Sacrifice. There’s always a thread, hanging, that needs to be cut.
Sacrifice. ‘To make sacred.’ To trim off the old in order to weave in the new.
Sacrifice. Death consecrates life.
Odinn is always discontent: can’t know enough. He’s like some of you that way: never satisfied. That’s the real reason he wanders. He says he needs to recruit people. Really, he just wants to know everything, about everyone, everywhere.
Anyway, on this day, he wanted to know death, so he did. It looked like a deep purple spot on his tapestry. Purple is the hardest colour, for everyone involved. So, when Urdr spun purple, we all knew it was going to be, well, interesting… and exhausting. Purple is exhausting… in the best possible way.
We were tending to the roots of Yggdrasil, feeding her the compost of life: you know, like the expressed emotions, forgiven slights, and reconciled dreams, when we noticed Odinn watching with an obsessive kind of interest. He’s always that way, really, either interested, or not. He was staring. And then he pulled out a noose.
I remember one of us muttered ‘purple.’ I’m not sure which one now. It doesn’t matter. In any event, he looked at us as if we might do something, like try to talk him out of it, or shoot him, or cover him in dried fruit, or any one of a million other things only he would think of. When we told him we saw the purple—it was ørlog, not wyrd—he sighed with relief. I don’t know what he thought, but he seemed happy that we weren’t going to go rogue on him.
Then it was so sweet! He asked us to watch over him. Of course, we told him! That’s what we’re here for! Then Urdr crawled into the tree to tie the rope so he wouldn’t fall prematurely—ørlog is mostly her department. She got the noose all cinched up, and dangling over the well. He didn’t really seem to want the well, but we wanted to be sure that if he fell he wouldn’t hurt himself… more than was necessary …and that he would have access to creation, or recreation, in his case.
Then he clawed his way up, stabbed himself with Gungnir—no easy task—and there he hung. Day in and day out, for nine days. Huggin and Muninn, Freki and Geri, they all just sat here with him, guarding him. Frigg was watching through her scrying pool. She didn’t want to add pressure. So sweet. His visitors came and went: mostly his ancestors—Búri brought him some honeyed-apple-cake, but he wasn’t in the eating mood, what with a spear in his side. We wrapped up the cake and put it on a ledge just inside the well to keep it fresh til he was done.
Someone brought him some mead, too: magical mead, of course. You wouldn’t give a dying god just a regular glass! Now they call that the mead of poetry, but it’s really more like the mead of beauty and power. For us, that’s what poetry means.
And he learned the spells and carved the runes. I know the rune thing seems wyrd, and it is. He carved them in himself. He scored them into his heart, mind, and soul, as he hung there, sometimes weeping, sometimes laughing…you know how it is when reality is too big to fit into your body and you waffle between despair and ecstasy: that was it. At first, it was slow: he’d be groaning all morning, then grinning all afternoon, but it sped up as he dangled until, at the end, it was hard to tell which end of the spectrum he was on… we suspected both.
On the last night, the Valkyrjur stayed with him in a candle light vigil. It was one of the most beautiful things we’ve ever seen. And we rarely agree on that kind of thing. It was on Walpurgis Night, sort of like your Halloween but without the costumes and candy. Wild, instinctual, magic builds up all year and breaks loose that night, only to be reigned in the following day … unless, of course, it’s first subsumed into the body of a god… and that night it was.
In the morning, his ecstatic-fever broke: broke him: broke his rope; broke his makeshift gallows. And he dropped, less like a rock than like a feather, truth be told, into the well, where he drank, and drank, and drank. He eventually climbed out, retrieving, then enjoying, his honeyed-apple-cake. And for one moment, and one moment only, Odinn was satisfied.
Sacrifice. Releases past.
Sacrifice. Restarts heart.
Sacrifice. Reveals magic.