Creation, Wisdom, Order
After the thunder of Thor
grounds the destructive force of the lightning, the rain that falls
along with it fertilizes the fields. So too does Ansuz follow
Thuriaz. All experience is a lesson, when seen correctly, and all
can be use for growth and inspiration. From his suffering, Odin
gained wisdom. If Thuriaz is chaos, destruction, and fear, Ansuz is
orderly, creative, wisdom. In spite of being orderly, it is not
always simple. Even well organized systems may be extremely detailed
and complicated. Just consider Celtic knotwork!
Consider, even, the complexity
of a good speech. First, a being must be complex enough TO speak –
something bacteria, for example, or even human babies, cannot do. The
speech, on top of this, needs to be well organized, with wisdom in
its ideas, and well chosen words, in order to be effective. Even the
simple act of uttering a sentence begins with an invisible thing, a
thought, something which cannot have its existence proven, beyond
which chemicals are attached to it and where it fires. Is dopamine
itself a thought? Is the thought based on where it is? Would it fire
in the same place in everyone who tries ice cream, enjoys it, and is
then made to remember the experience? Perhaps, perhaps not. We have
no proof of the content of thoughts, external to the mind of the
thinker. Such is the difficulty in treating those in comas, as well.
All we have are chemicals and ionic charges, surging and flowing.
We take this invisible thing and
give it form, in tangible, measurable soundwaves, with detectable
physical vibrations in the objective world, recordable, provable, but
still carrying the unobservable, hidden, and unknowable. No wonder we
miscommunicate, when we rely solely on sharing invisible ideas across
a medium which must be learned through itself.
We hear too often what we want
to hear, and only learn language as it is passed on – by parents or
guardians, teachers (in our native tongue, and in other languages),
friends, business associates... directly or through observation,
language IS system, and tradition, and order. Without this system,
one cannot even communicate ideas of anarchy! (How dangerous
extremism can be, if one thinks this far into it!)
While sometimes organization and
tradition fail us, this merely means we passed down the wrong
lessons. They must be periodically revised when needed, and other
times kept. Traditionalists don't like new ideas, revolutionaries
don't like old ones, and a balance must be kept. Sometimes there are
problems best solved in ways we have solved them before – for all
their flaws, our ancestors were not inferior beings, as we sometimes
like to think. Indeed, we have our own flaws, still. Sometimes, old
systems no longer apply, or must adapt. If we cut and burn all old
knowledge, we may abandon something not needed now, which will be
later. There is, perhaps, no greater historical warning on this than
the burning of the library of Alexandria. The knowledge it contained
may have been scoffed at in those days, but how much we could have
accomplished if we hadn't had to rediscover its ideas, like a
heliocentric universe, all over again! While its treatises on a
geocentric universe were perhaps no great loss, how much else did we
lose when the knowledge of the past was burned indiscriminately!
This is how we received the
wisdom of the Norse gods, as well – through records which were
kept. We also lost many of the oral tales told in halls, and what a
loss! In this way, oral tradition is much like a volva or mystic –
sharing echos down the ages, or of the voices of the gods, filtered
through a living mind. Too often we filter difficult messages, then
become angry when “reality happens” and breaks through anyway, in
spite of not being “invited in.”
There is interdependence between
Ansuz and Thuriaz, wisdom and difficulty. The gods made what they did
from the primal chaos, and chaos and destruction clean the slate for
creation.
So it is.
So it will be.
