In Ep. 35 we let the cat outta the bag, and Hansel gets a lesson in the missionary position
Part 1 [08:28] - In which we let the cat out of the bag, give her a nice old Nordic name, and before you know it, hooray, it’s Friday!
Part 2 [33:27] - In which we discuss the missionary position on Easter Sunday, and discover a funky medieval connection between pewter dishes and the genius behind Blade Runner
⚠️ Warning! ⚠️
To avoid danger of suffocation, keep this podcast away from babies and children.
Do not listen to this podcast in cribs, beds, carriages or playpens.
This podcast is not a toy.
and, uh, oh yeah… it’s got sharp edges too!
[oh boy, people are gonna really hate this episode. oh man, that's tough. alright.]
🎶 🔔 ding dong 🎶 🔔
[Noyes is next]
📻 Italian radio 📻
[This is Noyes]
⚡️ ⚡️ ⚡️
📻 more Italian radio 📻
[sound of a turntable scratch]
[what the hell is this???]
[this is a Purple Line Express to downtown]
[No. It's not.]
🎶 🎹 dramatic organ music 🎹 🎶
🎶 🔔 deep church bell 🔔 🎶
Bless me Fader, for I have sinned... it’s been about 6 weeks since my last episode...
[what are you doing here?]
I wonder if I should be asking you the same question, um, fader...???
🎶 ANACHRONIST 🎶
Hi there, and welcome back to the Hansel and Gretel Code... This here is Episode 35...
[who’s going to listen to this?]
[I like it!]
[this presentation sponsored by]
🎶 singing inside San Pietro 🎶
[Roma!]
In our last episode:
we learned that Hansel’s intermittent stopping to look back towards the Holzhacker house and home was a ruse so he could drop those little white pebbles, which are, of course, the precursors to the famous trail of breadcrumbs...
[of course]
we also realized that looking back was a figure of speech, consistent with the idea of homesickness... after all, Hansel WAS looking back at the home he might never see again...
[aww]
digging into that simple figure of speech, we came across the word: Sehnsucht... a word whose complex meaning showed us that Hansel’s looking back is something more cosmic and mystical than any simple case of nostalgia or homesickness...
and that’s because Sehnsucht is a longing for Henosis... a return to the One... which is to say a return to Wholeness...
since we already know that Henosis is an underlying theme of the entire fairytale, that means the House and Home of the fairytale isn’t just some humble cottage at the edge of a forest... it’s the House of the Father... the Gnostic Source from which the Soul has been separated and to which it longs to return...
then again, Sehnsucht isn’t just a LONGING for Henosis... it’s also a very brief taste of the real thing... kinda like a brief whiff of lilacs, or the scent of fresh cut grass... an immense, but ephemeral joy...
[fascinating!]
Henosis isn’t some heretical religious abstraction... it’s an experience we’re entitled to in this lifetime...
and speaking of heresy... while Hansel’s creator — the author of our fairytale was raised as a Christian — that doesn’t mean Hansel is Christian... even as I said in Episode 32, the Grimm’s chose to baptize him as a Calvinist...
[yes, I know]
Hansel represents Intuition... Pure and Simple...
and contrary to New Age propaganda... Intuition isn’t some woo, woo talent for knowing which lottery numbers to pick...
[why the fuck not?]
Intuition is our innate ability to know and discern Truth... that is to say, the true meaning of things... maybe especially the sort of thing known as a religious experience...
😇 🎶 angelic choir 🎶 😇
Intuition is the kind of knowledge that comes before or outside of any explanation — dogmatic or otherwise... and that kind of knowing is what’s meant by Gnosis...
hell, it’s even what’s really meant by Faith... Faith in your own experience of Truth...
except Faith is a word that has been co-opted and twisted into all sorts of tools and weapons to suit the aims of all sorts of people who seem to have lost contact with their own Intuition... their own innate ability to know Truth...
and that message, my dear listener, is the very reason this fairytale was created... a claim which I promise, I will be able to prove to you...
[I sure hope so]
and speaking of promises... in Episode 34, I said:
just as many medieval Christians saw their religion corrupted by the greed and simony of the Vatican... and for that reason longed to return to that Old-Time Religion... so many of them even doing so — by embracing the poverty and lifestyle of the apostles...
Hansel’s looking back represents the longing of the entire Germanic people for their Old-Time Religion... meaning, a return to their Intuitive, pre-syncretic roots... to the pre-christian ways of their ancestors... to the talismans of a culture that supported their innate Gnosis and experience of Truth...
[wow!]
a culture that modern academics — or at least Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica — call: Germanic Paganism...
[ugh, well then!]
I promised I was going to prove that in the next couple of lines of the fairytale... in order to make good on that promise — and find the Truth of the matter — we have to go back to Hansel’s little white lie...
remember when we last left him, Hansel was telling his father a fib about a non-existent white cat sitting up there on the roof of the family house...
[I remember]
in the course of my research, I found out that Hansel’s little fib was no fib at all...
when he said: “oh, I’m looking back at my little white cat who wants to say goodbye to me,” the Truth of the matter, as William Carlos Williams might have said: depends upon a little white cat sitting up there in the catbird seat...
turns out, the cat was — and still is — alive and well, and the real fucking deal...
[Welcome aboard the nuclear vacation class submarine. I’m Katz. Captain Katz.]
*🎶*🎶*
PART ONE [08:28]
Teil eins:
In which we let the cat out of the bag, give her a nice old Nordic name, and before you know it, hooray, it’s Friday!
[Welcome to Club Katz. I'm Katz, your host.]
[oh boy, oh boy]
before we do, indeed, let the cat out of the bag, let’s take another listen to the last couple of lines of the fairytale:
Der Vater sagte: was bleibst du immer stehn und guckst zurück; ach, antwortete das Brüderchen, ich seh nach meinem weißen Kätzchen, das sitzt auf dem Dach und will mir Ade sagen heimlich ließ es aber immer einen von den weißen Kieselsteinchen fallen.
The father said: what do you keep dawdling and looking back at? "Oh," answered the little brother, "I'm looking at my little white cat who's sitting on the roof and wants to say goodbye to me." Secretly, however, he would always let one of the little white pebbles fall.
[clever]
so let’s start by unpacking the symbolism of that little white kitty cat...
[meow]
remember from Episode 34, I was going crazy trying to find the real meaning of a white cat...
[no!]
yeah well, lo and behold, unsourced, copy and paste websites can sometimes prove helpful... even when they leave it all up to the reader to find references that might (or might not) back up the veracity of their plagiarism, er I mean statements...
[OOH!]
hey, whaddya call it when you find the same factoids and innuendo plastered all across the internet...? and I do mean plastered... word for word — typos and all...
[it’s just business. everything is just business with us.]
[oh! well it looks like crap!]
over 10 years ago, when I was in the throes of kitty cat research, I came upon some blog post with the intriguing title of: The Trials Of Cats In Medieval Times...
the original article has since disappeared, but there were 2 unsourced sentences in particular that grabbed my attention:
”Up until Medieval times, the cat had been elevated to a high status. She was even worshipped in some places, like the German states, where cats were associated with Freya the goddess of love and fertility.”
[yeah, so what?]
Of course the mention of German states and some goddess I wasn’t at all familiar with sounded promising...
Turns out, there are reputable sources citing the worship of cats in ancient Egypt, but I gotta say, extending that same fancy factoid to include “the German states” was stretching the truth into pure internet hyperbole...
[hyperbole, hyperbole, hyperbole, hyperbole]
[ahem]
well, at least the mention of Freya turned out to be a solid lead... because, sure enough, the Wikipedia article on Freyja said:
"...(she) rides a chariot driven by two cats...."
[hmm... I'll believe that when I see it]
the primary source of that assertion was easy enough to find in Norse mythology... specifically, in Chapter 24 of the Gylfaginning (The Beguiling of Gylfi) of the 13th century Prose Edda, where, sure enough, it says (in translation):
"When she goes abroad, she drives in a car drawn by two cats."
[ 🏎 ]
[ 😾 😾 ]
[oh brother]
well, that sure don’t explain Hansel's white cat... I mean: 2 cats strong enough to pull a chariot doesn’t tell us much... especially when nobody bothers to mention what color they are... no, no... the real revelation connecting Freya to Hansel and Gretel — and specifically to Hansel — is the concept of Seid or Seiðr:
[whaaat?]
according to Wikipedia, Seiðr:
"...is an Old Norse term for a type of sorcery or witchcraft practiced by the pre-Christian Norse."
In other words: Seiðr: is an Intuitive practice very much like Theurgy... and so it turns out that Freya might as well be the Germanic equivalent of Hermes Trismegistus...!
[hip hip hooray! hip hip hooray! hip hip hooray!]
there are plenty of sources in the Nordic literature confirming this... for example: in the Heimskringla, Freyja appears as a member of the Vanir, and she teaches the magic and divination of Seiðr to the Aesir...
[ooh]
and wait, there’s more:
in the Ynglinga saga it says that Freyja was an adept of the mysteries of Seiðr, and it was she who taught it to Odin...
[oh wow, man!]
yeah, that's right, except right off the bat we’ve got a problem...
[hmm, what’s that?]
all of a sudden we’re looking at the tip of an Icelandic iceberg...
[huh?]
I mean:
- Freya
- Vanir
- Aesir
- Odin
- Heimskringla
- Ynglinga
[OOH! FUGGEDABOUDIT!]
Norse Mythology — which is the proper source of all information about Freyja — is a ginormous conglomeration of complicated names and relationships and activities and personalities of all sorts of gods and goddesses and elves and what have you’s way too numerous to mention...
[FUGGEDABOUDIT!]
so I gotta admit, I personally have always found Norse and Celtic mythology much too busy to hold my interest...
[uuh, excuse you]
that said, some of it is way too important to the story of Hansel and Gretel for us to ignore...
fact is, the Grimms were not only hip to ALL of it, Jacob Grimm wrote a ginormous and authoritative text on the subject... he called it Deutsche Mythologie...
[ja, ja, it’s okay]
well, in translation it’s called Teutonic Mythology — and it runs to 4 volumes and thousands of pages... although even with all of the references and footnotes, it’s more reader friendly than you might otherwise think...
[okee dokee]
as far as the original Nordic material goes... whether or not it’s the kind of stuff that floats your boat, you and I are gonna make a detour around the great bulk of it...
[that sounds fine]
there is, however, one story we can’t ignore:
[what’s that?]
The 13th century Saga of Eric the Red...
[alright]
the story goes that around the year 1000, the settlers in Greenland were, just like our Holzhackers, suffering a time of starvation. So, what did they do? Unlike the Holzhackers, they didn’t send their kids out into the forest to die —
and that’s not just because there are practically no trees in the whole joint... in fact, a musician friend once told me he played a gig at an air force base in Greenland, and apparently the standing joke among the servicemen was: there’s a girl behind every tree...
[dad joke groans]
anyway, the starving Viking settlers didn’t try to get rid of their kids, they called for help from a Seiðr practitioner whose name was Thorbjorg...
***Þórbjörgr lítilvölva (the little völva Thorbjorg i.e. "protected by Thor")
In chapter 4 of that story it says that Thorbjorg arrived wearing a blue coat, and:
"On her head she had a black hood of lambskin, lined with ermine. On her hands she had gloves of ermine skin, and they were white and hairy within."
so... blah, blah, blah, blah, white gloves, blah, blah, ermine, blah, blah, blah...
sounds pretty useless and off the mark, right...?
[indeed]
yup... what could a black hoodie lined with ermine have to do with Hansel’s little white cat...?
[uuhh, I don’t know]
well turns out... I was quoting from an 1880 translation by Rev. John Sephton, Headmaster of the Liverpool Collegiate School...
[oh my]
now I coulda taken his word for it, and left this as a dead end, but my Intuition said I’d better double check...
📚🤓 Nerd Alert
On her head she had a black hood of lambskin, lined with ermine. Hon hafði á hálsi sér glertölur, lambskinnskofra svartan á höfði ok við innan kattarskinn hvít. On her hands she had gloves of ermine-skin, and they were white and hairy within. Hon hafði á höndum sér kattskinnsglófa, ok váru hvítir innan ok loðnir.
(The specific translation is given as: 1880, English, transl. J. Sephton, from the original 'Eiríks saga rauða')
***
so, once again, thanks to the Internet, I was able to find the original Icelandic text without having to schlep to a university library where I may or may not have found what I was looking for...
[you sure do have your problems]
given that text — and a little help from Google translate — I found it more or less obvious that the good Reverend Sephton was playing fast and loose with his description of Icelandic couture... because 2 words popped right out of that text and —as Dino sang — they hit my eye like a bigga pizza pie...
and those 2 words were:
[that’s amore?]
um, no...
the first word was lambskinnskofra... which pretty clearly jibes with Thorbjorg’s lambskin hoodie, except that hoodie seems to be a skofra or a scarf...
[oh, thank you captain obvious]
yeah I get it... scarf... hoodie... that’s not the point... but that word, lambskinnskofra... that was like a little flag in Google maps... it showed me I was in the right place...
and in that right place, I saw the second word... and that sure hit the bullseye... because that second word was:
[spaghetti]
uh, no...
it was kattarskin...
[what?]
well, turns out, Thorbjorg’s scarf... it wasn’t lined with ermine... it was lined with: kattarskin hvit — white catskin...
[sound of group shocked]
yeah, it’s catskin alright...
[ 🙀 ]
[yikes!]
and it’s the same story with her gloves: her kattskinnsglófa...
[ 😾 😿 ]
they were WHITE and furry inside...
[holy shit! ha, ha, ha]
📚🤓 Nerd Alert
p. 33 of the Reeves Translation bears this out, and is, BTW an interesting and entertaining read:
***
and just to put a cherry on top of this, it seems that once she got there, Thorbjorg climbed up on a scaffold and took a seat above the crowd in order to begin her Intuitive doings...
apparently, this high seat business — otherwise known as a Hliðskjálf — was an integral part of the Seiðr process...
so now we not only have solid grounds for seeing Hansel’s white cat as a symbol for Freya and the practice of Seiðr... we find the symbolism reinforced by having this cat sit high up on the roof...
[but that’s not all]
uh, right... having this cat high up on the roof is also an allusion to the goddess Frigg...
[who’s this?]
well, apparently, she’s Odin’s wife... and Wikipedia says:
"She is described as having the power of prophecy and is also described as the only one other than Odin who is permitted to sit on his high seat (Hliðskjálf) and look out over the universe."
Frigg is especially worth mentioning because not everyone is sure that she and Freya are 2 separate goddesses... (much the same way not everyone is sure Hansel’s step-mother and the witch are 2 separate villains...)
[I'm thinking this is a double duality]
[yes, you're getting two for the price of one]
[ahem]
the important takeaway from all this is that it’s not just Freya and Frigg, and the intuitive practice of Seiðr that’s symbolized by Hansel’s little white cat... we’ve got the whole kit and kaboodle of Norse, Germanic, Teutonic and even Celtic mythology sitting up there on the roof of casa Holzhacker...
[interesting]
knowing this now proves that Hansel’s looking back in the direction of Home is Intuition looking back towards all the old Germanic gods and goddesses and sensing Truth in them...
it shows us that Hansel’s longing or Sehnsucht is for Henosis via this older, more intuitive / chthonic religion of Germany and all Germanic people north of the Alps...
it also tells us that dropping those little white moon stones — which have to be symbolic of Runes — symbolizes the magical / divinatory practice of Seiðr... which in turn is the ancient Norse and Germanic equivalent of Hermeticism and theurgy.
[can you believe that?]
now there’s even more to say about the symbolism of Hansel’s Moon Rocks, and Runes, but it’s time for us to move along...
[and finally!]
if you’re interested, there’s a terrific set of articles on Runes you can read for yourself... it’s in a well-researched and nicely referenced website called Norse Mythology for Smart People...
I’ll leave a link...
[thank you]
and I gotta say, this Norse website is so well organized, researched and written, I suspect its erudite author must be an Intuitive Thinking Type... the very Typology I’m envious of because it makes for excellent writers...
I do have a nagging suspicion though, that he, like so many of us with a dominant Intuitive function, had his Intuition banished to the forest of the Unconscious by the demands of the Culture...
[that's not good]
but I also get the sense that he’s not gonna give up and let it get eaten by the witch...
[Roger that]
in any case, because of the excellence of that website, I just might find myself boning up on Norse Mythology after all...
[Hail Ragnar! Hail Ragnar! Hail Ragnar!]
Before we, uh, finally, uh, move along, there’s an interesting synchronicity in Seiðr that takes us right back to episode 30 and one of the historical models for Hansel… a guy who was also a model for that entertaining medieval magus, Dr. Johann Faustus…
[what are you talking about?]
Hey I’m talking about the Intuitive polymath, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, whose life story demonstrates the important fact that contrary to popular opinion, Intuition is NOT a gender specific trait...
[you are hormonally confused]
OOH! thinking of Intuition as a specifically female, feminine, or even effeminate trait is an irrational myth that somehow became engrained in Western European Culture, and persists to this very day...
it’s a cultural blindspot, to be sure... but the real problem is that due to the canonization and worship of Science and Technology, Intuition has been correspondingly damned by our culture...
instead of being seen and treated as the equal partner it is in creative intelligence, academics assume it’s inferior to Logic, and label it as Illogical, Irrational, and otherwise flaky as shit...
stuff that nobody wants to be called...
[you got THAT right]
and of course, since Intuition is also assumed to be a feminine trait, we’re all unconsciously (even in some cases, consciously and deliberately) forced to inhabit the inane headspace of thinking and acting as if women were naturally Illogical, Irrational and, flaky as shit...
[excuse me?]
in other words, these mistaken beliefs about Intuition are the source of our culturally sanctioned assumption that women are inferior to men...
[WTF?!?]
a mindless cultural atrocity that the Feminist and Intuitive Agrippa vehemently opposed in his famous Declamation on the Excellence of Women and Their Superiority Over Men...
[WTF?!?]
so, did I say there is no innate connection between Intuition and Gender... ???
[what are you thinking?]
well, call me woke, but we now know that the practice of Seiðr is, just like Hermeticism, a practice of Intuition... And Hansel’s dropping stones is symbolic of practicing Runes, meaning he is practicing Seiðr... and so he, just like Agrippa, is another male practitioner of the Intuitive arts...
so where in hell did this myth of gender specificity originate...?
[good question]
well in looking for white kitty cats North of the Alps, and especially East of the Rhein, we may have discovered the source of the myth...
[oh really?]
The wiki article on Seiðr says:
"Freyja and perhaps some of the other goddesses of Norse mythology were Seiðr practitioners, as was Odin, a fact for which he is taunted by Loki in the Lokasenna."
"In the Viking Age, the practice of Seiðr by men had connotations of ‘unmanliness’ known as ergi...."
[sound of a belch]
[please, don't do that]
there’s an anemic article on ergi in Wikipedia, but there are plenty of academic papers making it clear that ergi was both a gay slur and an accusation of cowardice...
they also make it clear that Seiðr was considered appropriate only for women... so that a man practicing Seiðr was considered both cowardly and effeminate...
the idea of overcoming your enemies or rivals by way of magic was problematic only because it meant you didn’t have to put yourself in harm’s way... so as a guy in a warrior culture, you’d not only lose face for not spittin’ chicklets, but unless you died in battle, there was no Valhalla for you...
[this is relevant to my interests]
📚🤓 Alert
These 3 papers explain this business of ergi / unmanliness associated with the practice of Seiðr:
Dirty Magic: Seiðr, Science, and the Parturating Man in Medieval Norse and Welsh Literature (Sarah Lynn Higley)
Nið, ergi and Old Norse Moral Attitudes (Folke Ström - lecture of May 10, 1973)
Manning the High Seat: Seiðr as Self-Making in Contemporary Norse Neopaganisms (Megan Goodwin)
***
somehow, this aspect of the pre-christian warrior mentality got codified in our unwritten rules of behavior... that is, the John Wayne School of Western European Culture, where real men would rather fight than fuck...
which is awfully peculiar since we moderns don’t seem to mind the idea of men as wizards or sorcerers with magic potions and silly pointy hats, and of course, Harry Potter with uh, whatever...
[Pilgrim, somebody oughta belt you in the mouth, but I won’t. I won’t. The hell I won’t]
[oh boy]
there’s also the fact that the Druids, who were, in essence, wiped out by the combined force of Roman conquest and Christianization, were well respected as practitioners of the Intuitive arts and neither predominantly one gender or the other...
but I can understand the disconnect... because our culture simply doesn’t understand Intuition... and it certainly doesn’t realize that the sort of flamboyant, un-scientific magic associated with wizards and witches is a theatrical characterization of true Intuitive practice...
and to go one final step further, isn’t it ironic that the Catholic priesthood... which specifically forbids the inclusion of women among its ranks, is an institution whose members engage in the Intuitive, Hermetic practice of theurgy on a daily basis...
[what?]
hey, if you want to know exactly what I mean by that, drop me a line, okay...
[I don’t think so]
[OOH!!!]
🎶 DUALITY 🎶
PART TWO [33:21]
Teil zwei:
In which we discuss the missionary position on Easter Sunday, and discover a funky medieval connection between pewter dishes and the genius behind Blade Runner
[it's all complicated]
so what about that business of Hansel’s little fib that I said wasn’t a fib after all...
[yeah sure, what about it?]
well, I’ve got a confession to make...
he wasn’t fibbing... I was...
[oh!]
Hansel wasn’t fibbing, he was lying through his teeth...
[dude, WTF!]
except he wasn’t lying about seeing his cat up there on the roof...
we’ve just learned that his little white cat was anything but some figment of his imagination...
the truth of the matter, um, lies, um, elsewhere — as we shall soon see...
so let’s listen to the next line of the fairytale and see what we can see...
[alright, if you insist]
Die Mutter sprach: geh nur fort, es ist dein Kätzchen nicht, es ist das Morgenroth, das auf den Schornstein scheint.
"The mother said: 'Get moving! That's not your little cat. That's the sunrise reflecting off the chimney.'"
she’s not exactly calling Hansel a liar, but it’s obvious she’s not seeing the same thing that Hansel is seeing
[true, that]
remember: his little white cat represents the dual goddess Freya / Frigg, and is symbolic of Seiðr, not to mention the entirety of pre-christian Germanic / Norse religion...
in order to figure out what he’s lying about we’ve gotta ask: were those gods and goddesses really saying goodbye to him...? or was HE the one saying goodbye to them?
[I don't know, mate]
well, this line of the fairytale doesn’t answer that question... but the next line sure as hell does:
Aber der Knabe blickte immer noch zurück, und immer ließ er wieder ein Steinchen fallen.
"But the young boy kept looking back, and always let another little stone fall."
so what does that tell us...?
[I'don't know (giggle)]
it says Hansel kept looking back at the old gods and goddesses, and he continued to practice his Runes...
Hansel was secretly keeping the old, intuitive traditions alive, and by doing so, he was keeping the old deities alive...
the truth here is that Freya never said goodbye to him... but more importantly, he never said goodbye to Freya...
he only pretended to... and THAT’s what his big lie is all about...
[I don’t get it]
let me explain:
see, in contradicting Hansel, the mother is telling him, in effect: "That’s not your goddess, Freya...! that’s something else..."
and she’s calling that something else: das Morgenroth
[huh?]
mythopoetically, Morgenroth means the Homeric rosy fingers of dawn...
in Greek mythology those red, rosy fingers belonged to the goddess Eos...
in Roman mythology the same goddess was known as Aurora...
[so what?]
so, why would the mother say: that’s not Freya, that’s Eos, or Aurora...???
[I don’t know!]
well, you know what... neither did I...
[oh, well that’s nice]
hmmph...
well, it turns out that among the Germanic tribes, the goddess of dawn was known as Ostara or Ēostre...
and THAT’s what makes this line of the fairytale very special... because once we get beyond the literal meaning of sunlight reflecting off a chimney... we catch it’s symbolic meaning... and that meaning resonates like crazy with the very essence of syncretism:
you know: allowing a traditional pagan ritual or belief, or even a name to remain intact, but giving it a Christian meaning...
[how do you know that? how do you know that?]
well, according to Jacob Grimm (in translation, of course):
[of course]
"Ostara, Eástre seems...to have been the divinity of the radiant dawn, of upspringing light, a spectacle that brings joy and blessing, whose meaning could be easily adapted by the resurrection-day of the Christian's God." (p. 291 vol. 1)
he also says:
"The great Christian festival... (bears a reminder of) the name ôstarâ. This Ostarâ, like the [Anglo-Saxon] Eástre, must in heathen religion have denoted a higher being, whose worship was so firmly rooted, that the Christian teachers tolerated the name, and applied it to one of their own grandest anniversaries." (p. 290 vol. 1)
[waaait a second]
and so there we have it...
metaphorically, these lines are like a catechism class, with her correcting Hansel... teaching him that he’s not seeing Freya, or Frigg, or even the goddess Ēostre... sure he can keep using that name (hey, how do you think we got the name Friday?)... but what she’s so impatiently saying is:
"boy, that’s not some old pagan biatch up there on the roof... that’s the shiny new god you promised to worship when we baptized you... that’s Easter Fucking Sunday up there...!!"
[oh, and I suppose you think that's funny, huh?]
so in these lines, Frau Holzhacker is acting out the business of syncretism... which we’ve already come across, and considering how it played out in Episode 15 it might as well be called the missionary position...
[oh God! oh Jesus!]
then again, it’s also known by the academic appellation of Interpretatio christiana... the syncretic double-talk of those Vatican missionaries who co-opted the rites and rituals of the Germanic people, and were, in effect, gaslighting them... er, I mean, bringing them into the loving arms of Christianity, and thus, saving their immortal souls...
[heh, heh, heh, heh...that's fucking not funny]
remember in Episode 3 we found the story of Boniface and how he converted the Pagan Germans to Christianity...
[I remember]
by chopping down a tree these Germanic ancestors considered sacred — and not being struck dead by Thor — Boniface figured he had successfully proven to them that their gods were a powerless figment of their imagination... and HIS God, was the one with all the power...
[amen!]
except the evidence may have convinced their eyes, it didn’t convince their Hearts, or their Intuition...
and in these new lines of the fairytale, Hansel represents those converted and baptized Germans who may have agreed to worship the Christian God but who, in their heart of hearts, were, like Hansel, lying through their teeth when, as often happened, they were forced on pain of death to actively renounce their old gods and goddesses...
you might want to read more about the history of Germanic Christianization in Wikipedia... with medieval bigwigs like Charlemagne and good King Clovis forcing Christianity down the throats of their subjects for political reasons, er I mean, you know, for the sake of saving their immortal souls...
[that's uh, not funny]
there are an awful lot of ugly facts and factoids that the good and pious nuns of my grammar school, not to mention the academically minded Jesuits involved in my higher education um, neglected to mention...
[that is so... that is so funny]
I personally spent plenty of time fascinated by this material — and of course, I wanted to share it with you, but time’s a wastin’...
before we move on though, it’s time for a word from our sponsor:
[lollipop]
[thank you]
All of this syncretism business is really important... that is to say important enough for our author to have made it sneaky obvious to our Intuition...
and make no mistake, this fairytale is an alchemical effort to wake up our Intuition and help us to reclaim it after millennia in which its repression and suppression became part of the culture...
in fact, it was written specifically to put an important philosophical text aimed at waking up our Intuition into story form so that the message of that text would speak directly to our Hearts and our Intuition without us ever having to read it...
[are you kidding me?!?]
mmm, nope!
so in the spirit of Freya and Seiðr, and of course, using our Intuition, there’s a very important something else glinting off Frau Holzhacker’s chimney... but it’s only visible if we come at it from yet another symbolic / Intuitive angle...
we’ve just seen how Morgenrothe is a mythopoetic way of referring to the dawn, the Greek goddess Eos, the Germanic goddess Eostre, and even the Roman goddess Aurora...
[who cares?]
well, it just so happens that Aurora is the title of an extremely influential book written by the 17th century German shoemaker and mystic, Jacob Böhme...
[what did you say that was called?]
it’s called: Aurora: Die Morgenröte im Aufgang
[ja, ja, it’s okay]
and I say it’s influential, because ever since its 1612 publication, it has continued to inspire a whole host of people — including our fairytale author...
and so not only was his book referenced in Frau Holzhacker’s impatient correction of Hansel... so too was Böhme’s personal story...
Böhme is important to this fairytale because he found Henosis in his own lifetime... and THAT is what marks someone as a so-called mystic, and what’s really meant by the phenomenon otherwise known as enlightenment...
not to be confused with the historic era known as The Enlightenment — which, btw is pretty fucking important to this fairytale...
[is that so?]
according to his biographer, Abraham von Franckenberg, in the year 1600, Böhme was
in other words, he was gobsmacked and godsmacked by a beam of morning sunlight reflecting off a pewter dish... a beam of sunlight that sparked his Intuition and gave him both Henosis and Gnosis... a steadfast knowledge of Truth that all theurgists as well as people of all religions would die for...
[oh yeah]
and in the context of this line of the fairytale, it needs to be said that Böhme was a very devout christian — after all, a good millennium had passed since christianization in the lands north of the Alps and south of the North and Baltic Seas had been completed... time in which talk of those ancient Germanic gods and goddesses had passed from religious observation to something more a matter of literary and cultural significance...
[Hmm, I see]
[all I can see is the end]
well, yes, we’re just about there for this episode, but speaking of literary matters... in learning about Jacob Böhme I was reminded of the wild personal story of Philip K. Dick the sci-fi author, who, in almost the exact same manner as Böhme, found himself psychologically, if not spiritually, transformed by a momentary flash of reflected sunlight... the story was related by Dick in a collection of interviews published as Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament by Gregg Rickman...
it’s not an easy book to get hold of, but R. Crumb published an amazing illustrated version of the story that’s available on archive.org, and is well worth your time...
I’ll leave a link…
[fine!]
[what’s next?]
In our next episode:
we reach the middle of the forest, we build a campfire of biblical proportion, and we fast forward through so many lines of the fairytale we eventually discover exactly why it is that Gretel spends so much of her fairytale time doing almost nothing but crying...
[aww]
and believe me, it’s a fascinating fucking reason...
[hyperbole, hyperbole, hyperbole]
so, I’m not gonna ask you to go to my buy me a ko-fi page, and uh, you know... uh buy me a ko-fi...
[don't go there]
and I’m not gonna beg you to rate, review, and share the podcast...
I’ll let someone else do that for me...
[please! PLEASE! please! please!]
[ahem]
alrighty then, ciao a tutti...!
[this is as far as this train goes. all passengers must leave the train. thank you for riding the CTA Purple Line]
[goodbye]
got a question, or just want to say hi...?
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
*Chapter Titles read by Anna Jacobsen*
*Original German Fairytale Reading by Jürgen Lexow*
Music Credits:
*🎶*🎶* Bleeping Demo by Kevin MacLeod of filmmusic.io
🎶 Anachronist 🎶 by Kevin MacLeod and licensed under filmmusic.io/standard-license
🎶 Duality 🎶 Hypnotic Minimalist Instrumental by Kjartan Abel, and courtesy of freesound.org
Visit kjartan-abel.com/library to find free music for your next project.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
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@08:13 "Captain Katz" - Katz
PART ONE / Teil eins @08:28
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@33:25 “OOOH!!!” - Johnny Vincente
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@41:12 "I remember" - the head of Nostradamus
@41:41 "amen!" courtesy of bectec and freesound.org
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