Odin: The True God of All Witches

[muninnskiss]

“You’re walking on gallows ground, and there’s a rope around your neck and a raven-bird on each shoulder waiting for your eyes, and the gallows tree has deep roots, for it stretches from heaven to hell, and our world is only the branch from which the rope is swinging.”
~American Gods, Neil Gaiman

Comments

[muninnskiss]

> I agree with much of what you write. Odin is not one to be fluffy-bunnyed. But he is also the god of ecstasy, of poetry, of gambling. Warriors *wanted* to end up in Valhalla b/c they knew Odin throws the best parties.

Yes, definitely. I think the ecstasy and poetry, the wisdom and intellect, parts are what draw me to him.

> But this bit is incorrect according to Lore and to most heathens: He is the "true god of all witches" and the last face you see at the Gates of Death (Arddhu?). Are you willing to face him? He is terrible, he is to be feared, he is unpredictable, but all come before him and "every knee shall bow."

> He's not the last face you see, unless he's specifically chosen you to be among his warriors. And he's picky about whom he chooses to be Einharjar. And he is not the Arddhu - the Arddhu as far as I know is another entity from another pantheon.

Well, in that paragraph, I was more addressing Robert Cochrane's "interpretation" which is based more on British folklore than on traditional Norse/Germanic belief. I may be jumping too far from what he said, but there are marked differences between his views and the traditional views. Not taking into considerations of differences between the northern Scandinavian beliefs verses the southern Germanic beliefs, both of which influenced different areas of Britain.

I wasn't really saying whether or not Odin actually *is* the Arddhu, more noting the similarities. Odin and Hermes are very different pantheons as well, and have a lot of differences, yet Robert Cochrane saw them as the same. I suspect he would place Thoth and Genesh there as well.

Tettens is the one RC concentrates on, and the name most of the Cochrane-related traditions use. No one knows for sure where the name comes from. It's the name of a small town in Lower Saxony in Germany, but there's no evidence anyone, as far as I know, has found connecting the town name to anything in any mythology, let alone to Odin. More than likely he drew from some local folktale or from something he learned from someone else. Either way, whether Tettens really is Odin or not, the description in the paragraph I included contains both similarities and extreme differences from the Norse version of Odin. As the beliefs of the gods traveled, it changed with the people. (I've been reading too much American Gods lately. lol)

When I'm talking about the Arddhu, I'm talking about the Feri god, not the Welsh one by that name, though there's certainly a connection. Just like when I talk about Nimue, it's not the Lady of the Lake in the Arthurian legends, though there's once again certainly a connection. Feri lore is that all true religions came from the original Feri or Faery or Fairy religion, from the religion of a specific race that spread across the world spreading that religion. Whether that's true or just too much Murray, the idea is important to many in Feri. Victor said, "All gods are Feri gods." The understanding I was taught of the Feri gods, or the lemniscate gods, or the Reflections of the Star Goddess, depending on who you ask, is that all gods land on the continuum that is the Feri gods. One description of the main gods, Nimue, Dian y Glas/Melk Ta'us, Mari, Krom/Tyr, the Anna, and the Arddhu, is that they are convenient stopping points on that continuum, and that there are thousands of gods near each one. Nimue matures into Mari, then into the Anna, Dian y Glas into Tyr into the Arddhu. They are all part of cycles, all the Star Goddess in how she appears to us. Yet they're each distinct "persons", each real. Feri is full of paradox.