Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen: Ragnarok & The Collapse Of The Ordered World
Channel: Last Born in the Wilderness Podcast
Date: 2019-09-25

This is a segment of episode #210 “Ragnarok!: Climate Cataclysm, Animism, & The Mythic Past w/ Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen.” Listen to the full episode: http://bit.ly/LBWrasmussen

Read ‘RAGNAROK IS COMING! Nordic Scholars: Ancient Viking prophecy speaks to our time.’ published originally in the Danish newspaper Politiken: http://bit.ly/2mfFEaM

The artwork featured is by Louis Moe: http://bit.ly/2lYW8nt

In this segment of my interview with creator of the Nordic Animist Calendar and Historian of Religion Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen, Rune describes how the animist worldview integrates human community with the grander cycles of the cosmos and seasons of the Earth through ritual and story, serving as a sort of technology that integrates human life with the broader communities of life on the planet through spiritual practice. Of particular concern to Rune is how the animist worldview and mythologies can inform our understanding of the contemporary environmental and climate crises unfolding on the planet right now. Rune uses the myth of Ragnarok — a sort of end-of-days apocalyptic vision involving environmental cataclysm and war famously depicted in the Old Norse poem Völuspá — as a means of comprehending and reframing the unfolding ecological, cultural, spiritual crises in our troubled times. (http://bit.ly/2mfFEaM) How can myth, and in particular the animist worldview, help us to not only reframe these current crises, but provide the tools required to build connection and deeper relationship to the land, community, and the living systems of the planet? 

Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen is a Danish historian of religion educated from the Universities of Copenhagen and Uppsala, with his research mainly focused on Afro-Atlantic polytheisms such as the Afro-Brazilian Orisha religion. Rune has engaged in a diverse set of fieldwork with a number of contemporary (primarily Afro-descendant) religions, with Nordic religion as a strong field of interest as well. Today Rune applies contemporary developments in anthropology to rethink the way we address Nordic religion both in terms of scholarship, but also as a reservoir of cultural knowledge for environmental activism and sustainability sensitization.

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