Role of Odinic Madness in Mental Health

When people are discussing Odin in terms of comparisons to Greek, one of the most common equivalences given is Hermes, noting that he was the psychopomp of that pantheon. While it is true that Odin often serves in that role, a better choice I feel would be Dionysus. Dionysus has the ties to the underworld and the strong association with ecstatic madness that is a closer match to Odin’s role. An examination of the role of madness for each god shows one of the great differences between Greek and Norse thought in the role of madness.

For the Greeks, madness was a curse. Dionysus cursed women to become Maenads to serve him, and to punish their people for failing to honour him. Odin gifted the berserks with the ecstatic madness to render them unstoppable (not unkillable, by any stretch, but certainly unstoppable). One punishes a people, at the cost of the lives of any bystanders caught in the way. One protects a people at the cost of the lives of the transformed warriors, and their foes. But while the role of wode or transforming ecstasy is well known in the warrior aspect, the madness given by Wode/Woden/Woten/Odin is so much more than simple battle fury.

Just as Thor is oversimplified as Jotun-bane, so is the madness given by Odin too easily dismissed as destructive. Thor is the god of social boundaries, he is the one who brings and keeps balance between opposing forces. In this role he establishes and defends the boundaries between our space and that of the Jotun. He does not practice genocide, but defend the borders. Odin is likewise distorted. Over the decades I have been building a reciprocal gifting relationship with the SigFather, I have had enough experiences with his gifts that forced me to re-examine my understanding of him, and to go back to the lore and to the archeological record to see how the modern understanding of his role has been stunted and transformed to fit the comfortable Wiccan archetypes or eclectic god swapping practices of modern neo-pagans. The reality was a lot more complex, a lot less clear division of responsibility between the gods, rather different ways in which the various gods used their nature to address the problems of their folk. I came to know the healing side of the Wise Counselor rather better than I thought I would over the last years, and the applications of the Wild Hunt’s master towards the healing of mind and spirit were something I was unprepared for.

The role of madness in mental health; catchy title isn’t it? The answer to that question is simple and profound. Madness, specifically the transforming ecstatic wode given by the Battle Glad, is what sweeps aside the mental circuitry and pathways that have gone wrong. Like wiping a corrupted hard drive, and rebooting from the uncorrupted boot disk. When I was in hospital with my shattered back, I had not slept for months, and was by any functional definition, insane. Given this to work with, I chose to use it as an ordeal and see if the ancestors or gods could aid me where medication was clearly failing. What followed was the source of my poem “Wode”, an experience with the Wild Hunt that left my body and mind forever changed, and gave me sleep. A night giving myself over to the transforming madness of the Wild Hunt had won back for me my sanity, and left me with the tools I would learn to use to wean myself off pain killers and muscle relaxants altogether (gave me sleep again too). Madness had swept away old and failed mental patterns, emotional connections, and neuroendocrine responses and associations that were unsustainable, and allowed me to establish new and workable alternatives to fit my changed circumstances.

When the powerful storms batter our lands, and the thunder sounds like artillery salvo, and the sky is torn apart by lightning, it calls to me. I find myself leaving my home, walking in the rain, feeling the lash of its icy whip, and laughing in response to the thunder, raising my fist to the lightning. As the storm grows fiercer, so does my laughter, often dancing in the fury of the storm, swept up in its wild power. I can feel the storms power singing in my nerves, rippling along my muscles. My skin grows red from the icy rain as my muscles swell and stretch. The stress burns from body and mind. The cares of the world, the money problems, teenager issues, work politics, all fall away. When I stalk home I am as relaxed as after meditation, as satisfied as after good sex, and with the feeling of clarity and stillness that usually accompanies a successful hunt.

The Delight of Frigg has other lessons to teach. Should it surprise that wode, or transforming ecstasy can be found in the marriage bed? There are times when his spirit rises within me, or perhaps my awareness of the world slips from normal vision, to skaldic vision, where you see not the shape of things before you, but the metaphor, the sacral context, the reality of the iceberg rather than the paltry shadow that stands above the water. At such times love becomes a sacral act, a sacred battle, a sacrifice, a hunt, an offering. There are many things that the unconscious mind excels at, many arts that the primal self is better attuned to than the easily distracted monkey mind of the tool using fore-brain, and sex is one of them. There are many things that the spirit can see, can sense, can express, can evoke that words and thoughts cannot wholly contain, love and rage are two of these. While famous for the guile that is his trademark in seduction, it is the underlying promise of the storm fury, of the unchained passion, of the wild limitless, wordless primal potency that calls beneath that makes Odin a figure evoked not simply as a god of killing and warriors, but of passion, fertility, love, and marriage. To share transforming passion with another, to feel the divine touch together as one, is to know and trust each other at a level below words or thoughts. It is a gift beyond price.

Art, poetry, lovemaking, healing, restoring self image, learning to accept being loved by others, learning to accept your own power, learning to let go the burdens of your daily life, learning to live with pain, learning to embrace joy and life after trauma, learning to trust, learning to express love; these are the gifts of madness. These are the benefits of Odinic ecstatic madness offers to sustainable mental health.

John T Mainer