Sayings of the High One

Well, it's that time of year again. The season when the Wild Hunt rides the sky and the sun flickers down to an ember, perhaps never to rekindle.

I like Yuletide, but the magic for me lies not in the Bethlehem child and his royal gifts but in rather darker and fiercer deities. Like Alan Moore, I believe all these things are real - in the same way that love and hate are real, not in the way that log fires and mince pies are. But some are more real to me than others. Odin and the other Aesir, above all the other gods mankind has imagined. They feel like old friends.

Whatever your beliefs, or lack of same, may you rise to find the sun still in its heaven and with a year of wondrous experiences laid out ahead. I'll leave you with the Allfather on Yggdrasil:

"I know that I hung on the wind-swept tree,
Nine long days and nights;
Stabbed with the spear, sacrificed I was
To Odin, myself to myself,
High on the tree that none may ever know
What root beneath it runs.

"None gave me succour with food or drink,
As I gazed right down in the deep;
I took up the runes, shrieking I took them,
And forthwith back I fell."

Thus Odin spoke before the world began;
Then he rose and came again.

Illustration by Paul Reck (Odingraphics) on DeviantArt, reproduced here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.