The day before President Barack Obama arrived in Oslo to accept his Nobel Peace Prize, a strange light appeared in the pre-dawn Norway sky. Huge and glowing like a Catherine Wheel, the central light vortex emitted a smaller blue light that spiraled down to earth like a cosmic neon curly fry.
Grateful Dead show? Aurora Borealis? Lame Russian attempt to ruin perfect Obama PR moment with missile launch? No. That light in the sky was something I've been searching for since the hard freeze of winter hit--Odin's Other Eye.
Odin, the One-Eyed Father God of Norse mythology, was known for his magical abilities and for his All-Seeing Eye. Odin's eye blazed like the Sun. Odin was a Shaman, an intellectual god who hung nine days and nights on the World Tree to receive the Nine Songs of Power. You could usually find Odin dressed in a red leather suit with fur trim, tearing between worlds on his eight-legged steed, Sleipnir. Odin was not a slacker. Besides being a prototype for Santa Claus, Odin was the god of poetry--and of war.
Odin originally had two eyes. They were brilliant in his beautiful face. Yeah, he had it all. Almost. The one thing Odin wanted was Wisdom. So Odin asked the question, "Where is Wisdom found?" Wisdom, apparently, was found in the Well of the giant Mimir; Mimir is the Old Norse word for memory.
After much travail, Odin finds Mimir and asks the rude, old-school giant for a drink of the waters of wisdom. "No way, hoss." says Mimir, but he and Odin finally cut a deal. The god reluctantly rips out one of his blazing all-seeing eyes, and drops it into the Well of Memory, where you never hear another word about it. Until now.
Every night for the last two weeks, I've scanned the frosty night sky for some celestial sign--the winter moon, a meteor?--and thought about Odin. About how the brilliant light of intellectual reason does not find wisdom until it looks deep into the well of memory and past experience, both personal and historical, and examines those memories. Even so, the realization that those memories are only a reflection of a bright light on a watery surface, of an all-seeing eye glowing from the bottom of Mimir's Well, is key. It is essential to acknowledge those memories, feel them, appreciate them for what they are, and release them, like silvery water running through your fingers under a moonlit sky.
So having finally decided that if (1) Odin's other eye lay at the bottom of Mimir's Well and (2) its light reflected on the well's surface and, knowing that ( 3) Odin's good eye was the sun, then his other eye, like the missing eye of the one-eyed Egyptian sun god Horus (4) had to be the moon, I was shocked to realize that I was wrong. The true Other Eye of Odin appeared in the Scandinavian sky on Wednesday, lighting the way for Barack Obama.
Obama is a two worlds walking, intellectual shaman kind of guy. After his Nobel acceptance speech, he is also a god of poetry and a god of war. He may know the value of knowledge filtered through the waters of memory. He stated in his speech, "To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism. It is a recognition of history, of the imperfections of man and the limits of reason." Odin's recognition of history and the imperfections of man led him to the knowledge that the world was going to end in a storm of fire and ice. Barack seems more upbeat.
I don't know what any of this means. I just hope it's good.
