It is the first of November. All-Saints Day. The Feast of All-Hallows. All part of Allhallowtide.So what do these Christian festivals have to do with the Old Man?
Nothing - and perhaps everything.
There are rhythms in the world which are quite apart from what we moderns might call ‘religion’, Movements of landscape, climate, geography, psyche and soul which have little to do with what should be and everything to do with what is.
Here in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s autumn, or near-as-damnit. Darkness comes, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it, no matter how many watts we burn through, how many turbines we turn with fire and water.
“Darkness precedes light and She is Mother.”
In 1084, that inscription was made on the altar at Salerno Cathedral, just two decades after the Normans conquered England, and less than a hundred after the Icelanders had converted to Christianity.
Consider this, consider myth-time and realise it has its own pulse. It may quicken and slow as the situation dictates, may race in moments of frenzy, may ease and move with languid inhuman patience, spiralling out into forever.
Consider that for a child, a year may as well be an eternity, a season seemingly endless.
tide (n.) Old English tid “point or portion of time, due time, period, season; feast-day, canonical hour,” from Proto-Germanic *tidiz “division of time” (cognates: Old Saxon tid, Dutch tijd, Old High German zit, German Zeit “time”), from PIE *di-ti- “division, division of time,” suffixed form of root *da- “to divide, cut up” (cognates: Sanskrit dati “cuts, divides;” Greek demos “people, land,” perhaps literally “division of society,” daiesthai “to divide;” Old Irish dam “troop, company”).
Meaning “rise and fall of the sea” (mid-14c.) probably is via notion of “fixed time,” specifically “time of high water;” either a native evolution or from Middle Low German getide (compare Middle Dutch tijd, Dutch tij, German Gezeiten “flood tide, tide of the sea”). Old English seems to have had no specific word for this, using flod and ebba to refer to the rise and fall. Old English heahtid “high tide” meant “festival, high day.”
The ebb and flow has its own sense, its own rhythm. This is the time for the in-between, not because of any so-called ‘veils’ falling or thinning, but because of the rhythm of light and darkness, of Sun and Earth, of blood and fire and voices raised in song. Like it or not, the West is embedded in Christian culture - for a thousand years, Christians have known this time and tide, to say nothing of the pagans who came before and interwove themselves between them.
Ten centuries. But the rhythm is older than that, for it’s brought by the darkness. It’s brought by the harvest’s end, and the drawing close together against Winter’s-Nights, against a time when the earth gleams with frosted skin, when winds howl and bare branches beat out the ancient refrains, the clattering bone-rattles and the bony-scratches on wood, stone, and skin.
Were there no Church grouped around the Christ, were there no memory of the old gods, no songs and stories to inspire us, to incline our minds to the presence of the numinous Powers, the Hallowtide would still come.
hallow (v.) Old English halgian “to make holy, sanctify; to honor as holy, consecrate, ordain,” related to halig “holy,” from Proto-Germanic *hailagon (cognates: Old Saxon helagon, Middle Dutch heligen, Old Norse helga), from PIE root *kailo- “whole, uninjured, of good omen” (see health). Used in Christian translations to render Latin sanctificare. Related: Hallowed; hallowing.
saint (n.) early 12c., from Old French saint, seinte “a saint; a holy relic,” displacing or altering Old English sanct, both from Latin sanctus “holy, consecrated” (used as a noun in Late Latin; also source of Spanish santo, santa, Italian san, etc.), properly past participle ofsancire “consecrate” (see sacred). Adopted into most Germanic languages (Old Frisian sankt, Dutch sint, German Sanct).
Originally an adjective prefixed to the name of a canonized person; by c. 1300 it came to be regarded as a noun. Meaning “person of extraordinary holiness” is recorded from 1560s
It’s sometimes hard to conceive a place for the gods in the modern world. The old names and titles seem distant, disconnected from our lives in the 21st century. So perhaps it’s no wonder they come to us in new forms and new shapes, either erupting into our minds and bodies, impressing themselves on our existences via media and patterns of daily life
Or, sometimes, we find ourselves seemingly alone, only to see them emerge, resolve while we’re not paying attention, so that one moment, it is as if they never existed - and the next, our senses are snared, and we wonder how in all the worlds we missed them before now.
But there are things outside modern life. Things which modern life finds uncomfortable, or tries to route around. The darkness is one such thing. There is no holding back the inevitable shift of the Earth at its Solstices and Equinoxes, these fundamental turning points in our lives and existences. Whether we like it or not, there are times and tides when things become different.
weird (adj.) c. 1400, “having power to control fate, from weird (n.), from Old English wyrd “fate, chance, fortune; destiny; the Fates,” literally “that which comes,” from Proto-Germanic *wurthiz (cognates: Old Saxon wurd, Old High German wurt “fate,” Old Norse urðr"fate, one of the three Norns”), from PIE *wert- “to turn, to wind,” (cognates: German werden, Old English weorðan “to become”), from root *wer- (3) “to turn, bend” (see versus). For sense development from “turning” to “becoming,” compare phrase turn into “become.”
versus (prep.) mid-15c., in legal case names, denoting action of one party against another, from Latin versus “turned toward or against,” from past participle of vertere (frequentative versare) “to turn, turn back, be turned, convert, transform, translate, be changed,” from PIE *wert- “to turn, wind,” from root *wer- (3) “to turn, bend” (cognates: Old English -weard “toward,” originally “turned toward,” weorthan “to befall,” wyrd “fate, destiny,” literally “what befalls one;” Sanskrit vartate “turns round, rolls;” Avestan varet-“to turn;” Old Church Slavonic vrŭteti “to turn, roll,” Russian vreteno “spindle, distaff;” Lithuanian ver čiu “to turn;” Greek rhatane “stirrer, ladle;” German werden, Old English weorðan “to become” (for sense, compare turn into); Welsh gwerthyd “spindle, distaff;” Old Irish frith “against”).
Things that, when you hold them against the light, well, an altogether different picture may emerge.
Things that may only be seen, and understood at the juxtaposition of light and darkness, figures which stand at the boundary between the known and the unknown, that lead us to acknowledge our own primordial nature. That with implacable, inhuman, immortal patience, cause us to confront our own mortality and powerlessness. That force us to make a choice-that-is-no-choice:
“There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” - CG Jung
(”It hurts to become”, says the Gallows God across the centuries,between the silences, howling in the night amidst the roaring of the wind and the creaking of the Tree)
We are beckoned into our inevitability at such times, into the processes that lead us to the-here-and-now, and it is only in that state that we can truly acknowledge Memory. Faced with the infinite darkness, the Mother of Light itself, we are once again cast into womb-and-tomb.
The knowledge that we are surrounded by the Larger, nourished, strengthened, delivered and doomed by it. We become aware that we are in fact, only the current iteration of our ancestors, and in this awareness, in the darkness we take our place amongst the Dead - we wear the masks, the costumes of fear and dread transformed into joy, mirth and celebration of our part in a living, breathing kosmos.
We are presented with the reality that the Dead are always with us, at every moment, in our every moment. We acknowledge that it is they who birthed us, that we emerge from the tomb, and are presented with an inner-soul-light.
And by that weird light, that wyrd-light of fox-fire that dances in the dark we perceive the restless nature of existence itself, the Dance of the Dead. We, living beings, suddenly masked and like the dead, are met by Grimnir - the Masked God, the Hooded One, and he speaks:
Would you know more?
III
Oðinn has many names, any many more secrets besides. One of the biggest is perhaps the most obvious and yet often overlooked:
Oðinn itself is a heiti - a title. His name, as with other godnames and beings of the period, is oblique, a dual-purpose concealer and revealer of his nature. If he ever had a ‘true name’ it is long lost, overwhelmed by his sheer presence.
Stitched together in a patchwork cloak, his many names swirl about him like a storm, the inexpressible in-betweeness of his nature shining through the rough scars and tattoos by which our perception attempts to grasp him.
The double-headed ambivalence of him shifts and dances, pulses and fluxes, drawing us ever on. And how can it be otherwise? For is not the master of wodh, the ecstatic, feral frenzy that gives bloody birth to poets and kings? The stirrer of souls, the rune-shrieker, the tactical striker, the master manipulator, the oath-breaker and worker of evil?
He’s the Uncanny Bastard - Das Unheimliche:
The uncanny (German: Das Unheimliche, “the opposite of what is familiar”) is a mixture of the familiar and unfamiliar that is experienced as being peculiar.[1] The psychological concept of the uncanny as something that is strangely familiar, rather than just mysterious, was perhaps first fixed by Sigmund Freud in his essay Das Unheimliche.[2][3]
Because the uncanny is familiar, yet incongruous, it has been seen as creating cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject, due to the paradoxical nature of being simultaneously attracted to yet repulsed by an object.
[…]
In The Will to Power manuscript Nietzsche refers to nihilism as “the uncanniest of all guests"
Uncanniness was first explored psychologically by Ernst Jentsch in a 1906 essay, On the Psychology of the Uncanny. Jentsch defines the Uncanny as: being a product of ”intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one’s way about in. The better oriented in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it.“
Freud draws on a wholly different element of the story, namely, “the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes,” as the “more striking instance of uncanniness”
Freud goes on, for the remainder of the essay, to identify uncanny effects that result from instances of “repetition of the same thing,” linking the concept to that of the repetition compulsion.[5] He includes incidents wherein one becomes lost and accidentally retraces one’s steps, and instances wherein random numbers recur, seemingly meaningfully (here Freud may be said to be prefiguring the concept that Jung would later refer to as synchronicity). He also discusses the uncanny nature of Otto Rank’s concept of the “double.”
Freud specifically relates an aspect of the Uncanny derived from German etymology. By contrasting the German adjective unheimlich with its base word heimlich (“concealed, hidden, in secret”), he proposes that social taboo often yields an aura not only of pious reverence but even more so of horror and even disgust, as the taboo state of an item gives rise to the commonplace assumption that that which is hidden from public eye (cf. the eye or sight metaphor) must be a dangerous threat and even an abomination - especially if the concealed item is obviously or presumingly sexual in nature.
(Bolding mine, from Wikipedia)
As concealer and revealer, the blind guest and Lord of the Host of the Dead, he stands there, between the darkness and light. As the Terrible Old Man, the Awful Stranger, he is the Watcher from the Dark, the boundary crosser, the Eldest Ancestor, the healer who is missing an eye, his ambiguity and fluidity makes him serve as soul-stirrer and guide.
He is the omnipresent eye on you, the thing that watches you as you pass through the forest, that sets the hair on the back of your neck to rise, the monstrous affront to all that is holy, and in that affronting-againstness is rendered a very peculiar kind of hallowed, a precise holiness as strange as burning darkness or the sun at midnight
Just as his his heroes are monsters who fight monsters, so he is their exemplar - the liar who speaks truth, the killer who prizes life, the preserver of the worlds, and their destroyer. The blasphemous saint, the daemonic god of darkness who brings wisdom and light, the strife-bringer who soothes away cares, and teaches freedom by inescapable inevitability
He is hunger, insatiability, need, desire, fury, fire, ice, joy, terror, glory and endless incompleteness, all knotted triply and more Whole than Whole
He is god of kings, of poets, of madfolk and cripples, of the sick and the able. Witch and warlock, monster and beloved, he is High, Just as High, and Third
He is Himself.
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