Wōden, for the Anglo, Odin for the Scando, is the God of Ecstasy. So the learned tell us. Not the club drug. Not the goofy little twat making good o-faces for bad reasons. (No woman or man should ever feel anything they dare call Ecstasy at unboxing a thing.) Ecstasy. A kind of energetic force which brings quick and prescient meaning. This living force was Wōden’s breath. Ecstasy may not be the best word. Önd has been proposed. Odr has also. But not many of us, not even Scando-Nationals, speak Old Norse. Most Asatruar can do with smatterings of Old English and Norse enough to give delicious spice to modern life. And Ecstasy isn’t the worst word, the shoe does fit. Enthusiasm is another. We forget that Latin shares an etymological, and thus mythopoeic, root in foggy prehistory where Yggdrasil was sown. They all point to something higher. Perhaps the latter more than the former.
A vital component of Man has been collared and abused. That is, didabused from his embrace of Ecstasy. Perhaps cultural mileage varies. But as regular readers know, I come from Yankee stock. Anyone from Away with cultural awareness who has come here from the vast country named Away calls us “dour.” Even if Puritanism became Transcendentalism and/or Perfectionism before being gobbled up by orthodox pragmatism and later secular agnosticism, than Orthopraxis is still imbedded in our culture. You do the right thing, you say the right thing. Respect is earned, only polity is given. They swatted the W.A.S.P’s Nest but the craving for respectability remains. A culture now perverted and turned to service of The Enemy. I know the Scandos, whether foreign nationals or assimilated specimens, have internalised the ghost of Janteleven which possesses, forgive me – enthuses – them and colours their pursuit of Ecstasy.
Grey.
That is the colour of the energy. For them and us, who come from reform protestant traditions with all the benefit and detriment that entails.
Bland. Dull. Lifeless. Drab. A doldrum. Droll. Peckish. Peevish. Timid. Cautious… keine Sturm, leben ohne Drang. ekelhaft.
Alas alack, I must digress.
Are you aware one of the names of Ymir is Aurgelmir? Sometimes understood as ‘one who shrieks from the mud.’ Our world was conceived in screaming. If one takes the third position on missionaries then it’s understood that life is conceived in prayers screamed to forgotten Gods. Sandbox gods? Please. Wōden was a God of many things. Sex, poetry, death, bloodshed, philosophy, the list goes on. Each item ticked is fuelled by Ecstasy and has a component that relates to the first three on the list.
Sex without Ecstasy is dreary. Poetry without Ecstasy is glum, uninspiring. (Another underrated word.) Death without Ecstasy is pathetic and demoralising. Nevermore and nevermind that the list items are all shaking hands behind closed doors. The little death is nothing without sex, and what would the poet praise without lovemaking and life ending? Nature, but even this is betrayingly genitive. Take the allegory out of nature and you get something unnatural.
Life itself is a monad, a prolonged act of birth whose conception we were asleep to witness, but of whose trembling aftermath we are a presumptive proud part.
Life is an Ecstatic exchange, therefore. Most enthusiastically.
Enthusiasm, for those uninitiated into the Cults of Funk & Wagnell, originally had a much deeper meaning. Possession by a God. Wōden’s proposed PIE name relates to “possession.”
bigthink.exe
What does any of this have to do with men, or vital essences? Man’s nature is logical, woman’s is emotional. Obviously these attributes are meted out in unequal measure so exceptions can prove the rule. But it is a rule. Man exists in an endless pit of thought. His very biology betrays this. He gives, women take. Not just in the art of sex, but in conversation, in a natural infrastructure. Man is awash in thinking, bargaining, reasoning. His only escape is to routinely empty himself.
Why does man have his obsession with brutality?
Nature denied.
In danger, a man can empty himself and become animal. I myself have never felt so alive as in the warm afterglow of times I could have died but was bigger than the death made little by my Providence. Steering out of a potential wreck? Manoeuvring through a fall off a roof’s edge? Absorbing shock from falling construction debris 30 feet in the air? Walking away breeds lively feeling.
But days, weeks, months, years can pass between Ecstasy. Oh of course, sex is a lovely thing and here is a wonderful shade of Ecstasy. But I think the State of Nature today proves it is not enough. Man was born to conquer, subdue and bring order in perpetuity. Does he do this? Most assuredly not in the Absolute State of ZOG.
It was once understood that in these moments of emptying, when man and all his pomp and pretence is cleared from the table, something greater comes to the movable feast. It was once believed Deity came inside the spaces between orgasms, filling the body so briefly emptied of mind. But why should the metaphor end there? It was never supposed to.
This is why trance is such a suppressed component of every religion that matters. Altered consciousness. There is no room for a God of the heart when the God of the mind is on the throne. You know I’m right. Overthinking can kill hope in anything. It detracts from being. Being is a state of absolute simplicity, understood theologically.
Wisdom can leave a man, being a mistress who requires a tickle down below to perform. In absence of enthusiasm she has no choice but leave. Here the intellect becomes stagnant. Thoughts become obsessions. Trifles fester and become seeping wounds. You become rotten inside. Achey, lonely and pathetic.
You must drain the venom.
Odin, God of Ecstasy, like the Serpent which he becomes in chase of Sophia who is the breath of the Goddess, will drain venom. Why not take the Serpent back from the gormless lemmings who ruined us? Sucked from the wound, the mind unveils and the Sun again is thick and full and fat with sweet and sensuous healing light and warmth, a sumptuous beauty to behold whose magnetism you cannot but dare obey. Yes indeed. She is again the sweet Goddess of triumph, soft, giving shelter through her shadow and no longer the bastard son of the brutal of Sol Invictus whose very gaze burns your wretched hide and seeks your every hiding place to excoriate you.
All this lovely restoration from a moment’s work of becoming an animal. Shrieking and howling, ready and willing to carve out a throat with your teeth. Rage, passion, mindless and purifying, acts as a vehicle by which the unwanted immigration of malaise is so lovingly deported. A time of blind energy gaining sight, clarity, becoming awareness. You have joined Aurgelmir in a vengeful swansong and turned the wheel of Ragnarøk around again to visit hour own Ginunngagap. Emptied,to be filled. A world again.
It’s no wonder then we see the most famous devotees of the God of the Posessed were Berserks, Wolfhoods and Sceopen/Skaldar. These all are trqdes which turn upon the hinge of self sacrifice. Self unto self. Odin to Odin. In the sublime time the God of the Gaps is Odin, ourselves bridged by the Archetype of the Father God. Enthusiasm broached by Ecstasy.
Thus freed, inspiration- the original act of the making of man- happens. For what is inspiration? Breathing in, but never forget, spirare gave us Spirit – the Divine Breath. In all of speech, every word, is understanding. But only from that Inspiration following the Enthusiasm of Ecstasy can we appreciate.
So if nothing else, live a little. Throw in the earbuds, pump iron – big lifts, not the sissy lifts. Go sprint. Sweat out your pores and do something that strips away the outer layers. Something that makes it hard to think, think, think.
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Well. That’s what I think about that. I’ve more than likely been wrong about far more needful things. And men have gone out of their way to be right about far less useful things, too. So it goes.
wæs þu hāl.
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The Serpent's Loft 