Greetings! My name is Peter. I was born in 1963, and live presently Northern Jutland in the Scandivanavian country, Denmark. I have created this website as a way to convey some of the knowledge, that I have acquired on my personal spiritual path. My path has included being a Buddhist monk for 3 years in South Korea, living in California for 4½ years, Hinduism in various forms, Freemasonry, Rosicrusianism, esoteric orders, as well as various body- and mind therapies.

The esoteric knowledge and corresponding practices of the ancient Norse tradition are returning or being re-discovered, facilitating a greater wholeness of body and mind, and our connectedness with nature. Odin, the All-Father, embodies ecstasy, and those who seek him, will most likely experience him as an overwhelming ecstasy in their body and soul. An experience of the divine in nature will also easily come to his followers, as well as a natural appreciation of the feminine principle, which has long been suppressed by some religions. Odin is completed by the goddess Frigga, his wife, and Freya, his mistress, the goddes of sensual love and nature.

Odin can, from a Jungian viewpoint, be seen as the archetypal traveller of world and mind. Always going deeper and further. In this, and other ways, Odin can be compared to the greek/roman/egyptian god Hermes/Mercurius, and therefore to the alchemical Mercury that is essential in the alchemical transformation of lead to the gold of consciousness. This also requires an explorative frame of mind, of which Odin so well exemplifies. A frame of mind that always is willing to dig deeper and go further, especially in the exploration of the psyche and it's inner worlds. The Odin Brotherhood even states that Odin and Hermes is one and the same God, appearing in different guises to different cultures. The Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psyschology has made observations to the same effect.

Odin is lord of the wind, the breath and the life-force. For those acquainted with Hermeticism/Qabalah, it is easy to place Odin on the sphere of Chokmah, the right upper-most sphere on the Tree of Life, which is also connected with the breath, prana, the life-force, and the paternal principle. The nothingness that "existed", Ginnungagab, before creation in the norse myths also corresponds very finely with Ayin, the No-Thing, that is described in the Qabalistic tradition as existing before a cycle of manifestation. So perhaps there are some correspondences between these traditions, at least on an inner level. As I have practiced the Hermetic-Qabalistic tradition to a degree, I like to find similarities between the various traditions. I also believe there is an inner esoteric wisdom tradition behind the external exoteric religions. Perhaps some of the similarities does not hold water on a academic level, but I am anyway more interested in the inner truth than struggling over words. (which also can have it day and place).

As to the pertinent question of polytheism versus monotheism, I favor the viewpoint of the invaluable Hermetic classic "The Kybalion", which states that "The All", which its authors prefers as the best term for the Absolute - the reality which we live in, move in, and have our being in - is beyond verbal definitions and human conceptions. In the Kybalion it is stated that the Gods really are human beings, that evolved to a state far from our own present state, a state to which we also will evolve to with time and incarnations. A state as different in powers and skills from us, as we are superior in power and function to an one-celled organism. In the Norse tradition, Odin hangs 9 nights on the World Tree, Yggdrasil, "offering Myself to Myself", and in the end discovers the Runes, tools for Self-knowledge, Magic and Self-transformation.. The Runes come from the Roots of Creation, a reality that is beyond our intellect to fathom. The Qabalistic Hebrew tradition also talks about the Three Veils that hides the Absolute from us mortals: Ain Soph Aur = The Limitless Light, Ain Soph = Infinity or Limitlessness, and finally, Ain = The No-Thing. We really can not understand the Absolute with our relative minds. Another good book is The Masks of Odin by Elsa-Brita Titchenell, which puts the Norse tradition into a Theosophical/esoteric perspective. The Danish priest and author N.F.S. Grundtvig who lived during the romantic period, also managed to synthezise the old Norse faith and Christianity, at least in his own way (likely because, he felt a conflict himself about this topic). Grundtvig has had a profound influence on Danish culture, and his views and values still has a high degree of influence today on Danish society. He authored a saying, "Høje Odin, Hvide Krist! Slettet ud er eders tvist, Begge sønner af Alfader..."which I translate like this: "High Odin, White Christ, forever gone are your strife, Both sons of Allfather...". Of course, as a polytheist I doubt the truth of this saying, but I nevertheless bring it here as food for thought.

I would say that the rather more correct way of stating it, could be" High Odin, White Christ, forever gone are your strife. Both sons of the All..".

It iis said in the old Norse tradition, we each have our own viewpoint, and none can tell who has the truest one. That also makes Asatru a very tolerant tradition. One cannot say that the monotheistic religions gernerally can pride themselves on that.

Rudolf Steiner has written in his fantastic book "The Mission of the Folk-Souls in relation to Teutonic Mythology", that the Middle Eastern mind naturally tends towards monotheism, while the Western mind naturally tends toward pluralism and polytheism. Hence the need to create a trinity in the Christian religion. The Qabalah/Kaballah is the most sublime expression of the effort to synthezise everything into an all-comprehensive whole. Teutonic mythology, on the other hand, is the mythology in the world, that exactly mirrors spiritual reality, because what Steiner calls "the First Clairvoyance" was last lost in Northern Europe. The Greeks lost it a couple of thousand years earlier, and that is why the Greek myths are more artistic, whereas the Nordic myths are more primal.

I believe that the Norse creation story of everything arising from the polar opposites of Fire and Ice in the magically charted Void, Ginnungagap, contain deep layers of truth and wisdom in it. For example, allegorically, one can see it as the pause, there is between to thoughts, and the resulting creative possibilities in the mind. This is just one example; there are many more, that can be gained from studying Norse mythology.

One of the things I really like about the Norse faith, is that Odin and the other Aesir and Vanir are seen as friends of humanity, as helpers and allies. Another extremely valuable ethic in the Norse tradition is the equal value put on free men and women. In an age, where we see a monotheistic Middle Eastern religion spreading a dark message of religious intolerance and suppression of women (at least in it's fundamentalist form), the light is shining brightly from the Northern tradition. An of course, All-Father is complemented by All-Mother, the one is not more important than the other. In the Armanen rune system, All-Father is represented by the rune FA, while the All-Mother is represented by the rune UR.

Another good thing about the Norse tradition, is that it is very much a tradition based on the individual's own experience, not on dogma and priests. In this sense, the Norse tradition share similarities with the Gnostic tradition. As Paul Foster Case, the founder of the esoteric order Builders of the Adytum and once leader of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the United States, writes in his remarkable book "The True and Invisible Rosicrucian Order" , both the proponents of dogmatic religion AND the proponents of materialistic scientific dogmatism have always been the enemies of those, who work for the freedom of the human spirit, and who work for this spirit to know itself through direct experience, not through mere faith and dogma.

I have found great inspiration and wisdom in the Western Mystery tradition, which includes Hermeticism, Qabalah, Theosophy, Alchemy, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, Astrology and Tarot. The eminent Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, as well as the now-living psychiatrist Stanislav Grof are some of the other great teachers, whose teachings I have found invaluable. Not so incidentally, the experiental explorations of the human psyche made by Jung and Grof contains many insights, that confirms the validity of the world-view and practices of the above mentioned esoteric teachings.

Peter M. Jacobsen - 2007 CE

MySpace profile: www.myspace.com/odinsruner