#woden

[weepingwidar]

Joseph Dilnot (British, 1997) - Woden (2023)

[wendelsae]

My Circumcision Theory

so in Ægypt & nearby lands at such a time, it was practice to chop off some member of enemies' corpses as a monument to triumph and to tally the slain. you see this on the Narmer Palette with heads; ears and hands were also used, which would have been easier to deal with than whole heads. but the Hebrews would also use foreskins for this purpose, as when Saul orders David to bring him two hundred Philistine foreskins.

probably the taking of foreskins was likewise an easier stylisation of taking the enemies' phalli whole; the symbolism there is hard to miss.

so for a Hebrew wye, the loss of the foreskin would be the greatest humiliation & submission possible- not only did the enemy kill you, they vanquished your whole army such as to be able to methodically violate your corpses like this. but what if the enemy couldn't do this?

recall the actual meaning of sacrifice- to make sacred to a god, that is, to remove it from the human economy and bequeath it to the god's estate. by sacrificing their own foreskins to the war-god IHVH, the Hebrews would accomplish several things, which are all the same thing framed from several angles from our deprived atheist viewpoint:

they would submit themselves utterly, not most shamefully to mortal men, but to the Lord of Hosts, to whom abjection is no dishonor.

they would deprive their enemy of the chance to collect the trophies or number their dead in the customary way. the Hebrew is ritually already dead, or, to say the same thing, Herclitan, the Hebrew is immortal.

by rendering themselves part of IHVH's treasure-horde, they secure his jealousy & wardenship in their favour.

a good comparand is how the Norse would cut themselves with speartips to devote themselves to Woden and ensure entrance to Walhall. I of course hold that Woden & IHVH are the same god (and Ba'al Hadad is Thunder).

[gifts-of-heimdall-runes]

"It is better not to pray at all than to pray for too much; nothing will be given that you won’t repay. It is better to sacrifice nothing than to offer too much."

Translation by Jackson Crawford.

Developed by an original found on a board by Diego Vega [Pinterest]

[astro-egg-celent]

One thing I always find funny is sci fi media where the spacefaring civilizations have "universal translator" devices that can decode completely foreign alien languages automatically, not just because it's pretty impossible to do that as-is, but also because how would it know not to over-translate? All words except onomatopoeia come from other languages ultimately, and that can drastically change the meaning. Like imagine the look of horror on an alien who translates "Jenny, let's have hamburgers Wednesday!" when it comes out as "Pale one, let us claim possession of the people from Hamburg, Germany, on Woden's day!" or "Spirit of the dead, allow us to eat the people of the riverbend town, upon the day of the Lord of Frenzy!"

[ur-folk]

Fighting madness is an ecstatic state of mind. Woden's name, which lives on in our "Wednesday," meant fury, but a fury that included a poet's ecstasy: Latin vates, "ecstatic poet," and Irish fáith, "seer, poet," come from the same root. In myths, Woden was the god of the poets. In Old Norse literature berserks spoke poems on the battlefield. These linguistic and mythological rapports give the berserk mind its place in Indo-European intellectual and cultural history.

The mind of berserk warriors in the second millennium BC may have been much the same as that of medieval berserk warriors two thousand years later. The English word "mind," related to "mania," comes from the same root as the Sanskrit manas and Greek menos, both meaning "spirit" as well as "fury." For Homeric warriors menos was "a temporary urge of one, many, or all bodily or mental organs to do something specific, an urge one can see but not influence." Menos came from the heavens; heroes owed their great deeds to it, and Indo-European heroic poetry sings its praise. From menos arose sundry forms of abandoning oneself to a new identity such as wolf- or bear-warrior, or berserk. As Mircea Eliade put it, "The frenzied berserkir, ferocious warriors realized precisely the state of the sacred fury (Wut, menos, furor) of the primordial world."

Above text from page 73 from book Ancient Germanic Warriors: Warrior Styles from Trajan's Column to Icelandic Sagas by Michael P. Speidel (Routledge, 2004)

[illustratus]

Wotan's farewell to Brunhilde by Ferdinand Leeke

[jestingherlaking]

Odin/Woden/Wodanaz, also known as the gallows god.

Wanted to represent odin more accurately to the old norse religion as a god of kingship, ectasy/madness, war and death as I feel people flanderize him too often.

[pageofpanels]