I hold these two up together is to dispense with the notion, common in Western society, that the various displaced polytheisms in our various cultural heritages are, as we are often told, intellectually immature or primitive. There are rich metaphors in both of these myths, and both offer complex and sometimes challenging notions of the meaning and worth of an individual human life.