Norse View of Luck

What is luck to you?
Do you believe in luck?

I have enjoyed trying to see from this broad pov of a 4 fold Soul, and this is a good explanation on the way Hamingja operates at a basic level.

The Hammer said:

What is luck to you?
Do you believe in luck?

I have enjoyed trying to see from this broad pov of a 4 fold Soul, and this is a good explanation on the way Hamingja operates at a basic level.

Click to expand...

My Christian perspective.

Luck can be affected by harmful spirits. So if harmful spirits have it in for you for some reason; they can give you bad luck. It's just them making sure bad things happen to you. That's all it is. It's like a curse really. Indeed people can curse you and cause you to have bad luck but you can pray against it to God if that happens. A curse is evil because it opens up the one cursed to demons targeting them. It's human hatred directed towards someone else which gives demons permission to attack them. People think they are powerful when they curse others but really it's just demons and they're an unwitting tool of demons. Because these spirits need human permission to act on humans. That's the rules they must follow. Either you give them permission yourself (wittingly or unwittingly) or someone else gives them permission to target you. (wittingly or unwittingly)

So the scripture teaches don't even let the sun go down on your anger. Also Jesus taught not to even hate someone or you're a murderer in your heart. These demons will use your hatred or anger as permission to target others for harm including in extreme cases killing them. Rather Jesus taught to bless those who curse you and pray for people who mistreat you. That way you overcome evil with good and also the demons can't touch you either.

This is why the old stereotype of vampires and other demonic entities needing permission to come in to people's house exists. This is figuratively how these spirits must operate.

This is why many people who are not Christian will offer blood sacrifices to appease the spirits when they have a run of bad luck. Either they kill a chicken or something. But this is actually not wise because you enter a contract with the spirits through blood by doing so. These spirits are able to then collect on the debt you seemingly owe them later on. As a Christian you don't need to do this. Just pray. It's spiritual warfare. The blood of Jesus Christ is sufficient. More than sufficient.

You can also have seemingly "bad luck" from God sometimes. Just think of Balaam's seemingly very stubborn donkey which was really his best friend and he didn't know it. This was not a curse though. It was just God trying to get his attention and stop him from doing something stupid. So this really is not true bad luck. It simply means you're going the wrong way.

Finally God can place a curse on some wicked people sometimes because they aren't doing right; until they repent. If they don't repent they'll eventually die.

God's favor/blessings are much better than anything.

The Hammer said:

What is luck to you?
Do you believe in luck?

Click to expand...

Randomness, probability and uncertainty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_variable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty

That seems like an interesting channel, that can get thrown into the bookmarks

6:37 : I thought I had read that for both the celts and norse, there was something about the grandparent's right to raise their children's kids. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I had caught that similarity in my reading. So if that is the case, and it is associated with one's luck level, then one might look at the life of their grandparent, to gauge an aspect of the luck they might have. I suppose

So then the association with 'fate' adds great complexity to things, because one would think that luck is antithetical, as a coexisting concept, or quality. It occurs to me, that fate and luck might be a dualism, as this seems to be a sort of universe that frequently involves polar opposites.

In some ways as well, an individual is sort of in the opposite existential quadrant to that of their grandparent, in the sort of double helix of ancestral descent

9:38 : That sounds like it compares well to modern attitudes in a way. I feel like self-defense is pretty criminalized

So what do I think about luck.. Well, I don't know, yet. I think it comes up somewhere in the whole free-will vs. fate vs. determinism discussion, and I have not made many conclusions on that either. I feel like I might have something more substantial to say on that, in like thirty years.

I want luck, I want others to have luck. I think maybe it is in some ways, adjacently opposite to intuition, and at the same time, the polar opposite of fate. So I visualize a triangle, a trinity there between those qualities. Intuition ought to be sober, but open to serendipitous chance. Luck cheats fate, maybe, and burns some of the pessimism out of intuition

In Americanism, one of the problems we have, is maybe that we want to seek luck; to will luck to happen. We are not a people with a lot of 'sober intuition,' in my opinion. I think one can hear it in the way we talk, in the way we talk about how we are 'the greatest this,' or 'the greatest that.' Maybe that comes down to a case of trying to force luck.

I do not believe luck of fate are either linked, or in any way controllable.
Chance is just that pure chance.
But what happens to us is a mix of our own efforts and happenstance.
however in a deterministic world, what other people chose to do can have a disproportionate effect on outcomes for us.

Curses, bogy men and malign spirits are just make believe.
Luck, or lack of it, is certainly not inherited.