[Main Blog Post] Woden's Three Deals

[jprussell]

I've picked up on what I think might be a thread tying together three of Woden's best-known tales, but I'm not yet wholly happy with my understanding of it. I try to get a bit closer in this week's post.

Comments

[deketemoisont]

A truly subtle post!

[jprussell]

Was the link not working when you checked it, or am I missing something?

(I put the dreamwidth post up first so I can generate the link to it for the post on my webstead).

[deketemoisont]

Oh, that makes perfect sense. (I did comment before the post proper was there.)

(In which Ódhinn literally fracks shale [1] in the hope of obtaining a precious liquid!)

First, I'd like the comments about this on Toward Ecosophy to be findable from here, so: https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/230217.html?thread=40611145#cmt40611145 .

A tangent from Ódhinn's eyes: in some Ecosophia comment, JMG linked him to Kether/Celi, on the basis of his being the one-eyed Aesir lord. I thought all this time "he has 2 eyes working perfectly, just not in the same plane" - note that heterochromia has been considered a sign of spirit sight. (Not to say having 1 eye/plane couldn't cost him anything, of course.) Moreover, if one uses a 9-planet scheme, to consider Ódhinn Uranian's a no-brainer to me, and Chokmah/Perydd would be associated to Uranus and the number 2 [2]. (See also Stephen Flowers' remarks on Odian bipolarity, which I don't consider even a slight stretch of the myths.) Lastly, I've asked myself: do I want to associate Kether/Celi to a person? [3] (If one did, it'd be a Neptunian deity in a 9-planet scheme.)

Well, how relevant do you consider not 1 but 2 "galdr"-cognates being involved in this, and maybe all the fairy tales about girls doing domestic work for nasty women have something to offer regarding it?

Did Ódhinn lose something to/with Gunnlodh? Well, did Freyja lose something to/with the 4 short ugly men? (Yes, I know the jötunn was named "Invitation", not "Men Run Away Screaming", so not *quite* the same situation.) *And what is it with Germanic myth and sex with underground denizens?*

"He does tell us that it was such a close call that Woden pissed out some of the Mead, and this is where bad poetry comes from." - so, is it explicitly said that good poetry requires being in good terms with the Aesir, while bad poetry happens spontaneously? Nicely straightforward!

About how much Gunnlodh is an underworld figure: given the former importance of burial mounds, am I seeing too much in think Ódhinn spent 3 days buried, i.e. dead, in this one? (Buried between a hot woman's thighs? Lots of writing about that too!)

To think that Ódhinn first lowers his status directly and then breaks an oath does make sense, but consider also - I failed to obtain a full quote now, but in addition to "Their accommodation was spartan in the extreme, and much time would be spent incubating poems and seeking inspiration in total darkness." ( https://druidry.org/druid-way/what-druidry/what-is-a-bard ), I remember a statement that even post-Christianity a bard being trained in this way would have *a stone placed on his chest*.

[1]: note that shale proper is a type of rock, not oil.
[2]: if higher planets have lower numbers - for the reverse, see https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/10976.html?thread=239072#cmt239072 .
[3]: I should note that The Litany of the Tree of Life has the Unmanifest above Celi, and *that* one is never linked to a person, but I shouldn't say I grasp the distinction between them.
[4]: If it clarifies anything - I thought much of this in silence, dark, and cold - but there was a blanket, not a stone!

[jprussell]

Heh, thank you the fracking joke and the explanation (I did not much need the explanation as several of my best friends are petroleum engineers, but others might find it helpful).

Thanks for linking to the Magic Monday thread, there was some good discussion there as well.

I can only slightly engage with your discussion of the Tree of Life, as that is something that I have been setting aside as not a core part of the systems I'm studying, but meaning to get to one day, since it has such a central role in Western occultism. Of course, now the Modern Order of Essenes work is requiring me to engage with it, so I may have to fix that!

As for Odhinn being Uranian, yeah, I agree, that seems very fitting, more so than Mercury, certainly (not that Mercury is a bad fit). As for "one eye," I wish I could remember where I read the speculation that putting his eye in the Well was more of an expansion of awareness than the "cost" it's usually seen as, because I agree that it's a helpful line of thinking to apply to the myth. But, as my post makes clear, I think it is likely also useful to think about it in the more straightforward way of "giving up something of great dearness and that would hurt like crazy to do"

When you mention Flowers' take on "Odian Bipolarity," are you thinking of the "Odhinnic Paradox" he associates with the Dagaz Rune mainly, or is there anything else that's not coming to mind for me? If it is "just" that Odhinn is often an ambivalent/two-sided figure who goes to extremes/violates taboos to get what is actually desirable, then yeah, I'm right there with you. But if you had any more you wanted to elaborate on, I'd be happy to hear it.

Okay, when you say "two galdr cognates," are you saying the poetry and what Odhinn won on the Tree, and so you're pointing out that at least two of these three stories are about magic/magic-adjacent structured speech? Or are you going somewhere else with that? Also, the fairy tale link is fascinating, but I may be missing the direct link - are you saying something like "Gunnlodh is given a (maybe) unpleasant task, it may have the same roots as the domestic work fairy tales"? At any rate, I've been meaning to get to Maria von Franz for ages, and this might bump her up the list. Grimm, of course, would also likely be helpful here.

As for "losing something" from sex, if we're talking mythology, I think we have to acknowledge that a dude having sex to get something from a woman and chick having sex to get something from a man are not exactly the same thing. Even without the (likely) disparity in attractiveness involved. If nothing else, there's the symbolic weight of masculine/feminine - the masculine puts out something, the feminine takes it in.

I didn't go into this in the post, because it seemed to be getting a bit too far afield, but I ran into some speculation that Bragi (God of Poetry, Idhunn's husband) might be the product of Odhinn and Gunnlodh's encounter. I didn't track down the evidence (yet) when I decided I wasn't going to write about it in this post, but I think it derives from one of Bragi's kennings/heiti being "Son of Odhinn." Add to this that some folks see Bragi as a hypostasis of Odhinn and also that you can make a good case that Idhunn might be part of the same "Mead Maiden" pattern we're talking about here, and things potentially get interesting (but messy).

And hah, does Germanic myth have more hot underground action than other mythologies? I guess I've just always assumed that most mythologies, at least most Indo-European ones, were full of sexy times when not sanitized either for telling to children or by later, more conservative religious views. But yeah, Northern Europe did have something in particular going on with the underground Beings - there are some similar motifs in Celtic myth, but of course it's all more fragmentary.

"so, is it explicitly said that good poetry requires being in good terms with the Aesir, while bad poetry happens spontaneously?" - Well, now that you mention it, Snorri did damn near single-handedly preserve the tales of mankind's relations with the Gods precisely because you had to understand those stories to craft the kind of poetry they did. I don't think I had ever thought of the complex system of kennings, heiti, and metrical form as a way of ensuring the stories get preserved. That clever Old Trickster!

"About how much Gunnlodh is an underworld figure: given the former importance of burial mounds, am I seeing too much in think Ódhinn spent 3 days buried, i.e. dead, in this one?" - You're not the only one to go here. Maria Kvilhaug in The Maiden with the Mead talks about how death was often portrayed in the lore as a sexual union with a female figure. If nothing else, her chamber is literally inside a mound (okay, mountain, but still).

"I failed to obtain a full quote now, but in addition to "Their accommodation was spartan in the extreme, and much time would be spent incubating poems and seeking inspiration in total darkness." ( https://druidry.org/druid-way/what-druidry/what-is-a-bard ), I remember a statement that even post-Christianity a bard being trained in this way would have *a stone placed on his chest*." - Huh, I don't know that I had ever heard that one! Now, if you want to get ready for the Jeff Russell drinking game, I'm about to bring up The One-Eyed God again: it is maybe not coincidental that the Bardic training, at least its Irish version, very well might trace a direct lineage to the same coming-of-age warbands that evolved into the Berserks.

Lest that sound too crazy, here's the super condensed version: PIE folks had a male coming-of-age practice that involved becoming a "wolf" for a few years and raiding neighboring folks. It also involved learning the esoteric knowledge special to men (which is common in traditional coming-of-age practices). Whether it always was associated with class/Dumezilian function, by closer to historical times, it was likely especially an aristocratic purview, whether first function (Priests/Judges/Kings) or second (Warriors) or both. So, the Irish development would have been something like "Coming-of-age raiders who learn religious poetry because that's how knowledge is transmitted -> coming of age for upper class priests/warriors who learn to fight and to write poetry -> Upper class specialized education that focused on the poetry side of things, but retained some of its hardass character. Basically flip the emphasis from "poetry" to "ecstatic state for fighting instead", and you get the development in the Berserks.

"[4]: If it clarifies anything - I thought much of this in silence, dark, and cold - but there was a blanket, not a stone!" - But was it at least a gravity blanket? I do most of my dark, silent waiting time with a cat rather than a stone, so I'm not sure how that affects things.