I was told from the beginning that our Odin is a woman’s god.

I had no idea what this meant. I had read the Gylfaginning and other Norse literature and various books and other web sites, and it looked to me like he was mostly a god of kings, with lots of world rulership, war, heroes, gifts of horses, and poetry. He also slept with lots of serving women.

I can lay claim to poetry, and someday soon hope to reunite with my mother’s passion of horses, but I have no claim to lineal aristocracy and don’t do much sword fighting. Mostly I am an inveterate Seeker in occult matters, and that is one thing Odin does, as well. He goes around the world collecting clues about the Ragnarok, the end of the world. So in that sense, Odin is my god, and, well, if you seem to be “like” a god in many ways, you should just own it. Not for nothing did I straightway leave my nets and follow Paimon.

When the Man of the World came in with his long-time demon who now goes by the moniker of Paimon–I hope someday to learn his other names–the demons are fairly helpless without their sorcerers who should try to stay with them forever in the chthonic bandwidth; this is why you bind yourself in hell –you will never wish to be severed from your demon partners–he made an assessment of the demons we are working with in order to learn their provenance. The genealogy and curriculum vitae of a demon is fairly important in knowing what and how the being will work. Here is what they have learned of our Odin.

He is a family farm spirit from my Scandinavian family here in western Washington.

He has been with our family for what he says is over a thousand years. In former times, he did the work of witches as Odin, for Odin was interchangeable with the Devil depending on the era and place. Thus he is a very much a woman’s god.

Often he works with the housewife in tricks to make the crops grow, keep the men home, and bar the neighbor from killing the cow. I need to learn more about these old Swedish tricks, because they will no doubt yield as much knowledge as power.

I have noticed I am very good at getting jobs and have always said what I want most as a witch is to be a job getter. Sometimes the gods solve other problems by changing a person’s job!

Some would call him a troll.

He stresses that he wishes this to be clear. He works in troll ways with the family if that is all they can muster, as it has been for some time, though he has a great range of potentialities that he works in many ways. My family call him a stream that always gets people the right lives. I have noticed that whenever I am too far from Seattle I make awful mistakes with getting myself the wrong life. Odin needs his family. He is part of their living energy.

His most recent work of trolldom has been as a scarecrow, though he stresses that he has hung out in churches. Odin says that churches have much marketing of the Devil.

I realize that some are trying to steal my demons and use them for themselves. It is very hip in the African tradition to kill a Solomonic magician with magick and take their demons. I am expected to be a slave in the underworld to their gods, but they will have to kill Odin to do that and the old ones as well, who are not as killable as many hope. They cannot bind real demons, a situation I will discuss in the next post. As Paimon says, many powers (living sorcerers) die in forming these things. Many Rosicrucians are also licking their chops to have the gods of the underworld without “making.”

I have also been told that it is a matter of great judgement in Africa to assassinate a god, so it was urged to me to strengthen Odin as best I could against such an event. This martyrdom thing was partly a way to protect Odin! And get us home to Seattle, which wasn’t happening as long as I had an extremely lucrative JOB in New York City.

Odin doesn’t just make the crops grow–he also kills them from time to time to get his way.

When he first came to me Odin said that the men were taking so many blows he had to conceal his warriors in female form, come sit by the fire in their kitchen, and work with them in milk tricks to guide the destiny of humanity. I find when I stray too far from the work of Frigg and my home things I go terribly wrong. The very making of the objects of domestic life–the food, the clothing, the tools–carries a magic that heals and protects, especially when done with magic. We should try to construct a new work of Frigg and the witches in enchanting the world, as Paimon has instructed me to do.

I call Odin “a mask of Germanic soul making.” The making of souls goes on over vast stretches within families, and you cannot judge by the metrics of this world. My grandfather was so fine a sorcerer he did no magic. He says he had to balance those many energies of pie in the sky. He just worked with his hands, making everything perfect, and took immaculate care of the children. He watched and waited for the storm, which was always there in the underworld, and is now quite visible here. And enjoyed his life. He is indispensable to us as the Papa who was, not the Papa who wasn’t. I am not urging people to underplay their hands in life. By all means, enjoy the world. It is great. But we should not worry if what we want and do is to be great at real life. We are all woven into the generations of Odin. He does not lose his children.