-- Wotan, by Carl Gustav Jung
Essay on WOTAN
by Carl Gustav Jung
Preface to Essays on Contemporary Events
[Originally published as the Vorwort to AUFSATZE ZUR ZEITGESCHICHTE (Zurich, 1946). Translation by Elizabeth Welsh in ESSAYS ON CONTEMPORARY EVENTS (London, 1947)]
Medical
psychotherapy, for practical reasons, has to deal with the whole of
the psyche. Therefore, it is bound to come to terms with all those
factors, biological as well as social and mental, which have a vital
influence on psychic life.
We are living
in times of great disruption: political passions are aflame,
internal upheavals have brought nations to the brink of chaos, and
the very foundations of our Weltanschauung are shattered. This
critical state of things has such a tremendous influence on the
psychic life of the individual that the doctor must follow its
effects with more than usual attention. The storm of events does not
sweep down upon him only from the great world outside; he feels the
violence of its impact even in the quiet of his consulting-room and
in the privacy of the medical consultation. As he has a
responsibility towards his patients, he cannot afford to withdraw to
the peaceful island of undisturbed scientific work, but must
constantly descend into the arena of world events, in order to join
in the battle of conflicting passions and opinions. Were he to
remain aloof from the tumult, the calamity of his time would reach
him only from afar, and his patients' suffering would find neither
ear nor understanding. He would be at a loss to know how to talk to
him, and to help him out of his isolation. For this reason the
psychologist cannot avoid coming to grips with contemporary history,
even his very soul shrinks from the political uproar, the lying
propaganda, and the jarring speeches of the demagogues. We need not
mention his duties as a citizen, which confront him with a similar
task. As a physician, he has a higher obligation to humanity in this
respect.
From time to
time, therefore, I have felt obliged to step beyond the usual bounds
of my profession. The experience of the psychologist is of a rather
special kind, and it seemed to me that the general public might find
it useful to hear his point of view. This was hardly a far-fetched
conclusion, for surely the most naive of laymen could not fail to
see that many contemporary figures and events were positively asking
for psychological elucidation. Were psychopathic symptoms ever more
conspicuous than in the contemporary political scene?
It has
never been my wish to meddle in the political questions of the day.
But in the course of the years I have written a few papers which
give my reactions to current events. The present book contains a
collection of these occasional essays, all written between 1936 and
1946. It is natural enough that my thoughts should have been
especially concerned with Germany, which has been a problem to me
ever since the first World War. My statements have evidently led
to all manner of misunderstandings, which are chiefly due, no doubt,
to the fact that my psychological point of view strikes many people
as new and therefore strange. Instead of embarking upon lengthy
arguments in an attempt to clear up these misunderstandings, I have
found it simpler to collect all the passages in my other writings
which deal with the same theme and to put them in an epilogue. The
reader will thus be in a position to get a clear picture of the
facts for himself.
[First
published as WOTAN, Neue Schweizer Rundschau (Zurich). n.s., III
(March, 1936), 657-69. Republished in AUFSATZE ZUR ZEITGESCHICHTE
(Zurich, 1946), 1-23. Trans. by Barbara Hannah in ESSAYS ON
CONTEMPORARY EVENTS (London, 1947) 1-16; this version has been
consulted. Motto, trans. by H.C. Roberts:
"In Germany Shall diverse sects arise,
Coming very near to happy paganism.
The heart captivated and small receivings
Shall open the gate to pay the true tithe."]WOTANEn Germanie naistront diverses sectes,
S'approchans fort de l'heureux paganisme:
Le coeur captif et petites receptes
Feront retour a payer la vraye disme.
-- Propheties De Maistre Michel Nostradamus, 1555
When we look
back to the time before 1914, we find ourselves living in a world of
events which would have been inconceivable before the war. We were
even beginning to regard war between civilized nations as a fable,
thinking that such an absurdity would become less and less possible
on our rational, internationally organized world. And what came
after the war was a veritable witches' sabbath. Everywhere
fantastic revolutions, violent alterations of the map, reversions
in politics to medieval or even antique prototypes, totalitarian
states that engulf their neighbours and outdo all previous
theocracies in their absolutist claims, persecutions of Christians
and Jews, wholesale political murder, and finally we have witnessed
a light-hearted piratical raid on a peaceful, half-civilized people.
With such
goings on in the wide world it is not in the least surprising that
there should be equally curious manifestations on a smaller scale in
other spheres. In the realm of philosophy we shall have to wait some
time before anyone is able to assess the kind of age we are living
in. But in the sphere of religion we can see at once that some very
significant things have been happening. We need feel no surprise
that in Russia the colourful splendours of the Eastern Orthodox
Church have been superseded by the Movement of the Godless --
indeed, one breathed a sigh of relief oneself when one emerged from
the haze of an Orthodox church with its multitude of lamps and
entered an honest mosque, where the sublime and invisible
omnipresence of God was not crowded out by a superfluity of sacred
paraphernalia. Tasteless and pitiably unintelligent as it is,
and however deplorable the low spiritual level of the "scientific"
reaction, it was inevitable that nineteenth-century "scientific"
enlightenment should one day dawn in Russia.
But what is
more than curious -- indeed, piquant to a degree -- is that an
ancient god of storm and frenzy, the long quiescent Wotan, should
awake, like an extinct volcano, to new activity, in a civilized
country that had long been supposed to have outgrown the Middle
Ages. We have seen him come to life in the German Youth Movement,
and right at the beginning the blood of several sheep was shed in
honour of his resurrection. Armed with rucksack and lute, blond
youths, and sometimes girls as well, were to be seen as restless
wanderers on every road from the North Cape to Sicily, faithful
votaries of the roving god. Later, towards the end of the Weimar
Republic, the wandering role was taken over by thousands of
unemployed, who were to be met with everywhere on their aimless
journeys. By 1933 they wandered no longer, but marched in their
hundreds of thousands. The Hitler movement literally brought the
whole of Germany to its feet, from five-year-olds to veterans, and
produced a spectacle of a nation migrating from one place to
another. Wotan the wanderer was on the move. He could be seen,
looking rather shamefaced, in the meeting-house of a sect of simple
folk in North Germany, disguised as Christ sitting on a white horse.
I do not know if these people were aware of Wotan's ancient
connection with the figures of Christ and Dionysus, but it is not
very probable.
Wotan is a
restless wanderer who creates unrest and stirs up strife, now here,
now there, and works magic. He was soon changed by Christianity into
the devil, and only lived on in fading local traditions as a
ghostly hunter who was seen with his retinue, flickering like a will
o' the wisp through the stormy night. In the Middle Ages the role of
the restless wanderer was taken over by Ahasuerus, the Wandering
Jew, which is not a Jewish but a Christian legend. The motif of the
wanderer who has not accepted Christ was projected on the Jews, in
the same way as we always rediscover our unconscious psychic
contents in other people. At any rate the coincidence of
anti-Semitism with the reawakening of Wotan is a psychological
subtlety that may perhaps be worth mentioning.
The German
youths who celebrated the solstice with sheep-sacrifices were not
the first to hear the rustling in the primeval forest of the
unconsciousness. They were anticipated by Nietzsche, Schuler, Stefan
George, and Ludwig Klages. The literary tradition of the
Rhineland and the country south of the Main has a classical stamp
that cannot easily be got rid of; every interpretation of
intoxication and exuberance is apt to be taken back to classical
models, to Dionysus, to the puer aeternus and the cosmogonic Eros.
No doubt it sounds better to academic ears to interpret these things
as Dionysus, but Wotan might be a more correct interpretation. He
is the god of storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the
lust of battle; moreover he is a superlative magician and artist in
illusion who is versed in all secrets of an occult nature.
Nietzsche's
case is certainly a peculiar one. He had no knowledge of Germanic
literature; he discovered the "cultural Philistine"; and the
announcement that "God is dead" led to
Zarathustra's meeting with an
unknown god in unexpected form, who approached him sometimes as an
enemy and sometimes disguised as Zarathustra himself.
Zarathustra, too, was a soothsayer, a magician, and the storm-wind:
And like a wind shall I come to blow among them, and with my spirit shall take away the breath of their spirit; thus my future wills it. Truly, a strong wind is Zarathustra to all that are low; and this counsel gives he to his enemies and to all that spit and spew: "Beware of spitting against the wind."
And when
Zarathustra dreamed that he was guardian of the graves in the "lone
mountain fortress of death," and was making a mighty effort to
open the gates, suddenly
A roaring wind tore the gates asunder; whistling, shrieking, and keening, it cast a black coffin before me.And amid the roaring and whistling and shrieking the coffin burst open and spouted a thousand peals of laughter.
The disciple
who interpreted the dream said to Zarathustra:
Are you not yourself the wind with shrill whistling, which bursts open the gates of the fortress of death?Are you not yourself the coffin filled with life's gay malice and angel-grimaces?
In 1863 or
1864, in his poem TO THE UNKNOWN GOD, Nietzsche had written:
I shall and will know thee, Unknown One,
Who searchest out the depths of my soul,
And blowest through my life like a storm,
Ungraspable, and yet my kinsman!
I shall and will know thee, and serve thee.
Twenty years
later, in his MISTRAL SONG, he wrote:
Mistral wind, chaser of clouds,
Killer of gloom, sweeper of the skies,
Raging storm-wind, how I love thee!
And we are not both the first-fruits
Of the same womb, forever predestined
To the same fate?
In the
dithyramb known as ARIADNE'S LAMENT, Nietzsche is completely the
victim of the hunter-god:
Stretched out, shuddering,
Like a half-dead thing whose feet are warmed,
Shaken by unknown fevers,
Shivering with piercing icy frost arrows,
Hunted by thee, O thought,
Unutterable! Veiled! horrible one!
Thou huntsman behind the cloud.
Struck down by thy lightning bolt,
Thou mocking eye that stares at me from the dark!
Thus I lie.
Writhing, twisting, tormented
With all eternal tortures,
Smitten
By thee, cruel huntsman,
Thou unknown -- God!
This
remarkable image of the hunter-god is not a mere dithyrambic figure
of speech but is based on an experience which Nietzsche had when he
was fifteen years old, at Pforta. It is described in a book by
Nietzsche's sister, Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche. As he was
wandering about in a gloomy wood at night, he was terrified by a
"blood-curdling shriek from a neighbouring lunatic asylum," and soon
afterwards he came face to face with a huntsman whose "features were
wild and uncanny." Setting his whistle to his lips "in a valley
surrounded by wild scrub," the huntsman "blew such a shrill blast"
that Nietzsche lost consciousness -- but woke up again in Pforta. It
was a nightmare. It is significant that in his dream Nietzsche, who
in reality intended to go to Eisleben, Luther's town, discussed with
the huntsman the question of going instead to "Teutschenthal"
(Valley of the Germans). No one with ears can misunderstand the
shrill whistling of the storm-god in the nocturnal wood.
Was it really
only the classical philologist in Nietzsche that led to the god
being called Dionysus instead of Wotan -- or was it perhaps due to
his fateful meeting with Wagner?
In his REICH
OHNE RAUM, which was first published in 1919, Bruno Goetz saw the
secret of coming events in Germany in the form of a very strange
vision. I have never forgotten this little book, for it struck me at
the time as a forecast of the German weather. It anticipates the
conflict between the realm of ideas and life, between Wotan's dual
nature as a god of storm and a god of secret musings. Wotan
disappeared when his oaks fell and appeared again when the Christian
God proved too weak to save Christendom from fratricidal slaughter.
When the Holy Father at Rome could only impotently lament before God
the fate of the grex segregatus, the one-eyed old hunter, on the
edge of the German forest, laughed and saddled Sleipnir.
We are always
convinced that the modern world is a reasonable world, basing our
opinion on economic, political, and psychological factors. But if we
may forget for a moment that we are living in the year of Our Lord
1936, and, laying aside our well-meaning, all-too-human
reasonableness, may burden God or the gods with the responsibility
for contemporary events instead of man, we would find Wotan quite
suitable as a casual hypothesis. In fact, I venture the heretical
suggestion that the unfathomable depths of Wotan's character explain
more of National Socialism than all three reasonable factors put
together. There is no doubt that each of these factors explains an
important aspect of what is going on in Germany, but Wotan explains
yet more. He is particularly enlightening in regard to a general
phenomenon which is so strange to anybody not a German that it
remains incomprehensible, even after the deepest reflection.
Perhaps we may
sum up this general phenomenon as Ergriffenheit -- a state of being
seized or possessed. The term postulates not only an Ergriffener
(one who is seized) but, also, an Ergreifer (one who seizes). Wotan
is an Ergreifer of men, and, unless one wishes to deify Hitler --
which has indeed actually happened -- he is really the only
explanation. It is true that Wotan shares this quality with his
cousin Dionysus, but Dionysus seems to have exercised his influence
mainly on women. The maenads were a species of female
storm-troopers, and, according to mythical reports, were dangerous
enough. Wotan confined himself to the berserkers, who found their
vocation as the Blackshirts of mythical kings.
A mind that is
still childish thinks of the gods as metaphysical entities existing
in their own right, or else regards them as playful or superstitious
inventions. From either point of view the parallel between Wotan
redivivus and the social, political and psychic storm that is
shaking Germany might have at least the value of a parable. But
since the gods are without doubt personifications of psychic forces,
to assert their metaphysical existence is as much an intellectual
presumption as the opinion that they could ever be invented. Not
that "psychic forces" have anything to do with the conscious mind,
fond as we are of playing with the idea that consciousness and
psyche are identical. This is only another piece of intellectual
presumption. "Psychic forces" have far more to do with the realm of
the unconscious. Our mania for rational explanations obviously has
its roots in our fear of metaphysics, for the two were always
hostile brothers. Hence, anything unexpected that approaches us from
the dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and,
therefore, as real, or else as an hallucination and, therefore, not
true. The idea that anything could be real or true which does not
come from outside has hardly begun to dawn on contemporary man.
For the sake
of better understanding and to avoid prejudice, we could of course
dispense with the name "Wotan" and speak instead of the furor
teutonicus. But we should only be saying the same thing and not as
well, for the furor in this case is a mere psychologizing of Wotan
and tells us no more than that the Germans are in a state of "fury."
We thus lose sight of the most peculiar feature of this whole
phenomenon, namely, the dramatic aspect of the Ergreifer and the
Ergriffener. The impressive thing about the German phenomenon is
that one man, who is obviously "possessed," has infected a whole
nation to such an extent that everything is set in motion and has
started rolling on its course towards perdition.
It seems to me
that Wotan hits the mark as an hypothesis. Apparently he really was
only asleep in the Kyffhauser mountain until the ravens called him
and announced the break of day. He is a fundamental attribute of
the German psyche, an irrational psychic factor which acts on the
high pressure of civilization like a cyclone and blows it away.
Despite their crankiness, the Wotan-worshippers seem to have judged
things more correctly than the worshippers of reason. Apparently
everyone had forgotten that Wotan is a Germanic datum of first
importance, the truest expression and unsurpassed personification of
a fundamental quality that is particularly characteristic of the
Germans. Houston Stewart
Chamberlain is a symptom which arouses suspicion that other
veiled gods may be sleeping elsewhere. The emphasis on the
Germanic race -- commonly called "Aryan" -- the Germanic heritage,
blood and soil, the Wagalaweia songs, the ride of the Valkyries,
Jesus as a blond and blue-eyed hero, the Greek mother of St. Paul,
the devil as an international Alberich in Jewish or Masonic guise,
the Nordic aurora borealis as the light of civilization, the
inferior Mediterranean races -- all this is the indispensable
scenery for the drama that is taking place and at the bottom they
all mean the same thing: a god has taken possession of the Germans
and their house is filled with a "mighty rushing wind." It was soon
after Hitler seized power, if I am not mistaken, that a cartoon
appeared in PUNCH of a raving berserker tearing himself free from
his bonds. A hurricane has broken loose in Germany while we still
believe it is fine weather.
Things are
comparatively quiet in Switzerland, though occasionally there is a
puff of wind from the north or south. Sometimes it has a slightly
ominous sound, sometimes it whispers so harmlessly or even
idealistically that no one is alarmed. "Let the sleeping dogs lie"
-- we manage to get along pretty well with this proverbial wisdom.
It is sometimes said that the Swiss are singularly averse to making
a problem of themselves. I must rebut this accusation: the Swiss do
have their problems, but they would not admit it for anything in the
world, even though they see which way the wind is blowing. We thus
pay our tribute to the time of storm and stress in Germany, but we
never mention it, and this enables us to feel vastly superior.
It is above
all the Germans who have an opportunity, perhaps unique in history,
to look into their own hearts and to learn what those perils of the
soul were from which Christianity tried to rescue mankind. Germany
is a land of spiritual catastrophes, where nature never makes more
than a pretense of peace with the world-ruling reason. The disturber
of the peace is a wind that blows into Europe from Asia's vastness,
sweeping in on a wide front from Thrace to the Baltic, scattering
the nations before it like dry leaves, or inspiring thoughts that
shake the world to its foundations. It is an elemental Dionysus
breaking into the Apollonian order. The rouser of this tempest
is named Wotan, and we can learn a good deal about him from the
political confusion and spiritual upheaval he has caused throughout
history. For a more exact investigation of his character,
however, we must go back to the age of myths, which did not explain
everything in terms of man and his limited capacities, but sought
the deeper cause in the psyche and its autonomous powers. Man's
earliest intuitions personified these powers. Man's earliest
intuitions personified these powers as gods, and described them in
the myths with great care and circumstantiality according to their
various characters. This could be done the more readily on account
of the firmly established primordial types or images which are
innate in the unconscious of many races and exercise a direct
influence upon them. Because the behavior of a race takes on its
specific character from its underlying images, we can speak of an
archetype "Wotan." As an autonomous psychic factor, Wotan produces
effects in the collective life of a people and thereby reveals his
own nature. For Wotan has a peculiar biology of his own, quite apart
from the nature of man. It is only from time to time that
individuals fall under the irresistible influence of this
unconscious factor. When it is quiescent, one is no more aware of
the archetype Wotan than of a latent epilepsy. Could the Germans who
were adults in 1914 have foreseen what they would be today? Such
amazing transformations are the effect of the god of wind, that "bloweth
where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not
tell whence it cometh, nor whither it goeth." It seizes everything
in its path and overthrows everything that is not firmly rooted.
When the wind blows it shakes everything that is insecure, whether
without or within.
Martin Ninck
has recently published a monograph which is a most welcome addition
to our knowledge of Wotan's nature. The reader need not fear
that this book is nothing but a scientific study written with
academic aloofness from the subject. Certainly the right to
scientific objectivity is fully preserved, and the material has been
collected with extraordinary thoroughness and presented in unusually
clear form. But, over and above all this, one feels that the
author is vitally interested in it, that the chord of Wotan is
vibrating in him, too. This is no criticism -- on the contrary,
it is one of the chief merits of the book, which without this
enthusiasm might easily have degenerated into a tedious catalogue.
Ninck sketches a really magnificent portrait of the German archetype
Wotan. He describes him in ten chapters, using all the available
sources, as the berserker, the god of storm, the wanderer, the
warrior, the Wunsch- and Minne-god, the lord of the dead and of the
Einherjar, the master of secret knowledge, the magician, and the god
of the poets. Neither the Valkyries nor the Fylgja are
forgotten, for they form part of the mythological background and
fateful significance of Wotan. Ninck's inquiry into the name and its
origin is particularly instructive. He shows that Wotan is not only
a god of rage and frenzy who embodies the instinctual and emotion
aspect of the unconscious. Its intuitive and inspiring side, also,
manifests itself in him, for he understands the runes and can
interpret fate.
The Romans
identified Wotan with Mercury, but his character does not really
correspond to any Roman or Greek god, although there are certain
resemblances. He is a wanderer like Mercury, for instance, he rules
over the dead like Pluto and Kronos, and is connected with Dionysus
by his emotional frenzy, particularly in its mantic aspect. It is
surprising that Ninck does not mention Hermes, the god of
revelation, who as pneuma and nous is associated with the wind.
He would be the connecting-link with the Christian pneuma and the
miracle of Pentecost. As
Poimandres (the shepherd of men), Hermes is an Ergreifer like Wotan.
Ninck rightly points out that Dionysus and the other Greek gods
always remained under the supreme authority of Zeus, which indicates
a fundamental difference between the Greek and the Germanic
temperament. Ninck assumes an inner affinity between Wotan and
Kronus, and the latter's defeat may perhaps be a sign that the
Wotan-archetype was once overcome and split up in prehistoric times.
At all events, the Germanic god represents a totality on a very
primitive level, a psychological condition in which man's will was
almost identical with the god's and entirely at his mercy. But
the Greeks had gods who helped man against other gods; indeed,
All-Father Zeus himself is not far from the ideal of a benevolent,
enlightened despot.
It was not in
Wotan's nature to linger on and show signs of old age. He simply
disappeared when the times turned against him, and remained
invisible for more than a thousand years, working anonymously and
indirectly. Archetypes are like riverbeds which dry up when the
water deserts them, but which it can find again at any time. An
archetype is like an old watercourse along which the water of life
has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself. The
longer it has flowed in this channel the more likely it is that
sooner or later the water will return to its old bed. The life of
the individual as a member of society and particularly as a part of
the State may be regulated like a canal, but the life of nations is
a great rushing river which is utterly beyond human control, in the
hands of One who has always been stronger than men. The League of
Nations, which was supposed to possess supranational authority, is
regarded by some as a child in need of care and protection, by
others as an abortion. Thus, the life of nations rolls on unchecked,
without guidance, unconscious of where it is going, like a rock
crashing down the side of a hill, until it is stopped by an obstacle
stronger than itself. Political events move from one impasse to the
next, like a torrent caught in gullies, creeks and marshes. All
human control comes to an end when the individual is caught in a
mass movement. Then, the archetypes begin to function, as
happens, also, in the lives of individuals when they are confronted
with situations that cannot be dealt with in any of the familiar
ways. But what a so-called Fuhrer does with a mass movement can
plainly be seen if we turn our eyes to the north or south of our
country.
The ruling
archetype does not remain the same forever, as is evident from the
temporal limitations that have been set to the hoped-for reign of
peace, the "thousand-year Reich." The Mediterranean
father-archetype of the just, order-loving, benevolent ruler had
been shattered over the whole of northern Europe, as the present
fate of the Christian Churches bears witness. Fascism in Italy and
the civil war in Spain show that in the south as well the cataclysm
has been far greater than one expected. Even the Catholic Church can
no longer afford trials of strength.
The
nationalist God has attacked Christianity on a broad front. In
Russia, he is called technology and science, in Italy, Duce, and in
Germany, "German Faith," "German Christianity," or the State. The
"German Christians" are a contradiction in terms and would do better
to join Hauer's "German Faith Movement." These are decent and
well-meaning people who honestly admit their Ergriffenheit and try
to come to terms with this new and undeniable fact. They go to an
enormous amount of trouble to make it look less alarming by dressing
it up in a conciliatory historical garb and giving us consoling
glimpses of great figures such as
Meister Eckhart, who
was, also, a German and, also, ergriffen. In this way the
awkward question of who the Ergrefer is is circumvented. He was
always "God." But the more Hauer restricts the world-wide sphere of
Indo-European culture to the "Nordic" in general and to the Edda in
particular, and the more "German" this faith becomes as a
manifestation of Ergriffenheit, the more painfully evident it is
that the "German" god is the god of the Germans.
One cannot
read Hauer's book without emotion, if one regards it as the tragic
and really heroic effort of a conscientious scholar who, without
knowing how it happened to him, was violently summoned by the
inaudible voice of the Ergreifer and is now trying with all his
might, and with all his knowledge and ability, to build a bridge
between the dark forces of life and the shining world of historical
ideas. But what do all the beauties of the past from totally
different levels of culture mean to the man of today, when
confronted with a living and unfathomable tribal god such as he has
never experienced before? They are sucked like dry leaves into the
roaring whirlwind, and the rhythmic alliterations of the Edda became
inextricably mixed up with Christian mystical texts, German poetry
and the wisdom of the Upanishads. Hauer himself is ergriffen by
the depths of meaning in the primal words lying at the root of the
Germanic languages, to an extent that he certainly never knew
before. Hauer the Indologist is not to blame for this, nor yet the
Edda; it is rather the fault of kairos -- the present moment in time
-- whose name on closer investigation turns out to be Wotan. I
would, therefore, advise the German Faith Movement to throw aside
their scruples. Intelligent people who will not confuse them
with the crude Wotan-worshippers whose faith is a mere pretense.
There are people in the German Faith Movement who are intelligent
enough not only to believe, but to know, that the god of the Germans
is Wotan and not the Christian God. This is a tragic experience and
no disgrace. It has always been terrible to fall into the hands of a
living god. Yahweh was no exception to this rule, and the
Philistines, Edomites, Amorites and the rest, who were outside the
Yahweh experience, must certainly have found it exceedingly
disagreeable. The Semitic experience of Allah was for a long time an
extremely painful affair for the whole of Christendom. We who
stand outside judge the Germans far too much, as if they were
responsible agents, but perhaps it would be nearer the truth to
regard them, also, as victims.
If we apply an
admittedly peculiar point of view consistently, we are driven to
conclude that Wotan must, in time, reveal not only the restless,
violent, stormy side of his character, but, also, his ecstatic and
mantic qualities -- a very different aspect of his nature. If this
conclusion is correct, National Socialism would not be the last
word. Things must be concealed in the background which we cannot
imagine at present, but we may expect them to appear in the course
of the next few years or decades. Wotan's reawakening is a
stepping back into the past; the stream was damned up and has broken
into its old channel. But the Obstruction will not last forever; it
is rather a reculer pour mieux sauter [to draw back in order to make
a better jump], and the water will overleap the obstacle. Then, at
last, we shall know what Wotan is saying when he "murmers with
Mimir's head."
Fast move the sons of Mim, and fate
Is heard in the note of the Gjallarhorn;
Loud blows Heimdall, the horn is aloft,
In fear quake all who on Hel-roads are.
Yggdrasill shakes and shivers on high
The ancient limbs, and the giant is loose;
Wotan murmurs with Mimir's head
But the kinsman of Surt shall slay him soon.How fare the gods? how fare the elves?
All Jotunheim groans, the gods are at council;
Loud roar the dwarfs by the doors of stone,
The masters of the rocks: would you know yet more?Now Garm howls loud before Gnipahellir;
The fetters will burst, and the wolf run free;
Much I do know, and more can see
Of the fate of the gods, the mighty in fight.From the east comes Hrym with shield held high;
In giant-wrath does the serpent writhe;
O'er the waves he twists, and the tawny eagle
Gnaws corpses screaming; Naglfar is loose.O'er the sea from the north there sails a ship
With the people of Hel, at the helm stands Loki;
After the wolf do wild men follow,
And with them the brother of Byleist goes.
