The Sacred Flame
The Sacred Flame Podcast explores our ancestral story-worlds: the ancient foundation narratives that helped guide our ancestors in life. In this podcast, we reinvigorate the modern world with those stories and bring us back to a place of balance through an archaic revival, a new force that is sourced from the old, forgotten knowledge that was once transmitted in living stories in sacred settings. We gather by the sacred flame and revive the old ways of creating community in the world; by listening to nature and reestablishing the ties that let us realize that we are connected with everything that exists.Our ancestors knew that cultivating the right relationships with the other-than-human beings in the world is the key to living a good life. In this podcast, I am retelling and reconnecting the Nordic story-world with our current reality and offering my thoughts on how you can use these stories to reflect on what it means to exist in the modern world.
The Sacred Flame
Yggdrasill: The Tree at the Center
In this episode we explore the symbolic meaning of the world tree Yggdrasill in the Nordic story-worlds. We examine the tree in Old Norse stories and relate them to Sámi and Finnish stories. We dig into the sacred meaning-making that lies behind using the tree as an image of the cosmos, world-connectedness, and community. Eventually, we arrive at suggestions to how the image of the tree in the Nordic story-worlds can be meaningful for us today, and how we can change our perception of our world by reflecting critically on how we think about nature in modern societies.
Show notes:
Sand Talk – HarperCollins
The benefits of nature experience: Improved affect and cognition - ScienceDirect
An occasion for unselfing: Beautiful nature leads to prosociality - ScienceDirect
Physiological and cognitive performance of exposure to biophilic indoor environment - ScienceDirect
René Descartes (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
'Mother Trees' Are Intelligent: They Learn and Remember - Scientific American
The Poetic Edda (Oxford World's Classics): Larrington, Carolyne: 9780199675340: Amazon.com: Books