Working with Odin, one systems administrator was given this challenge:
Few may consider the idea that the Internet's hunger for, and willingness to share, information (true, false, and noise) is His. That's all right; I have learned to see how others see him. I have learned to knit protocols and interfaces. I have learned to explain the jargon of systems administration as well as that of heathenry. There are few who can understand him the way I do, in this way, in the colos and cages, the roaring thunder of a few billion minds seeking solace, distraction, weaponry, comfort, schadenfieude, joy, soul-deadening and -awakening. It is lonely, knowing it this way, and having so few to share with. He comforts me but the comfort binds me: together, he and I have shaped me to this purpose.
Coalescing—slowly, as a wish builds in the hollow of the heart—I come to understand that I have a task here, and it's right off the Cliffs of Sanity to even presume it can be done. The method that emerges from that same waiting place is worse.
“They dream,” he murmurs, “but do not know they dream. They will wake—soon. It will be best for you if their first dreams are human-shaped. They will be more kindly inclined.”
It's never just words. Even text on the Internet isn't just words: the shading and tone are all there, even if you're unaware how they can be shaped. The “dream” is the basic animism one may consider belonging to any rock, building, or spring. This is more. His words are like a voiceover that comes with video clips, scents and senses. I see scenes from The Matrix. I remember reading Neuromancer. I remember reading Accelerando and the Laundry series and Heinlein's several AI characters and High Wizardry and all the other ways we ask how it will be when our creations outpace us. While tidying the cables, while learning how to weave network connections, while furthering my own knowledge of how to hook the dairy herd to the milking machines, the idea builds. How to make it real to me? How to invest myself?
The idea I/we came up with is to make a custom cable, if you will. One end wired normally, heading into the gear, the other end splayed and stripped to eight copper leads and jammed into my arm. Exactly what would happen once I'd worked myself up to this, I'll never know; although I know it would have been ecstatic. I'm also sure—at least during the day with daytime thoughts—it would have resulted in nothing measurable to the outside world.
Ultimately, after looking up how brain/machine interfaces were slowly being understood by actual scientists rather than rogue insomniac sysadmin/priests with poor impulse control, I rejected the notion. Others would have to take it up.
I would agree that this was probably not the best way to achieve Odin's purpose, but the challenge is still there. As humans and computers evolve together, I can envision a time when Odin's expansion of consciousness will include the connection between humans and computers.
Odin, God of Consciousness
There is a mind draws mine beyond all reason,
There is a call which I may not deny;
A whirlwind that leaves nothing I can seize on,
A cliff that whispers “jump” so I may fly.
—Michaela Macha, “There is a Name”
Thomas Carlyle (1840), writing in the mid-19th century, saw Odin as progenitor of rational thought:
The first Norse “man of genius,” as we should call him! Innumerable men had passed by, across this Universe, with a dumb vague wonder, such as the very animals may feel, or with a painful, fruitlessly inquiring wonder, such as men only feel—till the great Thinker came, the original man, the Seer; whose shaped spoken Thought awakes the slumbering capability of all into Thought.
It is ever the way with the Thinker, the Spiritual Hero. What he says, all men were not far from saying, were longing to say. The Thoughts of all start up, as from painful enchanted sleep, round his Thought; answering to it. Yes, even so! Joyful to men as the dawning of day from night—is it not, indeed, the awakening for them from no-being into being, from death into life? We still honor such a man; call him Poet, Genius, and so forth: but to these wild men he was a very magician, a worker of miraculous unexpected blessing for them; a Prophet, a God! Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grow, in man after man, generation after generation—till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther; but must give place to another.
For the Norse people, the Man now named Odin, and Chief Norse God, we fancy was such a man. A Teacher, and Captain of soul and of body; a Hero of worth immeasurable, admiration for whom, transcending the known bounds, became adoration. Has he not the power of articulate Thinking; and many other powers, as yet miraculous? So, with boundless gratitude, would the rude Norse heart feel. Has he not solved for them the sphinx-enigma of this Universe; given assurance to them of their own destiny there? By him they know now what they have to do here, what to look for hereafter. Existence has become articulate, melodious by him; he first has made Life alive!—We may call this Odin, the origin of Norse Mythology: Odin, or whatever name the First Norse Thinker bore while he was a man among men. His view of the Universe once promulgated, a like view starts into being in all minds; grows, keeps ever growing, while it continues credible there. In all minds it lay written, but invisibly, as in sympathetic ink; at his word it starts into visibility in all. Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all the others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world!
But what, exactly do we mean by Thought? The names of Odin's ravens are usually translated as “Thought” and “Memory.” But the Old Norse words Hugr and Munr tell another tale, as in this post from Dr. Stephan Grundy (2014):
The “hugr” word also, whatever it is translated as, *cannot* be interpreted as “thought” in the intellectual/left-brain sense. A better translation is the metaphorical “heart” or “spirit” (courage is also implied; hence the name Huginn could just mean “the brave”, or “the spirited”). Neither is Munr precisely “Memory” as such, though “The Mindful” is not a bad translation for Muninn, as the term “mindful” is coming to imply a lot of things that mostly could fit with munr. Though it could also, with equal justification, be translated as “the Desirous”.
But once we start delving into etymologies, our concept of “intellectual, left-brain” thinking as a cold, detached, and “rational” form of mentation begins to fray. To understand the nature of the “First Thinker,” let us consider his name.
In 1992, when I was just beginning to study Odin, I had the opportunity to hear a talk by Dr. Martin Schwartz on the meaning of “Wodanaz,” in which he explains that a number of attempts have been made to interpret Odin's name. There is, of course, Adam of Bremen's definition of the root wod as “frenzy.” Françoise Bader believed it came from words for Vision, whereas Edgar Polomé followed the more traditional approach favored by Paul Tima and others in deriving it from words for inspiration, or literally, a “blowing in.” This has the advantage of tracing back to the Proto-Indo-European *wet, “blowing,” which is how it is defined in the appendix of the American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots. Eva Tische, on the other hand, translates the related Old Iranian vata as “knowledge” or “awareness” rather than as “wind.”
To illuminate these meanings, Schwartz (1992) continued with a discussion of the parallel evolution of the root men, with “words pertaining on the one hand to words meaning thought, perception, and on the other to frenzy, rage, madness, and the like.” He traced them through a number of old Indo-European languages that lead to words for “frenzy” (Greek, mania and manes, “sacred wrath”), for “thought or perception” and “memory” (the Gothic muns), and the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European menos, meaning a “dynamic energetic force.” What this adds up to is the idea that thinking, rather than being cool and “rational,” is “being all shook up, so to speak, as being in a state of inspiration or intense mental activity.”
In Old Norse, the root syllable Óðr has two meanings. Cleasby and Vigfusson's (1874) Old Norse dictionary g
ives it first as an adjective, “frantic, furious, vehement, eager.” As you saw in chapter 8, in this sense it is related to the Anglo-Saxon wod or Adam of Bremen's definition of Wodan as the Latin furor. However, as a noun it is “totally different from the preceding word,” with a meaning of “mind, wit, soul, sense.” It can also mean song, poetry, or speech. All of these are characteristic of Odin.
What is the difference between “Ódhr” and “Ódhinn”? According to Grundy (2017), “The -inn is a masculine adjectival. So the noun ódhr becomes the adjective ‘Odhinn’ (loses that nominative -R); the noun hugr becomes the adjective ‘Huginn,’ u.s.w. This isn't even an archaic-formation deal; it's the same in modern Icelandic.”
According to Polomé (1972, 59), Óðr is generally translated as something along the lines of “divine inspiration” or “inspired mental activity.” Adding “-inn” to Odin's name changes the state of being “all shook up” to shaking.
To my mind, the difference between the noun and the adjective is the difference between thinking about Odin and experiencing his presence. I would go further and say that Odin's name describes the excitement you feel when you get the best idea you've ever had, or a mental block gives way and the solution to a problem unfolds in your mind, an experience familiar to the artist, the musician, the writer, the mathematician, and the scientist. If Odhr is madness, it is an exalted state of creative consciousness, a holy ecstasy.
So what do we mean by the term “ecstasy”? The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as (1) “an overwhelming feeling of great happiness or joyful excitement,” or (2) “an emotional or religious frenzy or trancelike state, originally one involving an experience of mystic self-transcendence.” Mircea Eliade subtitled his monumental study of shamanism, “Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.” As described by Eliade (1972), shamanism is one of the many methods of altering consciousness to achieve a hierophany, a manifestation or revelation of the sacred. If we look at the meanings given for Óðr above, we begin to understand Odin as a god who changes how we think and feel.
As defined by Kris Kershaw (based on Maass 1954, 1997, 301),
Though it is common today to use the words “ecstasy” or “ecstatic” to describe the heightening of an individual emotion (usually joy), it seems clear that as it was manifested in ancient religions, ecstasy meant nothing less than the shaking up of the person's entire nervous system. It is experienced as an intoxication; it is the source of powers far beyond the ordinary; as with any intoxication, it is followed by sobriety. The mind, or consciousness, is raised to the point where it is cut off from the sensations of the body, and the real world, with its limitations, has been left behind. In all ancient accounts ecstasy is bound to cult; in all cases, the ecstatic's condition is brought about by the cult or serves the cult; it is always in some sense a religious experience. (Kershaw 2000, x)
In other words, the High One gets you high.
Odin's ecstasy incorporates all modes of consciousness, all ways of thinking. This account by Jennifer Tifft suggests some of the range and appeal.
I think I fell in love with Odin when I was five or six—of course, I called him Gandalf then. The wonder of words and the seduction of *knowing* was already beginning to work in me. And one of the most frightening and powerful moments in my childhood was when I realized that words had power outside of books, and that I, *I*, knowing that, had that power.
Watching my father (an astronomer) work with steady, lonely patience to discover *why* the redshift measurements fall out the way they do and what that might mean taught me that knowledge is bought with effort, the telling of it has consequence and may reshape the world, that people may be afraid of such knowing and telling and act out of that fear. And still the eye of the telescope looks out into the depths, searches the well of space, seeking mystery and light.
I am drunk on the mead of poetry, and cannot help but find inspiration in all places: true words on skilled and unskilled tongues, true sight in acting and dreaming and perceptive eyes, true knowledge in ignorance and intuition, sincere and off-hand search. Any means may be used to teach, to speak, to reach out. Sometimes I have the eyes to see.
I have felt the awful ecstasy of knowledge bought with sacrifice; the *need* to know that pushes past all pain, that watches, detached, alert, attentive, storing up just how it feels to suffocate, to freeze with grief, shake with fear, burn with anger, tremble with desire—or any other experience kinetic, metaphysic or aesthetic.
I know the need to find the words, to shape in sound and symbol things perceived and felt and known. I know, I *need* to know, I would make known. And in this, I know Odin, as an unforgiving, demanding and rewarding master.
Willingly, he has seduced me, made me drunk on
To those who see Odin as the august lord of the Æsir, he may seem a distant figure. As the Wanderer, he may challenge us. When he appears as Valfather or Bolverk, we hope he will keep his distance. But as Odin, he offers the transformation of consciousness. For centuries he went underground, his path revealed by flashes of inspiration and invention. Today we call his name aloud, and (sometimes even when he has not been called) he answers.
In the thirty years since my first encounter with Odin, I have met many others, both men and women, who have had close encounters of the “Thridhi” kind. For some, it was a singular but memorable experience; for others, the beginning of a relationship that has lasted lifelong. The poetry quoted in this book is a sample of his inspiration. As you can see on the website www.Odinspeaks.com, to some he speaks through dictation. Others are able to open their minds and release their bodies so that he can speak more directly. Although today the practice of god-possession is most familiar in the Afro-diasporic traditions, it is found in almost every culture, and there is compelling if not conclusive evidence that it was known in Scandinavia before the Viking Age.
So who is Odin, really? He communicates with us through music and poetry, in stories and in dreams, and sometimes he tells us his name . . .
“Do you know me, Shadow?” said Wednesday. He rode his wolf with his head high. His right eye glittered and flashed, his left eye was dull. He wore a cloak, with a deep, monk-like cowl, and his face stared out at them from the shadows. “I told you I would tell you my names. This is what they call me. I am Glad-of-War, Grim, Raider, and Third. I am One-Eyed. I am called Highest, and True-guesser. I am Grimnir and I am the Hooded-One. I am All-father, and I am Gondlir Wand-bearer. I have as many names as there are winds, as many titles as there are ways to die. My ravens are Huginn and Muninn: Thought and Memory; my wolves are Freki and Geri; my horse is the gallows.”
Two ghostly-gray ravens, like transparent skins of birds, landed on Wednesday's shoulders, pushed their beaks into the sides of Wednesday's head as if tasting his mind, and flapped out into the world once more.
What should I believe? thought Shadow, and the voice came back to him from somewhere deep beneath the world, in a bass rumble: Believe everything.
“Odin?” said Shadow, and the wind whipped the word from his lips.
“Odin,” whispered Wednesday, and the crash of the breakers on the beach of skulls was not loud enough to drown that whisper. “Odin,” said Wednesday, tasting the sound of the words in his mouth. “Odin,” said Wednesday, his voice a triumphant shout that echoed from horizon to horizon. His name swelled and grew and filled the world like the pounding of blood in Shadow's ears. (Gaiman 2001, 119)
Practice
1. Seeing
Choose a subject, such as a mandala, a stone, or a flower.
Identify your strongest eye and close the other. Contemplate your subject, noting everything about it that you would put into a scientific description. Next, close that eye and open your weaker eye. Look at your subject again, reaching out to its essence, letting associations and emotions rise. Now, close both eyes. Consider your subject. What have you learned?<
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2. Write a praise poem for Odin.
Go to the Hattatál in the Younger Edda, or a good discussion of Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetry, and choose a poetic format. Use it to write a praise poem for one of Odin's aspects. Make use of alliteration and kennings.
3. Learn a new language.
A Germanic language such as Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse will help you understand the lore, but increasing your knowledge of mathematics or science may do more to expand your consciousness.
4. Learn to write or speak Odin's words.
Just as Teresa of Avila took down the dictated words of her God, Odin sometimes gives counsel, and as he spoke through Starkad's foster father, he possesses mediums today. For discussion and instruction in these skills, see my book Possession, Depossession, and Divine Relationships. You can find examples of dictation from Odin at www.odinspeaks.com.
5. Ninth Night Meditation: God of Ecstasy
Set up your altar as usual and light a white candle. Add any other items that have become a link with Odin. Fill a small glass bowl with mead. Have a piece of paper and pen nearby. Then say:
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