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mordant carnival, i hope you were careful about your 51st psalm (or secular equivalent) for banishing sins. i think loki is attracted to guilt (and not just loki).
loki is also attracted to freedom. so if you performed a general uncrossing, you might have left yourself in a sufficiently pathless state that loki (the unconquerable) was left as your only guide. one way to look at it is that loki is so weak he can only influence you when no other god is around. i make a lifestyle out of nonjoining, which even makes it impossible for me to declare myself for loki. in fact i hesitate even to say im firmly in the nonjoining camp. no wonder loki hangs around.
i have something to add from my own ongoing loki experience. my initial contact was brought about by oaths during a ritual with two friends, who came to represent odin and thor for the duration. it was this triune dynamic that allowed loki to ride me and then talk to me. my friend 'odin' is rather more personally willful than i am, and our relationship usually consisted of him dragging me along (willing and bemused) on his crazy schemes. during a later ritual with 'odin', i contacted apollo--although i later decided it was apollo speaking for someone else, maybe zeus or abraxas. since then, my relationship with 'odin' has become more greek. he has become hermes instead of odin--bringing me 'messages' rather than involving me in his schemes. no doubt its significant that i told him to do so. 'youre mercury' i said, and he seemed proud, offering me pictoral proof (which i wont go into). this is a worrying dynamic in itself, but an interesting mythological recapitulation.
i dont think ive read it anywhere, but i learned it from set: the trickster/villain is the deposed king. a king represents his kingdom; his existence depends on it, just as it depends on him. when a king is removed from power, he has nothing to do but try and regain it. this path leads either to villainy--direct attack--or to a more subtle undermining of the ruling order. set mostly goes direct, unfortunate for him since it leaves him very little to do but bogey. a 'pure' trickster like coyote has no interest in rulership. perhaps hes transcended it (he is a dog, after all). loki is somewhere in the middle. his tricks do actually bring down the kingdom, though not the ruling dynasty (similar to sets story). however, loki is largely 'tamed' by the ruler so his chaos benefits order.
since no mythologist has been able to offer convincing evidence of lokis origin, its all up in the air. i think he was a stone age gianttaming fire god, the destructive force that worked for us (i.e. humans)--perhaps the first foray into anthropomorphic deity. through fire, he represents ingenuity as more powerful than muscle, claws, and the elements. he is a kingly figure because fire maintenance is usually an organized group effort (somebody has to sleep). i dont know about lokis status during the vanir days, or if he was imported with the aesir (i think the latter is more likely, making loki an asian god). but in any case, by odins time, fire was not quite as impressive as it once had been. it was still useful, but in wooden towns its a hazard as well as a tool, something nomadic huntergatherers would be less concerned with. so loki remained important, but seemed less impressive than the ability to win battles, so he was subjugated (ya right) to a ruling order of logic and competition.
im glad loki cant be needled, or he might be pissed off by that revelation of his primitive glory. haha.
thanks everyone for pimping the teutons and brining the runes back into my life. i thought i was going to be lost in pythagorean analysis! |
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