ODIN or Wodan, the Spirit of the Universe, was conceived by our forefathers as a great wanderer. His very name describes him as the All-pervading. Watan in Old High German, wadan in Old Saxon, and vadha in Old Norse, are of the same root as the Latin vadere and (with the introduction of a nasal sound) the German wandern—to go, to permeate, to wander about. Wodan is the Breath of the World; his voice is in the rushing wind. Restlessly he travels through all lands. The Sanskrit wâta, which etymologically belongs to the same root, signifies the wind; and the wind, in that early Aryan tongue, is also called “the Ever Traveling.”
Hence several of the many names under which Odin was known represent him as being forever on the move. In the poetic “Edda” he is called Gangradr; Gangleri (still preserved in the Scottish “gangrel”—that is, a stroller); and Wegtam—all meaning the Wayfarer. In one of the Eddic songs in which he appears incarnated as Grimnir, he wears a blue mantle—a symbolic representation of the sky, of which he is the lord, and along which he incessantly travels. In the prose “Edda,” where his image is reflected, in the “Incantation of Gylfi,” under the guise of a man who makes inquiries about all things in the Heavenly Hall of Asgard, he assumes a name meaning the “Wayfarer.” He there says that he “comes from a pathless distance,” and asks “for a night’s lodging”—exactly as, in later times, we find the Wandering Jew saying, and asking for, the same.
In the Icelandic Heimskringla (the “World Circle”) the semi-historical, semi-mythical Odin, whose realm lay near the Black Sea, and who ruled in company with twelve temple priests, called Diar (that is, gods, or divines), again appears as a great migratory warrior. He was “often away for years, wandering through many lands.” The story of this powerful captain in war, who led the Germanic hosts from Asia or Asa-land, through Gardariki (Russia) and Saxon-land (Germany) to the Scandinavian North, is inextricably mixed up with the story of the Odin of mythology. But it is noteworthy that a restless, peregrinatory spirit—that spirit which, later on, made the Teutonic tribes overrun all Europe, and even the North of Africa—is also the characteristic of the warlike leader of the Icelandic hero-chronicle.
Saxo calls Odin the viator indefessus—the Indefatigable Wanderer. The Northern Sagas are full of the records of his many journeys. In the Ragnar Lodbrog Saga, however, we see Odin already changed into a gray-headed pilgrim, with long beard, broad hat, and nail-clad shoes, pointing out the paths to Rome. The broad hat everywhere characterizes the great god in Teutonic lands. It signifies the cloud region—the head-dress, as it were, of the earth. In many Germanic tales, the once powerful ruler of the world wears a motley mantle of many colors pieced together. This seemingly undignified garment is but another symbolic rendering of the spotted sky.
Now the motley, many-colored mantle, as well as the enormous broad hat and the heavy shoes of the Wandering Wodan, recur, on the one hand, in the curious shirt of St. Christophorus, and, on the other, in two of the chief attributes of the Wandering Jew. The coincidence is so striking, that Gotthard Heidegger already declared, at a time when the science of mythology was little developed yet, that “the great Christophorus and the Wandering Jew go together.” At present, little doubt is entertained that, so far as the Church legend is concerned in Germanic countries, Christophorus carrying the Savior over the water has replaced the older heathen tale of the giant Wate carrying Wieland over the water. Curiously enough, this tale has its prototype in a Krishna legend in India. Wate, as even his name shows, was only a Titanic counterpart of Wodan, who himself appears in the Asa religion also under the form of a water god, or Neptune.
But before going into a comparison between the symbolical attributes of the errant Ahasverus and those of Germanic deities, the tale of the Wild Huntsman has to be looked at, for he is the link between Wodan and the Wandering Jew.
This tale of the Wild Huntsman is found all over Germany, and in neighboring countries where the German race has penetrated during the migrations, in an endless variety of forms. Wodan-Odin was the Psychopompos, the leader of the departed into Walhalla. The Wild Huntsman, who has taken his place, careers along the sky with his ghostly retinue. In the same way Freia, who in heathen times received a number of the dead in her heavenly abode, is converted into a Wild Huntress, who hurries round at night with the unfortunate souls.
The names given in Germany to these spectral leaders of a nocturnal devilry bear a mark which cannot be mistaken. In German-Austria the Wild Huntsman is called Wotn, Wut, or Wode; in Holstein, Mecklenburg, and Pomerania, Wod. The name corresponds to that of the Wild Huntsman in Sweden, where it is Oden. In the same way a female leader of the wild chase meets us as Frau Wode, Gode, or Gauden; again, as Frick, Berchta, Holla, Hera, Herka, or, biblically changed, Herodias; all the former names, with the apparent exception of the latter, being but appellatives of the same heathen goddess. To the seemingly biblical name of Herodias, in some places a male Herodis corresponds. But I hold that a Hera, Odin’s wife, could without difficulty be formed into a Herodias. And an Oden, who was a Heer-Vater (Father of the Armed Hosts), and who afterward became a leader of the Wilde Heer, was as easily disguised into a Herodis….
The gradual transition from the heathen Germanic circle of ideas to the Christian legend is provable in many other ways. On Swiss and German soil, in places of close proximity, the same phantom form is alternately called the Eternal Hunter and the Eternal Jew, as well as the Pilgrim from Rome or the Wandering Pilate. In the last-mentioned form, he is assigned a local habitation in the Pilatus Mountain of Switzerland. It is a well-known process of Germanic mythology to “enmountain,” if I may say so, the deposed heathen gods, to charm them away into hills and underground caves, where they are converted into kings and emperors, often with a retinue of twelve men, corresponding to the duodecimal number of the deities.
A forest-haunting or hill-enchanted Jew has clearly no meaning. But if the Jude was originally a Wodan, Godan, or Gudan,—and, indeed, there is a Frankish form of the god’s appellation, from which the Godesberg, near Bonn, has its name,—then the mystery is at once dissolved. Godan may, by softer pronunciation, have been changed into a Jude or Jew,—even as the “Gütchen,” the German spirit forms, were converted into “Jüdchen,” of little Jews.
Where the Wanderer is known, in the Aargau, as the Ewige Jude, it is related that in the inn where he asks for a night’s lodging he does not go to bed, but walks about, without rest, in his room during the whole night, and then leaves in the morning. He once stated that, when for the first time he came to that Rhenish corner where Basel stands at present, there was nothing but a dark forest of black fir. On his second journey he found there a large copse of thorn bushes; on his third, a town rent by an earthquake. If, he added, he comes the same way a third time, one would have to go for miles and miles in order to find even as much as little twigs for making a besom.
The immense age and everlastingness of the Wanderer are fully indicated in this description.
At Berne he is said to have, on one occasion, left his staff and his shoes. In a “History of the Jews in Switzerland” (Basle, 1768), the Zurich clergyman Ulrich reports that in the Government Library at Berne a precious relic is preserved—namely, the aforesaid staff and a pair of shoes of the “Eternal, Immortal Jew”; the shoes being “uncommonly large and made of a hundred snips,—a shoemaker’s masterpiece, because patched together with the utmost labor, diligence, and cleverness, out of so many shreds of leather.” Evidently some impostor—who, however, kept up to the floating ideas of the old Germanic myth, which had grown into a Christian legend—had thought fit, in order to maintain his assumed character, to present the town of Berne, as it were, with a diminished facsimile of Vidar’s shoe.
At Ulm, also, the Wandering Jew is said to have left a pair of his shoes. This persistent connection of a decayed divine figure with shoes and the cobbler’s craft comes out in a number of tales about the Wild Huntsman. In Northern Germany, one of the many forms of the Ewig-Jäger is called Schlorf-Hacker,—a ghastly figure in rattling shoes or slippers that jumps pick-a-back upon men’s shoulders. In Glarus, the departed spirits of the Wild Chase are actually called “Shoemakers,” as if they had been contributors to Vidar’s shoe. A full explanation of this symbolism—for it can be nothing else—is still wanting. But the importance of the shoe, both in the Germanic creed and in the Ahasverus legend, is undeniable, and it clearly forms a thread of connection between the two circles of mythology.
When the real meaning of a myth is lost, popular fancy always tries to construct some new explanation. Even at a seat of English learning, the old Germanic Yuletide custom of the Boar’s Head Dinner—originally a holy supper of the heathen Teutons—is interpreted now as a festive commemoration of the miraculous escape of an Oxford student from the tusks of a bristly quadruped. Nothing can be made out more clearly than that the banquet in question is the remnant of a sacrificial ceremony once held in honor of Fro, or Freyr, the god of Light, whose symbol and sacred animal was the sun boar, and who was pre-eminently worshiped at the winter solstice. But how few there are, even among the most learned, who know this simple fact, or who have ever been startled by the palpable impossibility of the modernizing explanation of the Boar’s Head Dinner!
We cannot wonder, therefore, that the restless chasing of the Wild Huntsman—though he still bears here and there the name of Wotn, or Wodan, and though he be replaced in other districts by a Wild Huntress, who is called after one of the names of Wodan’s consort—should be explained now as the expiation of the crime of hunting on a Sunday, committed by some nobleman or squire in defiance of the orders of the Church. The details of this Christianizing explanation vary in every locality. Men are always ready to explain, offhand, that which they do not understand in the least. Yet the great heathen Germanic traits of the Wild Chase are preserved without change in places lying far asunder. In the same way there has been a Boar’s Head Dinner, until a comparatively recent time, in more places than one in England; and at Court there is still, at Christmas, a diminished survival of the custom. But only at Oxford the impossible story of the student is told.
So, also, there are different tales accounting for the peregrinations of that mythic figure which is variously known as the horseflesh-eating Eternal Hunter who insulted Christ, as the Pilgrim from Rome, as Pilatus the Wanderer, as the hill-enchanted and forest-haunting Jew, as Ahasver, Buttadeus, and so forth. But again, the chief characteristics of the Restless Wanderer remain everywhere the same; and in not a few districts this form is inextricably mixed up with that of the Wild Huntsman, who also dwells in a hill and haunts a forest, and whose Wodan or Godan name may in Germany have facilitated the transition to a Jude.
When we keep these things in mind, we shall see how useful it is to study the creed of our forefathers as a means of dispelling the dark shadows of present bigotry. Such fuller knowledge of a collapsed circle of ideas which often show so remarkable a contact with the Vedic religion enables us to enjoy, as a weird poetical conception, that which otherwise would only strike us as the superstition of a contemptible religious fanaticism. For all times to come, a Great Breath, a Mahan Atma, will rustle through the leaves, rage across hill and dale, and stir river and sea with mighty motion. In so far, there will never be a lack of an Eternal Wanderer. If we understand the myth in this natural sense, a curse will be removed; a feeling of relief will be created in bosoms yet heavily burdened with prejudices; and evidence will have been furnished that a grain of sense, however laid with absurdities, is often to be found in cruel fancies in which the human mind seems to have gone most wildly astray.
