22/08/2023
The story of the god-king Odin and his sacrifices for spiritual growth.
Odin was the king of the Aesir tribe, simultaneously a god of war and earth and a god of sky, wisdom, poetry, and magic. He was shamanic, a lover of ecstasy, and trance, and often ‘effeminate’, embarrassing the Viking warriors who preferred his masculine side. One of the most striking attributes of his appearance is his single, piercing eye. His other eye socket is empty—the eye it once held was sacrificed for wisdom. He gave it up so he could drink from the well of wisdom. On another occasion, Odin hung on the world-tree Yggdrasil for nine days and nights, receiving no form of nourishment from his companions, sacrificing himself to himself, so that in the end he perceived the runes, the magically-charged ancient Germanic alphabet that was held to contain many of the greatest secrets of existence.
Odin often appears as a leader of the Wild Hunt, a ghostly procession of the dead through the winter sky. He rides a horse that has eight legs and travels with his raven and a wolf, who give him information about what is happening in every corner of the world.
From another name of Odin, Wotan, comes the name ‘Wednesday’, linked astrologically to the solid-liquid ambiguous Mercury, a planet that is somewhere in between the masculine Mars and the feminine Venus.