Yggdrasil in Voluspa, (The Lay of The Sibyl)
What we know about Yggdrasil, the World-Tree at the center of the ancient Norse universe, comes mainly from the poems Grimnismol and Voluspa.
Both poems are found in a 12th-century Icelandic manuscript called the Codex Regius, which is the earliest known source for the material collected and published as the Elder, or Poetic, Edda.
Voluspa is rendered in English as ‘The lay of the sibyl’.
In Voluspa the sibyl teaches us the architecture of the universe, and about the doom of the gods:
'an ash I know, Yggdrasil its name,
with water white is the great tree wet;
thence come the dew that fall in the dales,
Green by Urd's Well does it ever grow.
Thence come the maidens mighty in wisdom,
three from their dwellings down neath the tree,
Urd is the one, Verthanthi the next,
on the wood they scored, and skuld the third.
Laws they made there, and life allotted,
to the sons of men, and set their fates.'
Yggdrasil is pronunced ‘IG-dra-sil.
The Saxons, a Germanic people whose tribal duchy would have been just south of where the ancient Norse hailed from, are said to have worshipped an all-sustaining pillar called Irminsul. According to the Royal Frankish Annuls of 772 AD, Irminsul was a cult object— something the Frankish Christians under Charlemagne laid hands on and destroyed in their campaigns against the Germanic pagans .
Ygg-Dra-Sil. Ir-Min-Sul.
Symbolically Yggdrasil and Irminsul both held up the roof of the sky and laid the foundations of the world. I believe they represented the same principle; the spine of reality reflected in the earth’s polar axis.
To anyone who had observed the night sky for long enough, the whole canopy of stars would appear to revolve around a central point; the place where the earth’s polar axis terminates.
As the earth spins on it’s axis, it wobbles like a top.
The earths wobbles are cyclic, and the north pole cycles through the entire zodiac just like the planets do, except over a much longer time period.
This is called Polar Precession, and is the basis of the Great Year. One Great Year, or complete cycle of polar precession, is about 240,000 years. During a cycle of precession, even the stars move. What doesn’t change is the central axis of the world—
Thus the Polar Axis represents the changeless; the great tree with deep roots, the mighty pillar, the law from which all other laws are descended.
The second stanza of the Voluspa poem tells us that the mighty roots and branches of Yggdrasil support the weight of the Nine Worlds:
The nature and identity of the Nine Worlds remains a source of wild speculation.
Proceeding from the observation that Yggdrasil is the same as the planetary axis, the Nine Worlds Yggdrasil supports might represent the sun and moon and planets.
Leaning into this idea, we could interpret the Norse doctrine of Nine Worlds as an animistic expression of Aristotle’s doctrine of the Planetary Spheres:
Early astronomers correctly evaluated the order of the planets based on the speed of their rotational periods, concluding in turn that each planets must rule over it’s own domain.
In Aristotle’s model, each planetary domain represented a ‘harmonic sphere’. These spheres were locked together like Russian nesting dolls with the earth as the immovable center.
English scholar Hilda Elison Davis has related the Norse Yggdrasil to Northern Eurasian shamanic traditions which saw a tree extending from the underworld into heaven, acting as a ladder or point of mediation between the earth and sky realms. Later gnostic philosophical schools around the Meditteranean applied this same model to Aristotle’s theory of the planetary spheres, believing that the human soul ascended to heaven by passing through each sphere as one might climb the rungs of a ladder.
Yggdrasil supports nine worlds, and Aristotelian Cosmology recognizes nine spheres.
The scholars of Latin Christendom adopted the Aristotelian model, and it would be unreasonable to assume that the Christenized (and deeply curious) Nordic Skaalds* hadn’t heard about it— but if we do assume a disconnect, we might turn to another source for the Nine Worlds of Yggdrasil.
Vedic Astrology utilizes nine objects, or Navagraha; the two luminaries, the five planets, and the north and south lunar nodes, Ratu and Ketu.
Why would we look to Vedic traditions circulating thousands of miles to the southeast to help us decrypt the Norse Eddas?
In the Upanishads, a layer of Hindu texts dating from about 800 to 600 BC, the god Krisha says there is a sacred fig tree called ashvattha that runs through everything. This point of identity is by no means conclusive, but there’s more— much more.
The three roots ofYggdrasil can be taken to represent the streams of the past, the present, and the future; Urd’s Well at the base of the tree is their meeting point; a cosmic x-y-z intercept.
Yggdrasils roots were watered from Urd’s Well by the three sisters Skuld, Verthanthi, and Urd. These are akin to the three sisters of fate Clotho, Lechesis, and Atropos; the Moirai of ancient Greece.
It stands to reason that the Norse were acquainted with a rich body of knowledge. Even without Aristotle’s input, long nights spent watching the night sky on sea voyages would have taught them the basic structure of the cosmos; indeed, the roving Norse would have lived and died by this knowledge, and the Eddas preserve the deepest wells of Skaaldic knowledge.
Before the Sibyl describes Yggdrasil, she explains explains how the first man was fashioned from an ash tree:
17. Then from the throng | did three come forth,
From the home of the gods, | the mighty and gracious;
Two without fate | on the land they found,
Ash and Elm, | empty of might.
18. Soul they had not, | sense they had not,
Heat nor motion, | nor goodly hue;
Soul gave Othin, | sense gave Hönir,
Heat gave Lothur | and goodly hue
… and earlier in Voluspa, the Sibyl had described Yggdrasil as an ash tree.
Taking this at face value, one could infer that mankind is the fractal image or platonic derivative of Yggdrasil, the spine of reality.
‘Esse est percepi’ means, ‘to be is to be percieved’. This maxim is the central tenant of Bishop George Berkeley’s philosophy of subjective idealism.
Because mankind, alone among animals, has been burdened with the necessity of communicating it’s perceptions, many have concluced that the world came into being for the benefit of man alone.
The myth-image of humanity being shaped from the substance of Yggdrasil could be interpreted as an Eddic expression of the anthropocentric worldview, but there is a deeper layer to this:
The goal of spiritual systems like Hinduism and Buddhism is to attain a state where the distinction between man and the universe ceases to exist.
In a similar vein, early Hellenic astronomers cultivated the idea of the ‘Celestial Man’; an essentially platonic idea wherein the macrocosm is reflected in the microcosm. The human body and the sidereal zodiac were taken as mirror images of one another in this scheme; but this idea had found earlier expression in the Egyptian Book of The Dead.
Here the deceased, identified with Ra, says “There is no member of my body which is not the member of some god.”
Going back even further in time, we find echoes of the same idea in the earliest layer of Indo-European literature.
In the Hindu Rigveda, which was written several centuries (or millenia) before the aforementioned Upanishads, the Universe is identified with Purusha (man):
'Purusha, who has a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, a thousand feet, investing the earth in all directions, … Purusha is verily all this universe; all that is, and all that is to be... the gods performed the sacrifice with Purusha as the offering... From that victim, in whom the universal oblation was offered'.
Compare this to the wording we find in Havalmal, the Eddic poem where Odin sacrifices himself to himself on Yggdrasil (bearing in mind that these are modern English renderings of ancient texts that were written in two different languages):
137. I trow I hung on that windy Tree
nine whole days and nights,
stabbed with a spear, offered to Odin,
myself to mine own self given,
high on that Tree of which none hath heard
from what roots it rises to heaven.
138. None refreshed me ever with food or drink,
I peered right down in the deep;
crying aloud I lifted the Runes
then back I fell from thence.
Would anyone care to advance a theory as to how ideas from Rigveda contaminated the Norse poetic tradition some three thousand plus years later?
Sanskrit is in the Indo-European language group, just like Norse and Greek. But Egyptian is not. Parsing out the transmission of spiritual or philosophical ideas that appear to have been universally distributed in the ancient world is no mean feat, and such an undertaking is beyond my meager resources.
but I did find this on Pinterest-
Are the Eddas an offshoot of the Vedas? Were the Vanir of Norse Tradition a mother-culture with ties to the Indo-Aryan culture of Northern India? Alternately, did the wide-ranging Norse merchants, court poets, and raiders bring Vedic wisdom to Northern Europe? Or are there archetypes and myth-forms so universal that parallel traditions developed without ever having been aware of one another?
…after all, truth is singular.
Yggdrasil in Grimnismol, (The Ballad of Grimnir)
Grimnismol, rendered in English as The Lay of Grimnir, is another Eddic poem that betrays the depths of skaaldic wisdom; it enshrines the ancient Norse conception of the nature and shape of the universe.
In the Grimnismol the high god Odin arrives at the court of King Geirrod disguised as an aged peasant calling himself Grimnir, whose name means ‘the masked one’.
King Geirrod percieves Grimnir to be a vagabond, and treats the old man with cruelty— he places the beggar between two fires for eight nights as a form of torture.
While enduring this unjust punishment, the old man who is secretly Odin reveals many secrets about the nature of the Gods and the Cosmos to King Geirrod.
As in the Havalmal, another famous example of Wisdom Poetry from the Nordic world, Odin’s process in Grimnismol is shamanic— he betrays his secrets while enduring unnatural punishment.
During Grimnir’s Revelation King Geirrod receives the most complete description of Yggdrasil that has come down to us:
31. Three roots there are | that three ways run
‘Neath the ash-tree Yggdrasil;
‘Neath the first lives Hel, | ‘neath the second the frost-giants,
‘Neath the last are the lands of men.
32. Ratatosk is the squirrel | who there shall run
On the ash-tree Yggdrasil;
From above, the words | of the eagle he bears,
And tells them to Nithhogg beneath.
33. Four harts there are, that the highest twigs
Nibble with necks bent back;
Dain and Dvalin, | . . . . . .
Duneyr and Dyrathror.
34. More serpents there are | beneath the ash
Than an unwise ape would think;
Goin and Moin, | Grafvitnir’s sons,
Grabak and Grafvolluth,
Ofnir and Svafnir | shall ever, methinks,
Gnaw at the twigs of the tree.
35. Yggdrasil’s ash | great evil suffers,
Far more than men do know;
The hart bites its top, | its trunk is rotting,
And Nithhogg gnaws beneath.
While under duress, Odin reveals that the very fabric of the cosmos is under duress: the all-nurturing tree is in the process of being consumed by it’s own offspring. This is entropy; all life is a candle burning at both ends, a fire fed by its own body.
The Cosmological Viewpoint brought forth in the Eddas is notoriously bleak. This pattern is preserved in Yggdrasil’s name:
There is an old Norse kenning which referred to the hangman’s gallows as ‘The Horse of The Hanged’; ‘Drasill’ means ‘Horse’, and one of the names given to Odin was ‘Ygg’, meaning ‘Terrible’.
Yggdrasil is thus ‘The Horse of The Terrible One’.
In the Havalmal Odin hangs himself on holy Yggdrasil for nine days and nine nights to derive the knowledge of the runes. Drawing the runic language from the substance of Yggdrasil implies that Odin’s wisdom is perpetually bound to the Great Tree.
Thus it can be said that Odin humanized the natural law represented by Yggdrasil, giving it direction and moral force— Odin helmed Yggdrasil like a sea- captain helming a ship and, like a captain, would have been nothing and nowhere without his vehicle, his ‘mount’.
Some believe natural formations like The Devils Tower in Wyoming are all that remains of the gigantic trees that used to flourish on a primeval Earth, and that the stories of Great Trees like Yggdrasil are also degraded memories—
12. THE HANGED MAN.—Wisdom, circumspection, discernment, trials, sacrifice, intuition, divination, prophecy. Reversed: Selfishness, the crowd, body politic
Grimnirsmol shows Odin preserving the ancient guest-laws, or Xenia.
In ancient Greek legal codes and dramatic literature, suppliants, guests, and fugitives were held sacred to and protected by the High God Zeus. Grimnirsmol shows us these were also sacred to and protected by Odin.
When King Geirrod realizes his mistake in punishing Grimnir, who came as a guest and a suppliant, the king moves to free the beggar from bondage. Geirrod falls on his own sword in the attempt, and Odin raises Geirrod’s brother Agnar to the Kingship.
Grimnismol thus reveals one of Odin’s most important functions: The High God holds sway over the rise and fall of kings, dealing with men according to how well they have kept his laws.
Odin the Bound God is thus a Binder, in the same way that oaths are binding.
The law is terrible to those who break it; Odin’s epithet Ygg, The Terrible, may have been a primal expression of Machiavelli’s famous axiom:
...but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than to be loved.
Why do we always find Odin in postures of surrender and suffering?
He knows the entire pattern of time. Is Odin bound by his own Omniscience? I think the answer is a resounding ‘Yes’.
He knows that the generation of the gods, and indeed the entire world, is doomed to die in the fatal conflagration of Ragnarok. Yet he guides men into slaughter and strife for the sole purpose of gathering together the best warriors in a desperate bid to turn back the fate of the universe, a fate he learned from the three sisters who nurture Yggdrasil’s three roots.
Odin is crucified by absolute knowledge. Ideas of extinction haunt the activities of the High God, and for all his wandering he is frozen in place; perched at the end of time and gazing into the abyss.
In this way, Odin is reflected in the Paul Attreides of the second Dune book.
…Would you like to read more about the Polar Axis/ The Polar Myth and Vedic Contamination in the Eddas?
My friend says all this shit is satanic; that Dungeonposting is a chasing after the wind— well, I guess that’s the thing about dungeons. They are places of captivity, imprisonment, and isolation— places that are far from the warmth of the sun, far from God’s Love.
I found Paul Attriedes in Odin, and Rig Veda in the Poetic Edda— but these are just the shells of a Russian Nesting Doll that encapsulate a burning hell, and all I’m doing is peeling back layer after layer of gift wrap to reveal a ripe center of shit. My fundamental error is in believing this work is important when in reality it is vain and godless—
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