Yggdrasil in Voluspa, (The Lay of The Sibyl)
An ancient Norse poem tells us there was a gigantic tree that ran through the center of everything. All of the worlds, infernal, terrestrial, divine, and otherwise, were supported by the roots and branches of this great tree, which was called Yggdrasil.
A good deal of what we know about Norse mythology comes from two sources: Snorri Sturleson’s 12th-century compilation called the younger, or prose, Edda; and a manuscript dated to the same period called the Codex Reguis, which is also known as the elder, or poetic, Edda.
What we know about Yggdrasil comes mainly from the Eddic poems Grimnismol and Voluspa.
Voluspa is rendered in English as ‘The lay of the sibyl’. A ‘lay’ is a narrative verse poem, while a sibyl is a seeress or wise-woman. Thus, Voluspa is the narrative poem of the seeress or wise-woman.
Here the sibyl teaches us the architecture of the universe, and about the doom of the gods.
This is how she introduces Yggdrasil, the World-Tree at the center of the Nordic universe:
'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, were said to worship an all-sustaining pillar called Irminsul.
Ygg-Dra-Sil. Ir-Min-Sul.
Yggdrasil and Irminsul both held up the roof of the sky and laid the foundations of the world. They both represented the same principle; the spine of reality, reflected in the earth’s polar axis.
To anyone who had observed the sky for long enough, the whole sky would appear to be revolving 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. Unlike a top, the earths wobbles are cyclic. The earths north pole cycles through the entire zodiac just like the planets do, except over a much longer time period.
One Great Year, or complete cycle of 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, the point around which even the stars revolve.
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 Axis is a miracle; it is the steady hand that holds the earth stable. And the mighty roots and branches of Yggdrasil support the weight of Nine worlds.
The nature and identity of the Nine Worlds has been the source of much debate over the centuries. Proceeding from the idea that the trunk of Yggdrasil is the polar axis; from a geocentric perspective, the order of the heavens depends on where the earth sits.
The Nine Worlds represent the luminaries and the planets. It is a vivid and uniquely animistic way to express Aristotle’s doctrine of the planetary spheres.
You see, Aristotle concieved of the armillary sphere universe; early astronomers correctly evaluated the order of the planets based on the speed of their rotational periods, and concluded that the planets must rule over their domains. In Aristotle’s model, each planetary domain was it’s own harmonic sphere, and these spheres were locked together like a russian nesting doll with the earth at the 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 climbs the rungs of a ladder.
Buy Yggdrasil supports nine worlds, while Aristotle only recognized seven spheres.
Turning to an unlikely source, Vedic Astrology utilizes nine objects, or Navagraha; the two luminaries, the five planets, and the north and south lunar nodes, Ratu and Ketu.
While Nordic cultures were not known for their astronomy, they were known for their skaalds. A skaald was a court poet who served his king as an entertainer, a chronicler, and an educator. The men who wrote the Eddas and the Sagas were men who prized knowledge and strove to keep it against the ravages of time.
Norse merchants and warriors traveled widely, as we can presume their skaalds did, though they hunted for a different kind of bounty.
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.
It stands to reason that the Norse were acquainted with a body of knowledge almost as rich as Aristotle’s. At the very least, their long nights watching the sky on sea-voyages would have taught them the structure of the cosmos. Far from being mere fairy stories, deep knowledge was packaged and preserved in the Eddas.
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, the cosmic x-y-z intercept.
Yggdrasils roots were watered from Urd’s Well by the three sisters Skuld, Verthanthi, and Urd, akin to the three sisters Clotho, Lechesis, and Atropos; the sisters of fate, the Moirai of ancient Greece.
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
Remember how Yggdrasil was also described as an ash tree in Voluspa.
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 that the macrocosm was reflected in the microcosm. The human body and the sidereal zodiac were images of one another in this scheme; but it’s an idea that found earlier expression. For example, 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, 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 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 and raiders bring Veddic 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)
In the Grimnismol, Odin arrives at the court of King Geirrod disguised as the aged peasant Grimnir.
King Geirrod percieves Grimnir to be a vagabond, and treats the old man with cruelty. The the beggar is placed 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.
During Grimnir’s Revelation we are given the most complete description of Yggdrasil that is available 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.
The Norse Cosmological View as conveyed by the Icelandic Eddas is notoriously bleak.
There is an old Norse kenning which referred to the hangman’s gallows as ‘The Horse of The Hanged’; ‘Drasill’ means ‘Horse’.One of the names given to Odin was ‘Ygg’, meaning ‘Terrible’.
Yggdrasil was thus ‘The Horse of The Terrible One’.
In the poem Havalmal, Odin hangs himself on the holy tree Yggdrasil for nine days and nine nights to derive the knowledge of the runes.
Drawing the runes of language from Yggdrasil implies that Odin’s wisdom was perpetually bound to the Great Tree.
It can be said that Odin humanizes the natural law represented by Yggdrasil, giving it direction and moral force.
Odin helmed Yggdrasil like a Norse captain helming his ship and, like the captain, would have been nothing and nowhere without his vehicle, his ‘mount’.
In Grimnirsmol, Odin is found preserving the ancient guest-laws, or Xenia, familiar to us from ancient Greek legal codes preserved in their dramatic literature. Here, suppliants and guests were sacred to and protected by the High God Zeus.
When King Geirrod realizes his mistake in punishing Grimnir, who came as a guest, he moves to free Odin from bondage. The king 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.
