Unlocking the Origin of Odin and the Wild Hunt

Imagine an enormous, rough mountain range with winter coming. No, I don't mean the Alps. Germany once covered Poland and Czechia, and the mountain range known as the Giant mountains, or the Riesengebirge. Due to church outlawing pre-Christian religions, these practices became buried and hard to access, unlike the Norse versions which appeared later in Iceland, written by Christians trying to create their own alternative by building up this Odin figure as Allfather. Icelandic Mythis distort his older nature and try to create containers he cannot fit in. But that representation does not tell you the roots or how these spiritual practices were originally conducted in continental Germany. In addition, in the 20th century, this part of Germany was redistributed, and the people of Germany no longer had access or connections to the folklore of this region. My great grandmother was born in this region, and her family was evicted. However, there is an enormous cannon over hundreds of years of those collecting this knowledge and oral history before Germans were no longer residing there geographically. Early stories were collected with an agenda to document and demonize the local spirits, but later collections were to preserve and prevent the cultural traditions from being lost. From Prätorius, Musäus, Hirscher, Kittel, Grässe, Zimmermann, Kuhn, and Schwartz, to Grimm, there is extensive cannon to understand this figure in relation to pre-Christian Germanic people. It is from these texts we can see and learn how Germans related to the mountain spirit most closely given descriptions resembling Wotan, or Odin, and how we can understand what the relationship and views were originally of this dangerous diety. For regions like Silesia, the spiritual heritage did not survive through books but through generations of lived practices, land memory, and the experiential chain of seers. When you look at Wotan's nature through the Silesian canon instead of Icelandic literature, his character becomes far more coherent and less contradictory. In addiiton, there is no Loki in the pantheon, a much later addition. He was a local diety with a specified realm of the mountains, with borders to his realm, and when that realm was left, the kingdom of humans oversaw the law. However, when humans went into the mountains, they entered his domain. He had power over chaotic elements of nature, of the underground, of magic, of seasons, and was considered volatile. He represented the volatility of wild untamable natural forces. Miners relied on him to help them uncover the earth's bounty located in the mountain.

When winter arrived, huge winter storms howled through the peaks with the "noise of a thousand voices" non distinct. This was him leading the Wild Hunt. He was feared that he could lead travellers to their deaths to collect them for his collection of souls. He was known to be fatal to those who trespassed his moral standards, failed his tests, or uttered his name aloud. The locals created an insulting nickname to try to balance the power with this diety, a story of him being tricked into counting turnips, and they had a code of silence not to call on the Turnip Counter aloud unless they met his wrath. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eohfT0ODM0 This is a powerful diety with cosmic powers to conjure seasons and control the entire natural order of life. He was known to conduct the magic of transformation and teleportation. He could trick your perception by being seen as an old man wandering, deceiving humans to test their character, or by being seen in two places at once, or transporting instantaneously. As the god of magic, he was known to give gifts that were tricks. Gold disguised as dirt or coal, the humble recipient would later find to provide long financial security. Conversely, dirt disguised as gold revealed greed and disappeared when used for immoral purchases. While the Norse focus heavily on Odin the 'Allfather' and his exploits in war, the traditions of continental Germany, such as those found in the Harz Mountains, focused intensely on Wotan as the eternal seeker of knowledge. He was the god who willingly gave up a part of himself, even his own eye, to drink from the sacred well and gain cosmic wisdom. This foundational theme of sacrifice for power and the agony of knowledge is crucial for understanding the character that was later regionalized in the Riesengebirge. He represents the storm, chaos, noise, and warrior death. His pursuit is characterized by fury (Wut) and violence.

Humans would seek the isolation of the mountain, away from the village life, for secret knowledge to be given to them, considering him as an oracle. Unlike the warring Norse, the continental Germanic tradition focused on Wotan's fury and search for wisdom while de-emphasizing the literal physical sacrifice. The Harz mountains have traditions which assign origins of his sacrificial knowledge seeking lore, but these do not exist as he was known in the mountains of Silesia. There the price he pays is psychological and social, taunted by an insulting nickname. In this region, the mountain and its dangers were real. The people needed the mountain for wood, food, mining, but entering the house of the mountain spirit could lead to death instantly in a flood, rockslide, cave-in, fog, or blizzard. The power of magic is real but simple. He can disguise himself as a hermit or harmless old man, but the lesson is you can never trust your eyes or what you see. The mountain will always test your insolence or meek spirit, and one can kill you while respect can keep you alive. Humans seeking access to his magical abilities faced soul-death and extreme dangers. The cost is a permanent loss of certainty and the inability to trust their own senses. The magic demands a spiritual and moral forfeiture. One must sacrifice your arrogance and entitlement to receive the gift, effectively accepting complete disorientation. Wotan in the original experiential form with Germanic peoples was not Allfather. He was an ancestor dead king and wanderer with frenzied spirit, shamanic initiator, wisdom-giver, diety of altered states and costly insight. Later mytholgy tried to elevate him to shape him into kingly, strategic, and patriarchal god. Then the shadow of his nature became problematic, and they were left with the trickster apsects the new narrative no longer held. It seems to be where the origin of Loki emerged, to create a container for the wild side of Wotan. Loki is a shadow cast by Odin's inflation. Late Icelandic texts present a sanitized Odin that does not reflect the original experiential narratives of the Germanic people. When you strip away the Icelandic layers, and look at the diety Germanic peoples encountered, it looks very different. Rather than a father-god or wise strategist, he was a liminial initiator, bringer of knowledge at a high cost, being of frenzy and ecstatic insight, and a patron of ooutcasts, seers, and wanderers. In short, this was not your sweet stoic Anthony Hopkins grandfather figure. Even from an actor that good, you could never get a pure display of pure cosmic Wut, fury, that this diety truely emboided in the German pantheon.