“I hung on that windy tree, nine whole nights, wounded with a spear, offered to Odin, myself to myself; on that tree of which no man knows from what roots it rises. They gave me no bread, they gave me no mead, downwards I peered; I took up the runes; screaming I took them, then fell back.” - (Hávamál, lines 138–145 in some editions; translator D. A. Ashliman)
God of fury and ecstasy, sorcery and kingship, poetry and the dead. His Old Norse name, Óðinn, is built on óðr—mind-rapture, inspired fury—so his path is the way of deliberate possession: taking the god upon oneself to win knowledge, even at terrible cost. In the oldest poems and in Snorri’s prose you see him as wanderer, seer, necromancer, shape-shifter, oath-binder, and lord of the gallows. He is a wizard-king not because he commands spells from safety, but because he pays for them with his body, breath, blood, and reputation.
sources and lineaments
The backbone sources are the Poetic Edda (especially Hávamál, Völuspá, Grímnismál) and Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda and Heimskringla. From these we learn: Odin’s ravens, Huginn and Muninn—Thought and Memory—fly each day over the world and whisper what they have seen into his ears; the All-father feeds his wolves Geri and Freki but himself lives on wine; Valhöll has “five hundred and forty” doors through which the dead-chosen pour to meet the Wolf; and Odin will be swallowed by Fenrir at Ragnarök while his son Víðarr avenges him. These are not just mythic furniture—they are emblems of a path.
the hanging on the tree: the rune-initiation
Hávamál gives the core initiatory act. Odin speaks: “I hung on the windy tree, nine long nights; wounded with a spear, offered to Odin—myself to myself.” He fasts, peers into the deep, “cried out, took up the runes, then fell.” The verses then say he learned “nine mighty songs” and drank of the precious mead that quickens wisdom. This is the Edda’s charter text for runic gnosis: the runes are not letters first but living potencies seized in ordeal; the tree is not a ladder but a noose. (Cite small fragments:) “I hung on that windy tree… myself to myself” and “crying aloud I lifted the runes.”
Tradition sees that tree as Yggdrasill; the very name is likely “Yggr’s horse”—Yggr being an Odinic by-name—so the world-tree becomes the gallows steed of the god. To “ride the horse of the hanged” is to undergo the god’s death in order to receive his sight.
the eye at Mímir’s well
The other primal payment is the eye. In Völuspá the seeress taunts him: “I know, Óðinn, where your eye is hidden—in Mímir’s famous well; each morning Mímir drinks mead from the pledge of the Father of Hosts.” The text tightly knots sight, memory, and debt. Odin’s seeing is purchased; the world’s deep remembers his vow.
wizardry, seiðr, and crossing the line
Snorri’s Ynglinga saga sketches Odin’s sorceries with a plainness that makes them sharper: he travels in trance while his body lies like a corpse; he binds, blunts, or maddens foes with words; he raises the dead; he teaches runes and incantations; he practices the craft “in which the greatest power is lodged,” a magic that lets him foresee fate or steal strength—yet it leaves a stigma, “not thought respectable for men,” so women were trained in it. The same chapter notes that Freyja “first taught the people of Ásaland the magic art,” establishing the old lore that seiðr came from the Vanir through her and was taken up by Odin. The god of kingly dignity willingly learns a “woman’s” art because power is worth the shame. That crossing of a social boundary is part of his wizardry.
In scholarship this complex—seiðr, trance-journeys, spirit-sending, social and gender liminality—has long been read alongside circumpolar shamanisms. The details vary, but the picture holds: Odin is the patron of ecstasy techniques and of the costs that attend them.
mead, poetry, and the theft of speech
Odin is also the thief of the Mead of Poetry—the blood of Kvasir, distilled wisdom itself. Hávamál and Skáldskaparmál preserve the tale: he schemes, seduces, shapeshifts, and flies as an eagle to bring the mead to the gods. In Hávamál’s own sequence after the hanging we hear: “Nine mighty spells I learned… and I got a drink of the precious mead, poured from Óðrerir.” Inspiration comes as plunder and as sacrament, both.
death, oaths, and the spear
Odin is a gallows-god and a spear-god. Human victims were sometimes given to “Mercury” by the Germanic tribes—Roman writers equate Mercury with Odin—“and on certain days they deem it right to sacrifice to him even with human victims.” In saga memory Odin himself, dying, “marked himself with a spear-point” and dedicated the brave to him—an image that mirrors his own spear-wounding on the tree. The spear Gungnir thus becomes an oath-binding and life-claiming sign: to cast it over a host is to consecrate them to Odin.
ravens, wolves, horse, and hall
Huginn and Muninn—Thought and Memory—go out each day; Odin confesses he fears they may not return. This is a startling admission: even the god’s thought and memory are precarious, always at risk of not coming back from the world’s breadth. He feeds his wolves but himself drinks wine; his hall is a machine of war-initiation with “five hundred and forty” doors, disgorging ranks at world’s end. Sleipnir, the eight-legged horse, ferries him between worlds; many have seen in that horse the sign of the trance-ride, the “extra legs” of the shamanic mount. These emblems—the ravens, wolves, spear, horse, hall—are not decorations; they are a grammar of powers: cognition as envoy, hunger as ally, vow as weapon, vehicle as spirit-steed, community as death-tested fellowship.
- The hanged god. Hanging reverses ordinary breath; the initiate is “between winds,” starved of earth-comfort, speared (pierced intention), and bound to the axis mundi. The prize is not abstract knowledge but runic sight: patterned potency woven through being. From that moment Odin becomes the one who “carves and colors runes so that a hanged man will walk and talk”—he can wake what is dead, in himself and in others. This is necromancy as pedagogy.
- The one-eyed seer. Depth-sight is bought by narrowing the field. Losing an eye is the sacrifice of breadth for penetration. He gives up symmetry for insight. The well is memory itself—Mímir drinks each morning “from the pledge of the Father of Hosts”—so Odin’s vision is rooted in a covenant with the past.
- The shame-crossing magician. To take up seiðr is to be willing to be shamed by your own people to gain the power to heal, bind, unbind, and foreknow. Wizardry here is not clean; it stains. The stain is the seal of the bargain.
- The poet-thief. Odin’s inspiration is won by cunning and eros. He does not wait to be gifted with grace; he takes it and then distributes it. The wizard-archetype, in this light, is a breaker of locks whose theft becomes sacrament for his house.
- The king of the dead. Sacrifices by hanging and spear mark him as lord of those “set apart,” the chosen dead. That path (and Valhöll’s economy) says plainly: those who follow him are not promised safety; they are promised meaning.
Odin’s myth is a manual for the “royal art” in a northern key. The Hanged Man of the Tarot often is read through this lens: voluntary inversion to harvest a higher alphabet of power; but the deeper import is ethical—knowledge has a price, and only those who will pay it can be trusted with it. The “wizard archetype” in the West—Merlin, the Magus of the Golden Dawn, the runemaster in late occult revival—carries Odinic shadows: cloak, staff/spear, bird-familiars, names upon names, and a readiness to be thought monstrous if the Work demands it. Academic work on seiðr (e.g., Neil Price) underlines the blend of trance, performance, and gender-crossing at the root of this magic; Snorri supplies the medieval witness; the Eddic poems preserve the rites in riddles.
“I hung on that windy tree… myself to myself.” (Hávamál 137–138, tr. D. A. Ashliman.)
“I know, Óðinn, where you hid your eye… in Mímir’s famous well; Mímir drinks mead each morning from the pledge of the Father of Hosts.” (Völuspá 28, various translations collated.)
“Freyja… first taught the people of Ásaland the magic art…; but after such witchcraft followed such weakness and anxiety, that it was not thought respectable for men to practice it.” (Ynglinga saga, chs. 4–7, Laing tr.)
“Five hundred doors and forty… in Valhöll; eight hundred warriors go together from one door when they go to fight the wolf.” (Grímnismál 23.)
Which “eye” will you give? On which “tree” will you hang?