>>17844690 (OP)The questions you raise matter because they speak to the cultural schizophrenia which has allowed Empire to reassert itself.
Tacitus’s association of Odin with Mercury is not comparative mythology. It is the Roman imperial semiotic machine attempting to categorize what it could not fully grasp. Mercury (Hermes) was the psychopomp, the trickster, and the messenger, but also the god of commerce. Odin shares the surface but lacks the classical ordering principle. Odin is not Reason. He is the shamanic cunning of a fragmented pantheon. He is associated with sacrifice, but not redemption. With knowledge, but not synthesis. He is the god of the wandering intellect (pre-rational, not supra-rational).
The degeneration of the Classical ideal (the ideal expressed in Zeus as Logos-bearer, in Apollo as harmony, in Athena as wisdom-in-action) allowed the rise of the anti-Renaissance mythos: a romantic, racial, and mystical regression toward tribal totems masquerading as divine insight. The Germanic world, when it produced Kepler, Leibniz, and Bach, was not channeling Odin. It was channeling Plato, Cusa, and Augustine filtered through Christian humanism and natural philosophy. That is what was destroyed by the same British-directed philosophical subversion that replaced Promethean man with Darwinian meat. It is anti-Logos, insofar as it refuses to rejoin the great project of human reason. That project has a name: The Republic.
