Re: Vulcan-Thor, vats der difference?

During the entirety of your post, you never made it clear why you think the ancients didn't believe that Thor was a protector of the common man/the lower classes. You simply went into a lengthy diatribe of discussing sources and claiming that the myriad individuals who have said that Thor was a god of the working class were all wrong because they were throwing "modern interpretations" on these entities. You then claimed that what you consider to be legitimate historians would all disagree with this. Since you failed to show any evidence of that one must be forced to conclude that you simply don't believe that Thor was ever a valid representative of the working class, therefore you deny the frequent claims from many authors and experts on Norse mythology that have all said the same thing about the deity.

Of course, you try to deny Freya Aswynn's statements by pointing out that she has worked in magick and gotten published by Llewellyn, therefore she must by necessity be faulty as a historian. But that is an atheistic bias...Aswynn has studied real history and the fact that she practices a system that your belief system insists must not be true doesn't necessarily mean that everything she says is total bunk. Guerber didn't practice magick and she essentially said the same thing that Aswynn did. Why do you assume that those who are strictly historians would disagree with this?

Determining what the ancients thought about their deities certainly isn't foolproof today, but it's well known that the lower classes, despite seeing the imutability of their lot in life, nevertheless had a strong sense of their position in the world. The fact that worship of Thor was so widespread and popular (and this is well known historically) and the fact that the lower classes made up the vast majority of the population makes it clear, from a historical standpoint, that the lower classes had a special affinity for Thor. The deity' was also a god of vegetation, and the peasants were mostly farmers with a strong rapport with the land and the elements (such as rain) that helped sustain their livlihood. This makes it clear that the peasants and lower classes, who tilled the land, had a strong rapport with Thor. I'm not saying that Thor represented revolution to those people, but from a modern standpoint, he can be interpreted that way. We have entered an era where it's now technologically possible to move beyond a class-divided society, and as such Thor has developed a special meaning to the working class of today. Interpretations do change as history moves on, this doesn't mean that all modern interpretations of what ancient societies thought were wrong. Interpretations do and must change as society moves on. The ancient Norse clearly didn't see Thor as a deity that would emancipate them from their lot in life while still alive, but he did hold out the promise of someday making them equal after death. The idea that we might achieve these things while still alive is indeed more modern, but that doesn't invalidate the interpreation of Thor as representing the interests of the lower classes in society. It's quite logical for a revolutionary political party to seize upon Thor's symbol--his hammer--as a symbol for revolution. You basically spent this entire thread overthinking things.

Now, as for whether or not the arm and hammer of the SLP symbol is actually Thor or Vulcan...as I pointed out with the pic I provided a link to, the conception of Thor with his raised hammer is an old one in artwork, and this clearly makes the interpretation of a raised arm with a hammer a valid image of Thor. As Baldy pointed out (somewhat sarcastically), Vulcan may have been a worker in a strict sense but he wasn't a protector of the lower classes of the time and the lower classes of ancient Rome didn't have a special affinity with him. He simply forged weapons for the gods. But Thor was directly connected to the livlihood of the lower classes; artisans and weaponmakers had a more advanced status in those ancient sociieties than did farmers and simple land-workers. Hence, it's not outright "wrong" to see Thor's hammer as being that upraised symbol of the workers, and Aswynn was correct to point it out as the particular symbol that socialists use.