Odins Day Reflection : Are the Gods and Spirits real?

 

 Blessings to all on this Odin Day! 

    I have been slipping lately but trying to get back in the saddle after a brief illness. 

    I've entitled this reflection "Are the Gods and Spirits Real" because I have for my whole life run into a certain line of thinking that I'd like to challenge a bit. Maybe it's my wishful thinking that drives me but I can't help but feel this question is a plague on our modern mind and an idea that our ancestors simply took at face value. 

    Whenever I see articles from pagan folks, especially from academics, dealing with faeries or gods and push comest to shove, they will typically fall into the idea that the faeries and gods are merely something we made up and then go into various things that they are or are not. Archetypes, personifications of the weather and the elements etc. But the idea that theres an actual person or force named Odin, or that theres literally a faerie living in a tree, these ideas seem to concrete for their post enlightened brain to admit to, so they shield it with the abstract. And I get it, you don't want to feel foolish. So it's easier to say you believe in some larger over arching unnamable force that animates everything because again this is way less direct. Again this rationalism plagues us. This unwillingness to surrender to things we can't see, to accept things that older generations took as fact until the enlightenment destroyed those sensibilities and relegated them to the nursery rhyme and the fairy tale. 

    A story was collected in the 19th century called "The Pooka" by E.W. The story of the Pooka is interesting to be sure, but it is the beginning of this tale that interests me where the story teller decries the "school master" or rather education as having ruined the folk beliefs of old.

    He writes :

    "Now that "the schoolmaster is abroad," there can be no question that the warm sun of education will, in the course of a very few years, dissipate those vapours of superstition, whose wild and shadowy forms have from time immemorial thrown a mysterious mantle around our mountain summits, shed a darker horror through our deepest glens, traced some legendary tale on each unchiselled column of stone that rises on our bleakest hills, and peopled the green border of the wizard stream and sainted well with beings of a spiritual world."

    So are these gods and faeries real? I can't say for sure. I have had intimate experiences with them ever since starting this journey that I can't explain, but I do know this, treating them like artifacts won't accomplish much. We have been taught that it's irrational to believe in things you can't see. So we comfort ourselves by turning them into abstractions that originate from the self because that's somehow easier for us to swallow. But what if there is a wanderer, and his name is Odin, and he gained the runes knowledge through self sacrifice and we can actually know him and interact with him? 

    I was reading in a book by George Ewart Evans where he stated that a certain generation born before WW1 had a wealth of lore and superstition that they accepted as fact and that the following generation who experienced the War in it's fullness had this same lore and knowledge but viewed with skepticism. 

    I think the best way to combat this skepticism and this need to make everything rational or abstract is to get out into the natural world and commune with the gods. Nature is clearly their abode and the old ones knew this. So on this Odins Day, I challenge you to grab a walking stick, throw some incense and an offering into a bag, maybe a small idol if you have a specific deity you work with and go into nature, build a little altar and make an offering and meditate and let me know how that goes.  

-Jacob