Calling on Oðinn Valfoðr

I had some strange dreams last night – one of those “wee hour of the morning” things. I don’t know what they were about, exactly, because that knowledge usually fades from my mind about the instant my eyes open. But I do remember the stark terror I was feeling. And strangely, instead of calling on Þórr, who would seem a logical choice to protect you when in danger, I called, through fear-frozen lips (just as I felt physically frozen in fear), “Oðinn.” I say call, but it was more a barely audible whisper, because I could not get my voice to work (not that a god could not still hear you). I called out again, and then a third time, a little louder but still little more than a gasp. In my dream I felt myself sitting up, perhaps as a result of trying to get out of the dream. All I know is that when I woke up, I was lying down. I threw the covers back and sat up, but already I had forgotten exactly what it was that had so terrified me in my dream.

I got up and wandered into the bathroom and laughed out loud, thinking about the price for anyone calling on Oðinn in a crisis compared to Þórr. “What type of morning would I have just woken up to?” I wondered, out of all possible mornings. It would not be, I was sure, the morning I’d woken up to had I called on Þórr.

According to the lore, Oðinn is a risky appeal. The Father of the Slain Valfoðr is not easy on himself (look at the eye he gave up to earn wisdom) or his heroes (as Valhall’s collection of einherjar could attest. Of course, we have very little actual knowledge of what ideas any worshippers of Oðinn would have believed about the Valfoðr. Note: I am referring to Odin as “Father of the Slain” (Valfoðr) rather than as “Allfather” (Alfaðir). Rudolf Simek believes – and you can believe with him or not – that “the names for Odin based on -foðr are probably older and more likely to be heathen than those based on -faðir (Simek 1993:346).

There will never be, among modern day Heathens – any real consensus of ideas about Oðinn. Is he the loving leader of our family, our community, winning wisdom and knowledge for his people, or a “crafty, usurping, duplicitous deity” selfishly accruing these things for himself – an “old bastard” as I saw one Ásatrú site say. Thomas A. Dubois (Nordic Religions of the Viking Age 1999:58) is left to wonder “whether worshippers of the Viking Age could have regarded Oðinn’s exploits as completely worthy of emulation, or whether instead, they represented the extreme acts of a divine being or the marginalized behavior of a practitioner of magic.”

Alas, we can never know. We can only try to know Oðinn as we can know him. The “lore” is far too problematic for us to be able to sort these things out with any reasonable degree of accuracy – assuming even that we could say that there was a normative Oðinn worship, and certainly there was not. These things varied according to time and space, temporal and spatial dimensions that still act as determinants. We see this in the polytheisms of the Mediterranean as well, as the various “gods of the place” – a Zeus-of-this and an “Athena-of-that” – and after all, isn’t that what Paganism is, “religion of the place” – ethnic religion? My Oðinn of this place may not be your Oðinn of that place, but they are all Oðinn, aspects of Oðinn, even where we might incorrectly misinterpret the divine will, such as it manifests itself.

It really isn’t important, as I have argued before. Polytheism is not about belief, but about cultic acts, rituals designed to honor the gods. We leave it to followers of the White Christ to knock each other upon the head over minutiae of that sort mentioned above. When I became a Heathen, an event (or the start of a process) I date to 1979, I did not feel an overwhelming need to “know” Oðinn or any other god in the sense that Christians are taught to “know” the White Christ. What I felt was an overwhelming need to know how to worship him – what rituals to follow to make my devotion known. Even in that simple shift you find the essence of polytheism.

But from the beginning I felt an affinity to Oðinn. I have written (mostly for my own amusement, as it turns out) since I started to read. If a Heathen can be said to have a patron, and I believe that we can – Viga-Glúm’s saga, for example, where in ch. 9 he calls Freyr “my patron (fulltrúi)” – then I have considered Oðinn my patron, and a natural one, I would say. I do not let late Viking Age poetry scare me off. I do not personally see Oðinn as a fickle patron who might sacrifice me at a whim. I do not think of him with trepidation or misgivings. Now granted, we have poor Egil railing at Oðinn over the death of his son, but that is nothing any father in history has not done when losing a child. I cursed the White Christ for taking my brother when I was 10. It does not make the White Christ fickle, and it says more of our own attitudes towards the gods than their attitudes towards us, wouldn’t you say?

So there I was, standing in the bathroom, looking at my bleary-eyed face in the mirror, thinking about Oðinn and what we know of him and what we think our ancestors might have known of him. Moments such as this are important. A crisis, a moment of fear, can crystallize our thoughts, even if that awareness does not come to us until later, when we’ve had a chance to relax and reflect. I think the key, for me, is that when I called on Oðinn, whether I actually uttered with breath or whether the words were only imagined, I did speak them because I spoke them in my thoughts, from my brain or from my heart, and the dream did end. The moment of fear ceased, and I was awake, freed from the grip of whatever held me, rescued, whether in a real or imagined sense, by my fulltrúi. Þórr is the “friend of man” and the defender, but doesn’t any patron protect his proteges and supporters?

So my patron protected me. He did not throw me to the wolves (yet). Will he? Will my day today be different because I called on Oðinn and not Þórr? Only time will tell, I suppose. If you don’t hear from me again I suppose you can conclude that a giant frozen block of shit fell from some passing 747 high overhead and put an end to my literary and religious aspirations, but I won’t be worrying about that. Will I make a sacrifice to Oðinn? Of a certainty. Just as I might make one to Þórr before leaving on a trip, or when arriving safe home from one. I am thankful for my gods. I am thankful for gods that are part of this world, and not separate from it, for gods who act upon history, gods who, in a very real sense, are the “founders of the feast” – our ancestors and parents and – patrons, who watch over us and answer our prayers, who, like any parent on a playground, answer a cry for help by one of their errant children. We cannot always know what that help will mean, but we can rest assured that it is help, and not harm, and that they have our best interests at heart.

And, as you might have by now guessed, the “selfish old bastard” Oðinn has no place in my thinking. If I find him fickle, it is likely my own flawed and very human understanding than any failing in a god. It would be hubris to think otherwise, wouldn’t it?