Odin

by Diana L. Paxson

  4. Make a car charm and bless your car before going on a trip. The illustration shows the one I use. This charm is a bind rune in which three runes have been combined:

  – EHWAZ, the horse who carries you

  – RAIDHO, riding, the act of travel

  – ELHAZ, the Elk rune of protection

  These god runes have been sketched on the back:

  – for Odin, to guide your wanderings

  – for Heimdall, father of men, to watch your back

  and – Tyr and Thor on the sides to ward you from harm

  Fig. 5. A car charm

  5. Write the story of your life as a journey.

  6. Learn to spirit journey using the exercises in my book, Trance-Portation.

  7. Do the First Night of the Nine Nights meditation.

  You can do these meditations, inspired by the structure of a meditation for Loki in Dag Loptson's Playing with Fire, as you finish each chapter or on nine consecutive nights after you have completed the book.

  Set up your Odin altar and make sure the room is secure. Light a grey candle and pour a little mead or whisky into a glass as an offering. Then say:

  Odin by these names I call you:

  Gangrádh (Journey Advisor)

  Gangleri (Wanderer)

  Vegtam (Way Tamer)

  Farmögnudh (Journey Power)

  Farmatyr (Cargo God)

  Gestr (Guest)

  Gestumblindi (Blind Guest)

  Grant me wisdom for my journeys,

  Wanderer, in your cloak of gray,

  Tame the obstacles before me,

  Give me strength by night and day.

  And when, returning from my travels

  I try to listen for your call,

  Help me see you in the stranger,

  A welcome guest within my hall.

  Think about journeys you have made. Remember people and places and what you have learned. Let the wind off the moors sweep through you. Scent the forest and the sea. See the white road unrolling before you and leading at last to the home you love. Then sit in silence, opening your heart, and when you hear the knock at the door of your spirit, welcome in the god.

  The Second Merseberg Charm

  Phol ende uuodan uuorun zi holza.

  du uuart demo balderes uolon sin uuoz birenkit.

  thu biguol en sinthgunt, sunna era suister;

  thu biguol en friia, uolla era suister;

  thu biguol en uuodan, so he uuola conda:

  sose benrenki, sose bluotrenki, sose lidirenki:

  ben zi bena, bluot si bluoda,

  lid zi geliden, sose gelimida sin!

  Phol and Wodan were riding to the woods,

  and the foot of Balder's foal was sprained

  Then spake Sinthgunt, Sunna's sister,

  Then spake Frija, Volla's sister,

  Then spake Wodan, as well he knew:

  So bone-sprain, so blood-sprain, so joint-sprain:

  Bone to bone, blood to blood,

  joints to joints, so may they be glued.

  Fig. 6. Göndlir

  CHAPTER THREE

  Master of Magic

  Ljóð ek þau kann er kannat þjóðans kona

  ok mannskis mögr . . .

  Magic songs I know, not known by queens,

  or any human . . .

  Hávamál 146

  The second poem in the Elder Edda is called the Hávamál, the sayings of the “high one,” a byname of Odin. It is a tantalizing mix of advice on manners and references to Odin's magic, but to learn what that magic is like, we must go elsewhere.

  In Ynglingasaga 7, Snorri Sturlusson tells us that

  Odin could transform his shape: his body would lie as if dead, or asleep; but then he would be in the shape of a fish, or worm, or bird, or beast, and be off in a twinkling to distant lands upon his own or other people's business. With words alone he could quench fire, still the ocean in tempest, and turn the wind to any quarter he pleased. . . . Sometimes even he called the dead out of the earth, or set himself beside the burial-mounds; whence he was called the ghost-sovereign, and lord of the mounds. He had two ravens, to whom he had taught the speech of man; and they flew far and wide through the land, and brought him the news. In all such things he was pre-eminently wise. He taught all these íþrótt [arts] in Runes, and songs which are called galdrar. . . . Odin understood also the íþrótt [art] in which the greatest power is lodged, and which he himself practised; namely, what is called seið [magic]. By means of this he could know beforehand the predestined fate of men, or their not yet completed lot; and also bring on the death, ill-luck, or bad health of people, and take the strength or wit from one person and give it to another. But after such fiolkynngi [witchcraft], followed such ergi [weakness and anxiety], that it was not thought respectable for men to practise it; and therefore the gydhjunum [priestesses] were brought up in this art. (Sturluson 1844)

  What are these “crafts” of which Odin is the master? One of his bynames is Thrótt, usually translated as “strength” or “might.” Here, the term íþrótt is translated as “art.” I suggest that in this case, a more appropriate translation might be “powers.” In the passage above, the magical terms are given in Old Norse, followed by the translation. As you can see, Old Norse had a much larger vocabulary for magical practices than we do.

  Odin's Magic Powers

  Galdr

  Galdr, which covers roughly the same kinds of skills as modern English words derived from the Latin root cantare (such as “enchantment” and “incantation”), is the type of magic most associated with Odin. This should be no surprise, given Odin's importance as a god of communication. He is the god who gave the gift of önd, the breath that is life, to the first humans, Ask and Embla (Völuspá 18). In the Anglo-Saxon Rune poem, the verse for the rune that survived in Scandinavia as the word ás, a god (especially Odin), became óss, sometimes translated as “mouth.” I think we can assume that whatever kinds of magic Odin is performing, it will include sung or chanted spells.

  The last part of Hávamál contains a list of these spells. I say a “list” because although Hár tells us what the charms do, he does not actually give us the spells. Of the eighteen, two refer to healing, four to battle, two to control of the elements, one to mind control, three are for protection, one for talking to the dead, and two for gaining knowledge. The last three are love spells.

  There is a special poetic meter for spells, called Galdralag (Incantation Meter). To see what this looks like in English, go to the translation of the Elder Edda by Lee M. Hollander.

  An example of galdralag from Hattatal (102) in the Younger Edda goes,

  Sóttak fremd, sótta ek fund kinungs,

  Sóttak ítran iarl,

  Thá er ek reist—thá er ek renna gat—

  Kaldan straum kili—

  Kaldan siá kili.

  Honor I sought, sought to meet with a king,

  Sought out a splendid jarl,

  There where I cut there where I ran,

  Through cold current with keel

  Over the cold sea.

  A major part of Odin's verbal magic involves the runes, which we'll look at in greater detail in chapter 4.

  Healing

  We may find the lack of actual spells in Hávamál frustrating, but even though one's first thought of Odin is not usually in connection with healing, we do have two spells in which he does just that. The Second Merseberg Spell is a charm for healing a horse, and it is the only surviving example in Old High German of a Heathen spell. It consists of a mythological setting and an incantation.

  Christian versions, in which Wodan's role is played by Jesus, are found in later Scandinavian folklore, but the essence of the incantation is far older. A. G. Storms traces it to a Vedic charm dated to around 500 BCE (Storms 1949, 111). I have given the original and a fairly literal translation of the Second Merseberg Spell. A video of the spell sung in Old High German by Birgit Knorr may be found on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjVRL
cOjOGc.

  Here is another version that I have translated more freely.

  Phol and Wodan rode to the wood,

  Balder's foal has sprained its foot.

  Sinthgunt, Sunna's sister, spoke

  Frija, Volla's sister, invoked.

  Then spoke Wodan as well he knew,

  Bone sprain, blood sprain, joint sprain, too:

  Bone to bone, blood to blood,

  joints to joints, may they be glued.

  I have used the spell myself for friends with broken bones, sprains, or wounds from surgery, focusing on the incantation and adding “flesh to flesh,” “skin to skin,” and any other body parts required.

  One of the most interesting of the surviving Anglo-Saxon charms is called the “Nine Herbs Galdor,” which lists the powers of mugwort, plantain, lambs-cress, cock's-spur-grass, chamomile, nettle, apple, chervil, and fennel to resist poison and infection. It is also the only spell in Storms's collection to mention a god. The spell concludes, “These nine have power against nine poisons. A worm [personified disease spirit] came crawling, it killed nothing, for Woden took nine glory-twigs. He smote then the adder that it flew apart into nine parts” (Storms 1949, #9). When the entire spell has been pronounced, the healer makes the herbs into a salve that is applied to the infected wound.

  Seidh

  Galdr, while important, is only one of the terms we encounter in discussions of Viking Age magic. As a more inclusive label, Neil Price of Uppsala University chooses seidh (pronounced “saythe”), which is the other category given in Ynglingasaga for Odin's magic.

  Again and again in the sources . . . we seem to find seiðr used simultaneously as a precise term and also as a generalization for “sorcery” in our modern sense of the word. In using seidr as a primary category, in a manner that implicitly includes the other magics, we would therefore seem to be following the fashion in which the Norse themselves understood the concept. (Price 2002, 66)

  Seidh is a term that has attracted considerable attention in recent years, particularly as a label for knowing “of man's fate and of the future,” via the oracular spá ritual described in the Saga of Eric the Red 4 and elsewhere in the sagas. This was the skill I was seeking to learn when I first got interested in Norse magic (described in my book The Way of the Oracle), although for a better understanding of the culture, I first studied the runes.

  What Völuspá calls “sporting with souls” is essentially the same idea we find in Aleister Crowley's definition of magic—the art of causing changes in consciousness in conformity with will. References to seidh in the sagas may describe magic performed to achieve a positive end, such as attracting fish or foretelling the future, as well as for negative purposes. To perform operant magic (actions that are intended to affect the physical world), the magician must change his or her consciousness, and one of the most effective ways to do this is actually galdr, the use of songs or spells. Thus, it makes sense that Snorri should attribute both classes of magic to Odin, although (not too surprisingly, given that he was writing two hundred years after the Christian conversion) he seems to be a little unclear on the distinction between them.

  Spá—the work of the seer or seeress—is only one of the kinds of magic Price includes under the heading of seidh. In his book, The Viking Way, he states, “More than anything else, seið seems to have been an extension of the mind and its faculties” (Price 2002, 64). In the story of the war between the Æsir and the Vanir, a mysterious figure called Heidh appears. In addition to her other skills, “by seið, she sported”, or “played around with souls” (Völuspá 22). Not only does this stanza tell us something about the different kinds of Norse magic, it indicates that seidh was considered to be primarily a female practice and highly suspect, which makes it surprising that it should be ascribed to Odin. For more about this, see chapter 6, in which I discuss Odin's relations with women.

  There are certainly many stories in the sagas about men who practice witchcraft, but as time went on, it became restricted to women, probably because men were expected to take physical rather than magical action against their foes. During the period when kings were attempting to force Norway to become a feudal Christian kingdom, it was the men who practiced magic who were persecuted, not the women. In the History of Harald Hairfair 36 (Sturlason 1990, 70), a seidhmadhr (man who practices seidh) called Vitgeir objects when the king outlaws seidh, on the grounds that the king's own son, Ragnvald Rettlebone, is practicing magic in Hadeland with eighty companions. The king solves the problem by sending another son, Eric Blood-Axe, to deal with the situation, which Eric does by burning his brother and the other seidhmadhrs in their hall. Eric, by the way, was married to a woman called Gunnhild who had herself learned seidh from two Finns (probably Saami) and made trouble with her spells in the sagas of Njal and of Egil. Apparently it was all right for queens to know magic.

  Males were still practicing seidh a generation or two later when the first King Olav tried to do the same thing to the seidhmadhrs in Tunsberg, including a grandson of Ragnvald called Eyvind Kelda (Sturluson 1990, History of Olav Trygvason 62–63, 165–166). Eyvind escaped and tried to overcome the king by magic, but was eventually captured and drowned. This pattern persisted into the witch-burning phase of the late Middle Ages, when, unlike the situation in the rest of Europe, in Scandinavia it was men rather than women who were usually accused.

  In the sagas, Seidh practiced by men is more likely to be negative. In Gislisaga 18, a seidhmadhr is hired to work seidh “that there should be no help for the man who had killed Thorgrim, however much men might want to give it to him, and there should be no rest for him in the country.” In Laxdaelasaga 35, Kotkel and his sons build a seidh scaffold and work weather magic against Thorold. A storm comes up and he is drowned.

  At the end of the description of Odin's magic in Ynglingasaga, Snorri explains that at one time, this kind of magic was practiced by both genders, but it eventually was considered so ergi, or “unmanly,” that it was restricted to women. The term ergi is a complex one, with meanings ranging from “sexually receptive” to “cowardly” or “sneaky,” all of which seem to have evolved as Norse gender roles became increasingly polarized. Some years ago, I attempted to analyze the relationship in an essay published in Idunna 31 called “Sex, Status and Seið: Homosexuality and Germanic Religion” (available online at www.seidh.org).

  In her article, “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women and Power in Early Northern Europe,” Carol J. Clover demonstrates that when there is a conflict situation in the sagas, the important distinction is not between the male and female sexes but between the roles of hvatr, someone who takes physical action, and blaudr, which may refer to a woman or an old man or a person of any gender who cannot take up a sword and deal with the matter directly (Clover 1993, 2). As you shall see when we look at Odin as a battle god, his role in a military situation usually involves strategy or magic rather than combat.

  Gand

  Seið and Galdr are not the only kinds of magic mentioned in the passage from Ynglingasaga. In Old Norse, the term gand refers to anything enchanted, in particular magical items used by sorcerers, and by extension to magic. In the Old Norse dictionary, Cleasby and Vigfusson define a gandr as an object that has been bewitched. It occurs in a variety of compound terms, such as the gand-reid, or witches' ride. It can also mean a spirit-being and can take the form of a wolf. Price sees it as “a general kind of sorcerous energy from which all power was drawn” (2002, 66). It is probably in this sense that the word is used in the Völuspá 22 description of Gullveig/Heidh. Orchard translates “vitti hon ganda” as “the skill of wands.”

  By the later Middle Ages, the word “gand” had come to mean a magical wand or staff. Price (2002, 87) cites a study by Clive Tolley, who points out that a derivative of gandr is the word göndull, which seems to refer to a staff, possibly used to summon or direct the gand spirits. As it happens, another of Odin's names is Göndlir, which by this reasoning would mean “staff-bearer.” Another byn
ame, Sveigðir means “cane (or wand?)-bringer.” Price also quotes a spell collected during a 14th century Norwegian witch trial—“I ride [or ‘thrust’] from me göndull's breaths, one to bite you in the back, another to bite you in the breast, a third to turn harm and evil upon you” (Price 2002, 178).

  The evidence is inconclusive, but the image that comes to me is of Odin using his staff and his önd to send his wolves Geri and Freki forth to attack his foes. This certainly gives them a more worthy purpose than recycling the god's uneaten offerings.

  Shamanism

  Coming fresh from my study of the shamanic literature, the Ynglingasaga's negative description of Odin's magical powers struck me as very like the way a Christian missionary encountering a Pagan tribe might summarize the local shaman's skills. But can we call Odin a shaman? Shamanism, a term that originated among the tribes of Siberia, has been widely used, or misused. In his exploration of shamanic practices around the world, Mircea Eliade defines it as

  a technique of religious ecstasy. Shamanism encompasses the premise that shamans are intermediaries or messengers between the human world and the spirit worlds. Shamans are said to treat ailments/illness by mending the soul. Alleviating traumas affecting the soul/spirit restores the physical body of the individual to balance and wholeness. The shaman also enters supernatural realms or dimensions to obtain solutions to problems afflicting the community. Shamans may visit other worlds/dimensions to bring guidance to misguided souls and to ameliorate illnesses of the human soul caused by foreign elements. The shaman operates primarily within the spiritual world, which in turn affects the human world. The restoration of balance results in the elimination of the ailment. (Eliade 1972, 3–7)