Master of Magic

Odin: Ecstasy, Runes, & Norse Magic - Diana L. Paxson 2017


Master of Magic

Ljóð ek þau kann er kannat þjóðans kona

ok mannskis mögr . . .

Magic songs I know, not known by queens,

or any human . . .

Hávamál 146

The second poem in the Elder Edda is called the Hávamál, the sayings of the “high one,” a byname of Odin. It is a tantalizing mix of advice on manners and references to Odin's magic, but to learn what that magic is like, we must go elsewhere.

In Ynglingasaga 7, Snorri Sturlusson tells us that

Odin could transform his shape: his body would lie as if dead, or asleep; but then he would be in the shape of a fish, or worm, or bird, or beast, and be off in a twinkling to distant lands upon his own or other people's business. With words alone he could quench fire, still the ocean in tempest, and turn the wind to any quarter he pleased. . . . Sometimes even he called the dead out of the earth, or set himself beside the burial-mounds; whence he was called the ghost-sovereign, and lord of the mounds. He had two ravens, to whom he had taught the speech of man; and they flew far and wide through the land, and brought him the news. In all such things he was pre-eminently wise. He taught all these íþrótt [arts] in Runes, and songs which are called galdrar. . . . Odin understood also the íþrótt [art] in which the greatest power is lodged, and which he himself practised; namely, what is called seið [magic]. By means of this he could know beforehand the predestined fate of men, or their not yet completed lot; and also bring on the death, ill-luck, or bad health of people, and take the strength or wit from one person and give it to another. But after such fiolkynngi [witchcraft], followed such ergi [weakness and anxiety], that it was not thought respectable for men to practise it; and therefore the gydhjunum [priestesses] were brought up in this art. (Sturluson 1844)

What are these “crafts” of which Odin is the master? One of his bynames is Thrótt, usually translated as “strength” or “might.” Here, the term íþrótt is translated as “art.” I suggest that in this case, a more appropriate translation might be “powers.” In the passage above, the magical terms are given in Old Norse, followed by the translation. As you can see, Old Norse had a much larger vocabulary for magical practices than we do.

Odin's Magic Powers

Galdr

Galdr, which covers roughly the same kinds of skills as modern English words derived from the Latin root cantare (such as “enchantment” and “incantation”), is the type of magic most associated with Odin. This should be no surprise, given Odin's importance as a god of communication. He is the god who gave the gift of önd, the breath that is life, to the first humans, Ask and Embla (Völuspá 18). In the Anglo-Saxon Rune poem, the verse for the rune that survived in Scandinavia as the word ás, a god (especially Odin), became óss, sometimes translated as “mouth.” I think we can assume that whatever kinds of magic Odin is performing, it will include sung or chanted spells.

The last part of Hávamál contains a list of these spells. I say a “list” because although Hár tells us what the charms do, he does not actually give us the spells. Of the eighteen, two refer to healing, four to battle, two to control of the elements, one to mind control, three are for protection, one for talking to the dead, and two for gaining knowledge. The last three are love spells.

There is a special poetic meter for spells, called Galdralag (Incantation Meter). To see what this looks like in English, go to the translation of the Elder Edda by Lee M. Hollander.

An example of galdralag from Hattatal (102) in the Younger Edda goes,

Sóttak fremd, sótta ek fund kinungs,

Sóttak ítran iarl,

Thá er ek reist—thá er ek renna gat—

Kaldan straum kili—

Kaldan siá kili.

Honor I sought, sought to meet with a king,

Sought out a splendid jarl,

There where I cut there where I ran,

Through cold current with keel

Over the cold sea.

A major part of Odin's verbal magic involves the runes, which we'll look at in greater detail in chapter 4.

Healing

We may find the lack of actual spells in Hávamál frustrating, but even though one's first thought of Odin is not usually in connection with healing, we do have two spells in which he does just that. The Second Merseberg Spell is a charm for healing a horse, and it is the only surviving example in Old High German of a Heathen spell. It consists of a mythological setting and an incantation.

Christian versions, in which Wodan's role is played by Jesus, are found in later Scandinavian folklore, but the essence of the incantation is far older. A. G. Storms traces it to a Vedic charm dated to around 500 BCE (Storms 1949, 111). I have given the original and a fairly literal translation of the Second Merseberg Spell. A video of the spell sung in Old High German by Birgit Knorr may be found on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjVRLcOjOGc.

Here is another version that I have translated more freely.

Phol and Wodan rode to the wood,

Balder's foal has sprained its foot.

Sinthgunt, Sunna's sister, spoke

Frija, Volla's sister, invoked.

Then spoke Wodan as well he knew,

Bone sprain, blood sprain, joint sprain, too:

Bone to bone, blood to blood,

joints to joints, may they be glued.

I have used the spell myself for friends with broken bones, sprains, or wounds from surgery, focusing on the incantation and adding “flesh to flesh,” “skin to skin,” and any other body parts required.

One of the most interesting of the surviving Anglo-Saxon charms is called the “Nine Herbs Galdor,” which lists the powers of mugwort, plantain, lambs-cress, cock's-spur-grass, chamomile, nettle, apple, chervil, and fennel to resist poison and infection. It is also the only spell in Storms's collection to mention a god. The spell concludes, “These nine have power against nine poisons. A worm [personified disease spirit] came crawling, it killed nothing, for Woden took nine glory-twigs. He smote then the adder that it flew apart into nine parts” (Storms 1949, #9). When the entire spell has been pronounced, the healer makes the herbs into a salve that is applied to the infected wound.

Seidh

Galdr, while important, is only one of the terms we encounter in discussions of Viking Age magic. As a more inclusive label, Neil Price of Uppsala University chooses seidh (pronounced “saythe”), which is the other category given in Ynglingasaga for Odin's magic.

Again and again in the sources . . . we seem to find seiðr used simultaneously as a precise term and also as a generalization for “sorcery” in our modern sense of the word. In using seidr as a primary category, in a manner that implicitly includes the other magics, we would therefore seem to be following the fashion in which the Norse themselves understood the concept. (Price 2002, 66)

Seidh is a term that has attracted considerable attention in recent years, particularly as a label for knowing “of man's fate and of the future,” via the oracular spá ritual described in the Saga of Eric the Red 4 and elsewhere in the sagas. This was the skill I was seeking to learn when I first got interested in Norse magic (described in my book The Way of the Oracle), although for a better understanding of the culture, I first studied the runes.

What Völuspá calls “sporting with souls” is essentially the same idea we find in Aleister Crowley's definition of magic—the art of causing changes in consciousness in conformity with will. References to seidh in the sagas may describe magic performed to achieve a positive end, such as attracting fish or foretelling the future, as well as for negative purposes. To perform operant magic (actions that are intended to affect the physical world), the magician must change his or her consciousness, and one of the most effective ways to do this is actually galdr, the use of songs or spells. Thus, it makes sense that Snorri should attribute both classes of magic to Odin, although (not too surprisingly, given that he was writing two hundred years after the Christian conversion) he seems to be a little unclear on the distinction between them.

S—the work of the seer or seeress—is only one of the kinds of magic Price includes under the heading of seidh. In his book, The Viking Way, he states, “More than anything else, seið seems to have been an extension of the mind and its faculties” (Price 2002, 64). In the story of the war between the Æsir and the Vanir, a mysterious figure called Heidh appears. In addition to her other skills, “by seið, she sported”, or “played around with souls” (Völuspá 22). Not only does this stanza tell us something about the different kinds of Norse magic, it indicates that seidh was considered to be primarily a female practice and highly suspect, which makes it surprising that it should be ascribed to Odin. For more about this, see chapter 6, in which I discuss Odin's relations with women.

There are certainly many stories in the sagas about men who practice witchcraft, but as time went on, it became restricted to women, probably because men were expected to take physical rather than magical action against their foes. During the period when kings were attempting to force Norway to become a feudal Christian kingdom, it was the men who practiced magic who were persecuted, not the women. In the History of Harald Hairfair 36 (Sturlason 1990, 70), a seidhmadhr (man who practices seidh) called Vitgeir objects when the king outlaws seidh, on the grounds that the king's own son, Ragnvald Rettlebone, is practicing magic in Hadeland with eighty companions. The king solves the problem by sending another son, Eric Blood-Axe, to deal with the situation, which Eric does by burning his brother and the other seidhmadhrs in their hall. Eric, by the way, was married to a woman called Gunnhild who had herself learned seidh from two Finns (probably Saami) and made trouble with her spells in the sagas of Njal and of Egil. Apparently it was all right for queens to know magic.

Males were still practicing seidh a generation or two later when the first King Olav tried to do the same thing to the seidhmadhrs in Tunsberg, including a grandson of Ragnvald called Eyvind Kelda (Sturluson 1990, History of Olav Trygvason 62—63, 165—166). Eyvind escaped and tried to overcome the king by magic, but was eventually captured and drowned. This pattern persisted into the witch-burning phase of the late Middle Ages, when, unlike the situation in the rest of Europe, in Scandinavia it was men rather than women who were usually accused.

In the sagas, Seidh practiced by men is more likely to be negative. In Gislisaga 18, a seidhmadhr is hired to work seidh “that there should be no help for the man who had killed Thorgrim, however much men might want to give it to him, and there should be no rest for him in the country.” In Laxdaelasaga 35, Kotkel and his sons build a seidh scaffold and work weather magic against Thorold. A storm comes up and he is drowned.

At the end of the description of Odin's magic in Ynglingasaga, Snorri explains that at one time, this kind of magic was practiced by both genders, but it eventually was considered so ergi, or “unmanly,” that it was restricted to women. The term ergi is a complex one, with meanings ranging from “sexually receptive” to “cowardly” or “sneaky,” all of which seem to have evolved as Norse gender roles became increasingly polarized. Some years ago, I attempted to analyze the relationship in an essay published in Idunna 31 called “Sex, Status and Seið: Homosexuality and Germanic Religion” (available online at www.seidh.org).

In her article, “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women and Power in Early Northern Europe,” Carol J. Clover demonstrates that when there is a conflict situation in the sagas, the important distinction is not between the male and female sexes but between the roles of hvatr, someone who takes physical action, and blaudr, which may refer to a woman or an old man or a person of any gender who cannot take up a sword and deal with the matter directly (Clover 1993, 2). As you shall see when we look at Odin as a battle god, his role in a military situation usually involves strategy or magic rather than combat.

Gand

Seið and Galdr are not the only kinds of magic mentioned in the passage from Ynglingasaga. In Old Norse, the term gand refers to anything enchanted, in particular magical items used by sorcerers, and by extension to magic. In the Old Norse dictionary, Cleasby and Vigfusson define a gandr as an object that has been bewitched. It occurs in a variety of compound terms, such as the gand-reid, or witches' ride. It can also mean a spirit-being and can take the form of a wolf. Price sees it as “a general kind of sorcerous energy from which all power was drawn” (2002, 66). It is probably in this sense that the word is used in the Völuspá 22 description of Gullveig/Heidh. Orchard translates “vitti hon ganda” as “the skill of wands.”

By the later Middle Ages, the word “gand” had come to mean a magical wand or staff. Price (2002, 87) cites a study by Clive Tolley, who points out that a derivative of gandr is the word göndull, which seems to refer to a staff, possibly used to summon or direct the gand spirits. As it happens, another of Odin's names is Göndlir, which by this reasoning would mean “staff-bearer.” Another byname, Sveigðir means “cane (or wand?)-bringer.” Price also quotes a spell collected during a 14th century Norwegian witch trial—“I ride [or ’thrust’] from me göndull's breaths, one to bite you in the back, another to bite you in the breast, a third to turn harm and evil upon you” (Price 2002, 178).

The evidence is inconclusive, but the image that comes to me is of Odin using his staff and his önd to send his wolves Geri and Freki forth to attack his foes. This certainly gives them a more worthy purpose than recycling the god's uneaten offerings.

Shamanism

Coming fresh from my study of the shamanic literature, the Ynglingasaga's negative description of Odin's magical powers struck me as very like the way a Christian missionary encountering a Pagan tribe might summarize the local shaman's skills. But can we call Odin a shaman? Shamanism, a term that originated among the tribes of Siberia, has been widely used, or misused. In his exploration of shamanic practices around the world, Mircea Eliade defines it as

a technique of religious ecstasy. Shamanism encompasses the premise that shamans are intermediaries or messengers between the human world and the spirit worlds. Shamans are said to treat ailments/illness by mending the soul. Alleviating traumas affecting the soul/spirit restores the physical body of the individual to balance and wholeness. The shaman also enters supernatural realms or dimensions to obtain solutions to problems afflicting the community. Shamans may visit other worlds/dimensions to bring guidance to misguided souls and to ameliorate illnesses of the human soul caused by foreign elements. The shaman operates primarily within the spiritual world, which in turn affects the human world. The restoration of balance results in the elimination of the ailment. (Eliade 1972, 3—7)

The shaman is a spiritual practitioner who serves a tribe or rural community. He or she may be called to the work after having a near-death or visionary experience in which he or she is destroyed and reconstituted by the spirits. The new shaman is trained by the spirits or by an older shaman. Shamanic skills include trance journeys to gain knowledge or information, to heal the sick by retrieving their spirits, or to access otherworldly power with the help of spirit allies. Like many other spiritual traditions, the context and details of shamanic practices in different places are shaped by the culture and the influences of other religions in the area in which they occur. Properly speaking, in each culture, the local name for such spiritual specialists should be used, but it is also clear that a very similar pattern of experiences and skills is found in cultures from Siberia to Tierra del Fuego. If shamanic practice has indeed survived from a very early stage of human evolution, it seems reasonable to expect that traces of it would be found in Europe as well.

In 1980, Michael Harner, who had done ethnographic work among the Jivaro people of the Ecuadorian Amazon, published The Way of the Shaman, the seminal work in contemporary neo-shamanism, and established the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. His work does not claim to be “authentic” shamanic practice but is rather a synthesis and adaptation that can be effectively used by modern Americans and Europeans in a very different culture. People trained in his system are doing good work as “shamanic” therapists in many countries today.

At the time Harner's book came out, my own studies had already taken me through Women's Spirituality, eclectic Wicca, and Western Esoteric Kabbalah, and I felt a need to balance my ceremonial training with more intuitive skills. By then I had enough experience with trance journeying to take Harner's book and put into practice many of the skills covered there. It was not until 1987 that I had an opportunity to actually participate in the introductory workshop. This is the workshop where, as described in the introduction, I met Odin. This book is one of the results of that encounter.

While I understand the reactions of those scholars who stoutly maintain that Odin is not a shaman, the fact that he chose to tag me at a neo-shamanic workshop where I was most certainly not expecting to encounter him requires that I look at the reasons writers like Mircea Eliade, who devotes several pages to the evidence for shamanic practices in Scandinavian culture, think that he is.

In part 1 of Shamanism, Eliade identifies the following features of shamanism, which can be compared to the list in Ynglingasaga as follows:

1. Shamanism—The shaman is the most prestigious spiritual worker in his region, although he may coexist with other kinds of priests or even other religions, because his spirit leaves his body and travels between the worlds.

Norse myth—Odin and Freyja are the Norse gods most famed for their mastery of magic. Both wander the world or worlds.

2. Shamanism—The shaman has one or more spirit allies, taking the form of animals, ancestors, or other beings, that are called and controlled by magical songs.

Norse myth—Odin gets information from his ravens, Huginn and Muninn, and rides his magical horse, Sleipnir, between the worlds. His wolves may also be allies. He is famed for his mastery of magic songs.

3. Shamanism—The shaman can perceive souls and soul parts and retrieve them to heal or guide a soul to the afterlife.

Norse Myth—Odin can talk to the dead, on earth or in the Underworld. His valkyries escort those whom he chooses from the battlefield to his hall.

4. Shamanism—The shaman experiences an illness or near-death crisis in which he may experience death and reconstruction, learns from the spirits through dreams and visions, and is trained in his people's magical tradition.

Norse Myth—Odin “dies,” self-sacrificed, by being stabbed and hanging on the Worldtree. In the process, he acquires the runes and learns their mysteries.

5. Shamanism—The Otherworld has levels and a detailed cosmology that can be mapped.

Norse Myth—The Norse Otherworld has nine worlds, including our own. Odin wanders through them all.

Of these elements, the one that has perhaps attracted the most attention from the shamanic scholars is Odin's ordeal on the Worldtree. We will be discussing that in more detail in the next chapter, which looks at Odin as the giver of the runes.

One objection to identifying Odin's magic as shamanism is the absence of one of the most powerful shamanic tools for altering consciousness and raising power—the drum. Certainly the Saami, who have shared a great deal of magic with their Norse neighbors, use drums; however, the lack of references in the sagas (or, I must admit, of archaeological evidence) has led most scholars to doubt that drums were used by the Vikings. There is, however, one example that is, if not conclusive, at least suggestive.

One of the few humorous poems in the Elder Edda (given Old Norse definitions of humor) is the Lokasenna, a story in which Loki crashes a party at Aegir's place and proceeds to systematically insult all the gods and goddesses. Unfortunately, all the evidence we have from other sources suggests that everything he says, however scurrilous, is true. When Odin attempts to defend Gefon, Loki responds,

But you worked Seidh, they say, on Samsey Isle

Beat on the drum(?) like the völur;

Like unto a vitki, fared among men:

I think that those were ergi ways.

Lokasenna 24

Völva (singular of vôlur) and Vitki are terms for a female and male worker of magic, respectively—witch and wizard, you might say. Draptu á vétt—“Beat on the drum”—is my attempt to translate a much-debated phrase, since the closest we can come to a translation of vétt is something like “box lid.” Chisholm gives the phrase as “plied magic”; Hollander, “wove magic”; and Orchard, “beat the drum.” I conclude that when Odin was working magic like a Völva, a term usually translated as “witch,” he was using some kind of rhythm as an aid to altering consciousness.

In the years since I started working with Odin, I have created and collected a variety of magical tools, including a seidh staff, a rune wand, and a drum.

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Fig. 7. Seidh staff, wand, and drum

The drum is made of elk hide and shows creatures from the Norse tradition placed in the Upper, Middle, and Lower worlds. Although this drum is too sensitive to moisture to be of much use outdoors, in a controlled environment, striking the images showing different levels or animals is a useful way to guide myself through a trance journey.

Practice

The path that drew me to Odin was magic. The skills to which it led me required years of exploration—presented in my books, Trance-Portation, The Way of the Oracle, and Possession, Depossession, and Divine Relationships—and what I know now is only a beginning. The first step on this path is self-knowledge.

1. Self-evaluation before studying magic

What magical practices have you tried?

What knowledge/abilities do you already have?

___ concentration and focus

___ memory

___ poetry/song

___ visualization

___ sigils and charms

___ energy sensing

___ trance work

___ connection with spirits

2. Use the Galdralag verse form to write a spell.

For an example of a verse in Galdralag, see the prayer on page 59.

3. Second of the Nine Nights Meditations:

Set up your altar and prepare the space as before. Light a blue candle and invoke Odin as Vitki. Then say:

Odin, by these names I call you:

Göndlir (Staff Wielder)

Jolnir (Yule Being)

Sváfnir (Sleep Bringer)

Thrótt (Magical Power),

Fjölsvidh (Much Wise)

Sanngetal (Truth Guesser)

Jalk (Gelding)

Grímnir (Masked One)

Magic's Master, Wand Wielder, hear me,

Mighty Singer of spells,

Word power I want, wisdom I wish for

To work my will in the world,

To work my will.

Seidh madhr show me, spirit inspiring

How to soar between the worlds.

Drum with the witches, whisper open my heart,

Till it pulses with power,

To receive the power.

Meditate on the meaning of power. What power do you have and how do you use it? Do you want “Power over” or “Power to”? Sit quietly and count your breathing, letting the words bubble up into your awareness and then float away until your spirit is still. Continue to breathe and open your awareness to the currents of energy around you. Open your heart to the god. If words come to you, write them down. When the time feels right, breathe more quickly and move your limbs to return to ordinary consciousness.

Rune Song

Odin old one-eye

hanging nine nights on a tree

waiting for wisdom.

You hung till the tree

grew into you

branching red tree of life

bare white bone tree of death.

The first night fear fastened your lids;

the second fog formed in vague clusters,

at eye corner blooming and buzzing;

the third night world came into focus

trees, mountains, meander of rivers,

sharp as new-made;

the fourth night was motion:

boar, cave bear and flea;

the fifth night came Huginn to sit on your head

you brought into being the four thinkers,

your one eye struggling for their shapes.

The sixth night you stretched down,

drank Mimir's water,

recalled and called them by name;

the seventh Muninn, black clot of feathers,

settled on your shoulder.

Nothing, you could forget nothing now.

The eighth night your black mind

saw, inner eye saw

all was nothing:

nothing within, nothing without

nothing now, nothing then, nothing to come.

On the ninth night hanging

on the tree of yourself

you saw

how you held it all within you,

everything and nothing within you,

and you lifted your voice, singing.

Holding yourself together,

inner and outer together,

blood tree and bone tree and world tree together,

beginning and ending together,

holding all things together,

you sang.

—Elizabeth Harrod (1999, 10)

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Fig. 8. Odin on the Tree

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