Odin: The First Rune-Master

Odin is the high God in the Northern Tradition. In both the surviving sources and in modern Heathenry, He is referred to variously as the All-Father, Victory Father, Hanging God, Old Man, or Old One-Eye. One of the defining aspects of His nature, as attested to in the Norse myths, is His insatiable thirst for knowledge and wisdom. This thirst for knowledge led Odin to seek out the runes, and He did so by sacrificing Himself on the Norse World-Tree: Yggdrasil. Modern Northern Tradition Shamans such as Raven Kaldera refer to Odin as the God of the Ordeal. The Ordeal Path as practiced by modern Northern Tradition Shamans (and others) involves the "intentional and careful use of pain in order to put the body into an altered state." One could say that the use of pain in such a fashion lies at the heart of Odin's sacrifice to win the runes.

The story of Odin's primary ordeal is told in the Havamal, one of the lays of the Poetic Edda. The reader is told that in search of wisdom, Odin hung Himself for nine days and nights on Yggdrasil, the World-Tree. Although Odin is usually viewed as a God of kingship, He also holds a place within the Northern Tradition as a God of shamans. The idea of a great cosmic tree that supports the universe and which can be utilized by shamans in spirit-travel is common to many northern European cultures, most notably the Yakut and Buryat. The Tree shows up again in Jewish Cabbala in the guise of the Tree of Life, and has one of its earliest manifestations in Sumerian stories of the Goddess Inanna. It is by traversing the World-Tree that Odin is able to move from His role as sacred king to that of Shaman. The key to this transition from temporal to liminal power was His sacrifice by hanging.

During this ordeal, He starved Himself and stabbed Himself with His own spear, shedding His own blood. Eventually He died. It is through His death and rebirth that He gained access to the runes, the keys to the secrets of the universe:

I ween that I hung on the windy tree,
Hung there for nights full nine;
With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was
To Othin, myself to myself,
On the tree that none may ever know
What root beneath it runs.

Odin then recited the charms that He learned, and set down the formula for making appropriate sacrifices by providing a list of ritual acts including divination, blood offering, petitioning the Gods and making actual sacrifice. Although many modern Heathens look at this passage as esoteric lore solely concerned with the reading of runes for divination, many scholars, most notably, the German historian Rudolf Simek, believe it to be a complex list of ritual actions, one that specifically references sacrifice. Odin's sacrifice permeates modern Heathen consciousness. It is one of the defining moments in the religion's mythos.

The use of pain as a spiritual tool is quite controversial in modern Heathenry. It is, however, part and parcel of Odin's story. In his book Dark Moon Rising, Raven Kaldera notes that "cultures all over the world have explored ways to use the power of pain as a spiritual tool." He references the Lakota sun dance and the Hindu Kavadi, and notes that "the technique of applied pain is probably older than that of psychoactive substances," yet another Shamanic practice with which Odin is associated. Although Northern Tradition Shamanic practices are somewhat outside the scope of this book, the idea of sacrifice (whatever that might mean to the individual) to gain wisdom is deeply entrenched in the core cosmological ethos of northern religions. This has evolved within a small subsection of the modern Northern Tradition into the practice of ordeal work.

Ordeal work refers to a body of practices used to bring about a deep catharsis for purposes such as self-growth, religious sacrifice, or a rite of passage. These practices quite often involve physical pain, and are usually done in a spiritual or at least a carefully crafted context. Practitioners maintain that when utilized in a controlled manner, ordeal practices have the power to heal, transform, and render the practitioner receptive to their Gods.

The use of pain-based rites for spiritual reasons had many corollaries in the ancient world. Priests of the Goddess Cybele, for example, would slash their bodies with knives, giving their own blood in offering. At its most extreme manifestation, devotees would castrate themselves in a similar manner at the conclusion of rituals filled with ecstatic dancing. During specific religious festivals, Hindu devotees may perform Kavadi — piercing the body with hooks or spikes, ideally to provoke spirit possession. Lest this be mistaken for an Eastern phenomenon, it is worth noting that numerous Native American tribes still perform the sun dance, a sacrificial dance in which dancers have hooks inserted into their flesh, which are then secured to a central tree or post (again, we see the imagery of the tree recurring as a central theme). They then dance until the hooks tear free of their flesh. We also have the example of the Spanish Christian flagellantes who still perform rites of flagellation in honor of Christ. By engaging in such practices, practitioners of the ordeal position themselves as living sacrifices to their Gods. It is not coincidental that the majority of ordeal workers within the Northern Tradition are devotees of Odin. Although Odin is not just a God of the ordeal (far from it), ordeal work is one of the many things for which He is known. He is a God of sacrifice, most especially the sacrifice of the self. Historian E. Turville-Petre points out that

the sacrifice of Odin to himself may ... be seen as the highest conceivable form of sacrifice, in fact so high that, like many a religious mystery, it surpasses our comprehension. It is the sacrifice, not of king to god, but of god to god of such a kind as is related in Scripture of the sacrifice of Christ.

Nor was this similarity with the sacrifice of Christ lost on early converts to Christianity. One of the earliest known Anglo-Saxon Christian poems, The Dream of the Rood, dating from the 7th century CE, uses imagery suited to both Christ and Odin. Pagan themes abound:

The young hero stripped himself — he, God Almighty — strong and stout-minded. He mounted high gallows, bold before many, when he would loose mankind. I shook when that Man clasped me. I dared, still, not bow to earth, fall to earth's fields, but had to stand fast. Rood was I reared. I lifted a mighty King, Lord of the heavens, dared not to bend. With dark nails they drove me through: on me those sores are seen, open malice-wounds. I dared not scathe anyone. They mocked us both, we two together. All wet with blood I was, poured out from that Man's side, after ghost he gave up. Much have I born on that hill of fierce fate. I saw the God of hosts harshly stretched out.

Here the reader is presented with the image of a warrior-Christ,...