Incorporation of Foreign Languages Into Your Spirituality?

I'm already trilingual: (native Slovak and Serbian, and learned English as a teenager) and I'm currently learning German, Swedish, Ancient Greek and Egyptian, but I used to study dozens of different modern and ancient languages. I'm almost proficient in every Slavic language including Old Church Slavonic. I can also read several writing systems even though I don't speak the languages they're used for, like Devanagari, Arabic, Hiragana and Katakana, and I learned like 700 Kanji before I quit learning Japanese a few years ago, but my handwriting is still pretty good.

What I often do is I find a hymn or a poem in a language and script I like, let's say yesterday I before sleep I wrote by hand on a piece of paper a verse from Tolkien's Bagme Bloma in Gothic but in Elder Futhark runes, as well as an excerpt from the Chaldean Oracles in cursive Greek. During my break at work I wrote a few passages in Hieroglyphic Egyptian from the Book of the Gates.

I also listen to songs from different languages on Youtube.

To be honest, I couldn't imagine being spiritual in a single language, especially not in English. Some languages are more deeply imbued with symbols, and the scripts their written in even more so. For me seeing a hymn in English in the Latin alphabet feels... empty. I'd have to write in in runes or something else for it to feel meaningful to me. But Latin language in the Latin alphabet is just fine. In my mind it's suppose to be written in its own alphabet.

So the main reason for my learning of foreign and ancient languages has been so I can read texts in those languages directly in the original. A lot of symbolism is lost in translation. I've compared translation of some works of Plato and they can be wildly different, while to original is simple and straightforward because the words have meanings English can't express directly but has to go around with long sentences. Ancient Egyptian is an even better example since Hieroglyphs are full of puns and allusions that just can't translated without glosses explaining them.

/r/heathenry Thread