Chapter 656
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Returning once more to this most important subject in Archaic Cosmogony, even in the Norse legends, in the Sacred Scrolls of the Goddess Saga, we find Loki, the brother by blood of Odin—just as Typhon, Ahriman, and others are respectively brothers of Osiris and Ormazd—becoming evil only later, when he had mingled too long with humanity. Like all other Fire or Light Gods—Fire burning and destroying as well as warming and giving life—he ended by being regarded in the destructive sense of “Fire.” The name Loki, we learn from Asgard and the Gods (p. 250), has been derived from the old word liuhan, to enlighten. It has, therefore, the same origin as the Latin lux, light. Hence Loki is identical with Lucifer or Light-bringer. This title, being given to the Prince of Darkness, is very suggestive and is in itself a vindication against theological slander. But Loki is still more closely related to Prometheus, for he is shown chained to a sharp rock, while Lucifer, also identified with Satan, was chained down in Hell; a circumstance, however, which prevented neither of them from acting with all freedom on Earth, if we accept the theological paradox in its fulness. Loki is a beneficent, generous and powerful God in the beginnings of time, and the principle of good, and not of evil, in early Scandinavian Theogony.