The Eye of Odin

There’s many mythologies and many historical stories that I think capture a lot of our attention, especially for those of us on the mystical and magical paths. Very few of them are as enduring and as mixed with controversy as that of Odin. Odin, the Allfather, is one of these essential archetypes. The famous psychologist Carl Jung was a famed supporter of a lot of the Nordic ideas himself, having Germanic descent. In fact, many believe that he went quite a long way to impress these ideas inside of his work. His philosophy, along with a couple of other modern interpretations, allows us to see the nature of organic consciousness. It’s very interesting how a lot of its prefabricated ideas or early levels of manifestation were oftentimes misassociated with things like Nazism, racism, and all of these things.

In light of recent events in the White House during the American election, these ideas have been even more plagiarized. Many true occultists were deeply offended by the people that broke the law in many ways, sporting Nordic symbols, which didn’t really represent the philosophy and possibly didn’t even truly understand the culture. In fact, myself and many other practitioners of the magical path felt that it was a setback and an insult in many ways to see these people blatantly point out symbols and wear them in protest in ways that they do not understand their origin and meaning.

Many people will look at the mystical path, the magical path, and make very quick assumptions due to their propaganda, due to their lack of information rather than their true search. This is why people like yourself, I think, are in the 10 percent—you are the rare few free thinkers who are obsessed with finding the real information and getting the real solutions. So let’s dive into a little bit of that now.

There are many ways to interpret aspects of the myth of Odin, and there are many lessons that we can glean from the journey. The first thing that I love the most is that it wasn’t the most regular. There’s no point in these ancient parts where the gods are being made out to be holier-than-thou. They may have more powers, more abilities, more knowledge, or more immortality, but they’re still human in many kinds of ways. They’re amongst us; they are like us in certain ways. I think it is because of our personal relationships and the metaphors that we can take from many of these stories, many of these ideas.

The Nordic Witch herself shares in her YouTube channel a story about how Odin himself has to suffer, and how he speaks in the Hávamál about the suffering—the greatest sickness is the one where we lose the will to live. I think this is such a powerful idea and such a core concept because it is one of the biggest struggles not just for occultists but for many people. For an occultist, it may be more common because one finds oneself at the age of the intellectual palette. You are not simply, as a true occultist, feasting on superstition, mythology, and ancient rites and hidden secrets, but you are at the cusp of exploring science and technology. You are yet able to hold contradicting ideas inside of your mind without feeling obliged to choose one or the other without further investigation and experimentation, but understanding the place and the possibility of both.

Your capacity to do that can sometimes dull you to the experiences of life. In fact, it’s one of the classic Faustian ideas. There are many interpretations of the story of Faust, and one of its more rooted ideas was not that the devil was tempting the soul of Dr. Faustus, but instead that Faust made the agreement—the idea very much like Dee in certain ways—to say, “If you could give me something of true beauty, then I will go gladly with you.” It is this sense of awe, this sense of beauty that we find ourselves longing for.

I find that this is such an essential thing when we look at how our soul gets broken, how our life, our journey gets broken, because this happens to each and every one of us. We come into the world smiling or screaming children, but we’re very soon enchanted by the beauty of life and the possibility and the wonder. We’re caught up in the beauty because we’re so enriched with our soul before it gets tainted, before parts of it get broken. That first time your parents scolded you and you didn’t really do anything wrong, but they were in a bad mood and you were too young to understand what to do with this, and they maybe didn’t have enough emotional and psychological resources in order to help you with that. To that first breakup, you know, that embarrassing moment at school, that being rejected—whatever it was, whatever you did as a result of these things slowly and systemically fractured your beauty.

We find our beauty then lost in other people, and in memories, and in projections of the future because we’re either looking at the past because of where we felt beautiful and longing to have our beauty back—thinking it’s that person, that place, that time—or even we’re projecting that we’ve gotten so much shame attached to us that we’re projecting in the future, someday when or when if whatever, then I’ll have. Many people understand this intellectually but still do this emotionally. Many of us, no matter how long you’ve been on the path, it’s very easy to succumb to this, and you’re a fool if you think that you’re immune to it.

I love the work of Robert Greene in the area of our nature, where he speaks and identifies that these laws of human nature are not something that you’re immune to. Understanding them doesn’t make you immune to them. Sometimes, you know, knowledge is not in and of itself a cure. Knowledge is in and of itself a guide to the probability of a cure, but it’s only through walking the way, like Odin going on the quest of knowledge, going on the search, that one makes it.

But there is this beautiful component of the journey of Odin, and there are many essential components I think that we can glean from that. To really go into it would take volumes and lectures and details, and by the way—there is, selfless plug, an entire module dedicated to it in The Cult of You—but you know, that aside, there are two key points inside of the journey that I would like us to focus on today.

It is the sacrifice of the eye of Odin because that’s the first part, right? He has to sacrifice his eye for the attainment of knowledge. Then, further down the road, he sacrifices himself to himself for the knowledge of the runes. I think there’s so much beauty here; there’s so much deep, profound meaning that is often overlooked when we look at these simple points of the mythology.

Let’s first start with the most basic of this understanding and the biggest event inside of this, which is a culmination of the ideas, but I think it’ll help us illustrate the initial point a little bit better. Odin sacrifices himself on the life tree for nine days and nine nights. Nine, according to the sciences of numbers, allows us to recognize the number of man. Firstly, we see nine cropping up in every single aspect of the path. The secret name of God, the Shem HaMephorash, is 72 letters and 72 names—7 plus 2 is 9. The Goetia, the counter if you will, to the Shem is also obviously 72, also again equating to 9. Even the beast, the beast itself, 666, again boils down to nine. Nine is the number of man.

Nine is oftentimes attributed to, in the Tree of Life and upon our bodies, to Yesod or its counter, Gamaliel. It’s interesting that we find attributed to this position inside of the tree, the gateway into the astral, the gateway into the unconscious, the cave of Lilith, the cave of the subconscious mind, the doorway of our sexuality. And it’s because at the root of our identity sets our sexual identity.

Now one can very easily confuse the notion when an occultist or a magician would say that all things are sexual. Even Freud himself postulated the idea that everything was driven by this sexual impulse. Crowley himself identifies the concept that when man realizes that God is sex and sex is God, that liberation begins. It is in that recognition that he’s speaking of here as the Tetragrammaton, the holy four-lettered name of God, the these four ideas that represent the four elemental dimensions of our souls, the four sheaths of the body, the four archetypes of the sovereign, magician, warrior, lover, the four attachment styles—all these aspects of our nature which is the result of our relationship with signals of pleasure or love and signals of pain or fear.

Our yin-yang of influence, the duality by which we find ourselves subjugated to reality, it is this duality that creates the attachment biochemically inside of our body that produces the hallucination of “me.” My sense of self is the result of my attachment. It is what I avoid, what I’m trying to disassociate from or move away from, is the NLP term, and what I want to move towards is the NLP term. Whereas Tony Robbins says, the pain and the pleasure, or as the Bible says, the heaven and the hell, the yin and the yang—these dualities that are consistently affecting our drive.

One of the core ideas in the occult principles and the spiritual traditions is the resolution of duality. Deepak Chopra talks about in these Seven Spiritual Laws of Love that the first law is to be natural, and to be natural, which is the key behind traction, is to accept one’s duality, to not try and make amends for your imperfections, but to embrace them, to see their beauty and to allow that. Even if you decide to work on it to improve it, you still don’t do it because you’re rejecting it. You’re still not separating yourself further from self and causing further incongruences. In fact, you are reaching a deeper state of congruence.

I think this is so pertinent because we see the sacrifice of Odin on the Tree of Life. The Tree of Life can be very much seen as the structure, the blueprint upon which identity is created. He sacrifices himself unto himself as a way of saying, “I am sacrificing my current persona, my current hallucinated model of self that’s come as a result of this duality, as a result of what I’m attached to through pain and through pleasure, in order to myself, to sacrifice it to myself as Christ would give it unto his Father.”

So many others would have to go through this journey. Jesus sacrifices himself or is sacrificed and dies before he is resurrected in the right-hand myth. In essence, both archetypes descend beneath the persona, beneath the ego mind, beneath the false self to reach its roots—the origin stories of these components—in order to dismantle and change from that science.

This is so powerful, I think, and is a core idea. It’s echoed again in the work of Joe Dispenza. Joe Dispenza’s work has a very nice catchphrase to it. He says, “Personality creates personal reality.” I think it brings these mythical ideas back down to something practical. That’s the core concept here. It is when we recognize the roots of the personality, and this is more than just, “Oh, your behavior changes.” This is literally your brain changes, your neurological structure in your brain changes, meaning you access different things from the inner mind, you access different things from the universe, or from God, or from whatever you want to call it, and you start to unlock more of this.

As Odin himself, then, through this process of sacrifice, descends down the tree and comes up with the knowledge of the runes, the 24 runes—this is great, this is so powerful because I think it taps back into what we spoke about previously in the Doctrine of Death. You see, in the Doctrine of Death, we identified that Kali is in and of herself time, and we spoke about how necessary it is when these infinite concepts of consciousness, these deep dreams of our world and our life, need to be brought down into doable, actionable steps. We need to recognize the value of time and not be wasting it. As Napoleon Hill in Outwitting the Devil points out, the devil in that mythology is us losing presence, our skiing being caught up in the daydream and not actioning.

Where are you not actioning? What are the components of the persona, of the personality, that’s preventing you from developing the true will and executing on the vision that you’ve been receiving through your rituals, your meditations, and your prayers, and your spiritual work? Because this is the idea that a lot of people don’t get of magic—it’s when we go into the ceremony, you go into the sacred work, it’s not boom, suddenly everything’s done for you. No, not maybe, but most of the time, no. It is often a case that a great inspiration or a great idea comes, but then you have to go, and you have to go work and evolve yourself, transmute self, die to the current self.

You need to sacrifice yourself unto yourself in order to do the work to cultivate the true will, to bring to ground this grand vision into reality through action. Now there’s a great phrase in the Afrikaans tradition where the concept of even Christ was referred to as the Dadesie, the Son of Action. This notion is great because it’s this concept that the divine is only grounded through action, and if you’re not taking action, then you’re not getting the result. In fact, that’s part of the beauty.

There’s this philosophy of the law of attraction that says, “Oh, I need to feel good, and if it doesn’t feel good, don’t do it.” Look, you’re never going to feel good about getting out of bed at 5:00 a.m. It’s just not gonna happen. You’re not gonna feel good when you’re sitting and relaxing, and it’s time to go to the gym. But when you’re doing it, oh, then you feel good. That comes afterward. So if we’re going to be judging ourselves based upon our feel-good, we’re gonna lose the game completely. That’s not what is meant. What is meant is when it’s grounded in your identity, it’s grounded in who you are. Because it’s who I am, I will get up, and I will do that 5:00 a.m., 5:30 meditation every single day, no matter what happens, no matter how tired I am, because I’m cultivating my will, my strength, my power.

Now here is the big question, and this is the next part, and that’s why I stamped earlier, and I said, you know, we’re going to look back to the other part about the sacrifice of the eye. It is oftentimes depicted to the eyes that one is almost looking in the future, and one is looking to the past. It’s the concept of Juno, of Janus, which one face looks to the past, one to the future, and one to the present—these three points. But it’s very common that we experience these two, and then we see the depiction of the centaur with a singular eye. We see the eye of Shiva, the singular eye of destruction. We see the mind’s eye—all these depictions, all these ideas come back to highlight to us a very fundamental concept.

Why don’t you want to get out of bed that morning? You know, why are you staying in longer than you should? You see, before we can get to that state of sacrificing ourselves for ourselves, we need to begin with these systematic portions of the journey that Odin takes us through, these lessons that are embedded inside of it. He sacrifices the eye for knowledge, for gnosis.

Every problem in spirituality can oftentimes be traced back—maybe not everyone, but a lot of problems in our spirituality can be traced back to the fact that we live in our past. How do you live in your past? A great example of this is in the Tree of Life. In the Tree of Life, when we raise up the Tree of Life, we come to Tiferet. In Tiferet, there are many translations or ideas and concepts attributed to this, and my favorite is the attribution of beauty and the attribution of imagination. Tiferet is the beauty because Tiferet represents very much the higher self in that sense, or at least the solar self, if we will. By representing the solar self, we find this part of ourselves that gets fragmented.

Now remember, we started off this journey, and we talked about how mommy and daddy did something wrong, and it started fragmenting, a relationship broke, it started fragmenting—this is our own Qliphoth, this is the light that comes in, and the current Sephiroth isn’t strong enough to handle it, so it shatters, and the Qliphoth is created. But the Qliphoth, even though it has the friction and everything inside of it, at its root is still the need to suit. In other words, that initial light is still inside there. Our job is to go in and retrieve it, not wallow in it. Not, “I’m a black magician,” no. It’s to go into it, transmute the darkness, unlock its power, unlock its light, and then reintegrate the portion—finish the journey. It’s a journey; it’s not just a get-stuck-in-one-spot.

The lesson is so beautifully put in the sacrifice of the eye, you see, because when one eye is sacrificed and we are left with only one eye, we need to look at what’s right in front of us. We can’t be daydreaming off into the future, off into the past. We are forced almost to become completely present. There’s this phrase that says, or this idea that when certain senses are lost, for example, if your sight is lost, suddenly your hearing improves because you’re wasting less time and energy.

I want you to think of that eye as you looking to your past, and I want you to think about where in your past or even where in your future is your beauty. Now I’m not saying that you stop seeing, you know, stop having great memories, and I’m not saying you stop having great goals. I am saying, though, that you start recognizing that based upon the principles of vibration, unless you’re going to start resonating with the thing you seek, you are not going to find it.

This is at least a philosophy we can all agree on at some level or another. Whether you’re saying that it’s true from a quantum mechanical point of view, it’s true from a spiritual point of view, or it’s simply true from a behavioral science point of view. If you’re going to act like an [expletive], you’re not going to find love, or you’re at least not going to attract the right kind of people in your life. If you’re going to vibrate and behave in an empowering way, you’re going to attract the right people. If we give up our eye, it means that we give up looking to the past for our beauty, looking to the future for our beauty.

This is very important in terms of spirituality as well because how many of us do that? When I get that initiation, or I get that degree, or I get that, then I’ll have, then I’ll be. When I get that goal, then I’ll be, then I’ll have. It’s the same as putting your power inside of other people and going like, if they act a certain way, then I’ll feel a certain thing. Feeling lost and spiraling down a rabbit hole where you’re always going to be in reaction and never really in response—in other words, never really inside your own self, never really accessing your own godhood and able to unlock its wisdom, its knowledge, its gnosis for that moment because you have lost, as Eckhart Tolle says, presence. You are outside of the presence. That was his definition of the spiritual eternal now.

But how do we do that? How do we sacrifice? Because it’s an elusive, obvious—you don’t even know that you’re sometimes doing it. If you have gone through a breakup recently, or at any point, and you still find yourself thinking back about the ex, that’s not because the ex was so wonderful. You know, if the ex was so wonderful, they would still be in your life. If the company, if it was a company or a job that was still so wonderful, it would still be in your life. If it was a position, maybe it was your health, maybe it was your fitness, maybe it was something else. If that was still so wonderful, that was truly your destiny, truly your beauty, it would still be here.

The reason you miss it is because your beauty, which is you, which is your Tiferet, which is your soul, is stuck in there. You have infused it, and this is a process of anchoring, you see. We anchor neurologically—this is how we build up this identity, this version of ourselves in our head. We simply go, we’re in a peak emotional state, and whatever happens around us at that point that is unique, we link up. It’s the same thing now. When you’re in a relationship or in a business, and you’re in peak emotional states, when you’re in your beauty, that person is around, that place is around, those people are around, they link up, your brain merges the two. So when that’s gone, you feel like a part of you is gone because it is—you have left your beauty inside of that.

You need to give up that eye, you need to give up—because what does the eye do? The eye seeks beauty; it looks for beauty. In other words, it looks for yourself because you are the source of your beauty. You are the source of that which you seek in life. Your partner isn’t the beauty—you may make them beautiful, but they’re beautiful because of you, because of the eyes through which you see them. If you were tainted and too damaged, you wouldn’t see that beauty, and you would never experience it. How many people would you die to be with, but there’s someone that treats them like crap, that doesn’t see their value? That’s because that person’s not putting their beauty in them.

Same thing with futures—what futures are just so amazing to you that, you know, other people would scoff at? And what is something you’d scoff at that other people would kill for? We all have countless examples of this. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but it’s about learning to understand where we have gotten misattached, where we are trying to move forward, but we’re looking back without realizing it and sacrificing the eye.

When we sacrifice the eye, we recognize part of the teachings and the idea of the Eye of Shiva. In the Eye of Shiva, we recognize that through the Eye of Shiva, all of time and space is destroyed. Why time and space? Because attachment is when we have anchored against an event or a person or a place or a time or thing that is inside that is measured inside of time and space. This is literally because it’s how the neocortex functions. Joe Dispenza’s work goes in depth around this idea, so, you know, if you’re not joining The Cult now, then please at least pick up one of his books and have a look at Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself—a very well-recommended piece of reading to help you deepen your understanding of the subject even further.

Now, what I want to leave you with is a little bit of a map, a little bit of a what-now. You understand now that, you know, the mystery of Odin is the secret teaching about sacrificing ourselves. The limit of our access to our knowledge, our mastery over time, and our ability to do our will is very much our attachments, our old self, our limited self. You understand now that the biggest cause of that, the biggest struggle of that, is because we’re constantly looking at the past. We’re constantly looking to the future for our beauty.

If your beauty is stuck in the past or stuck in the future, now I recommend doing soul travel or soul retrieval work in order to really unlock that. In fact, very soon, I’m going to be releasing a talk with a really good friend of mine, an amazing, amazing man and sorcerer—I’m going to give you a hint, his name is Enoch—he’s written a book, The Black Witch. Him and I speak quite in depth about the subject of soul retrieval and mental health in the occult world, and I really recommend you listen to that if you’re serious about your path, and we discuss these values.

But one of the core ideas and one of the core concepts that comes through in that talk, as well as one you’ll realize when you recognize—and I want to kind of impart this one to you now though—is that the only reason the past or the future is so beautiful is because of your projection inside of it. Because you accessed, in a moment, your beauty, a state of beauty within you, which we can call your soul, and you linked it through repetition to that past or that future, that person, that place, that time, that thing, or event.

I’m not telling you to let go and give that up, but I am telling you that you will suffer as long as you’ll be stuck. This is why you’re not taking action, this is why you’re not following through—because you’ve got mixed emotions, mixed meanings of what it’ll mean. If you know that the action that you need to take will lead you to true beauty and is your true beauty, this is purity, this is the fundamental principle of occult purity. Occult purity doesn’t mean that you stop drinking and stop having sex—heck, we’re not that path. It means that you have unlocked the singular eye, you have a single purpose, a single beauty.

So you see where you’ve been, you look back at your life and your past, and you see the beauty of the people that have been in it, in the moments that you’ve had, but you recognize that that beauty was you. You look at the future and where you’re going, what you’re going to create, and the journeys that you’re going to take, but you realize you are that beauty that you’re after. And then you begin to believe in your own beauty, and you begin to truly see yourself as beautiful.

How many people suffer from this—magician or muggle? How many women, how many men suffer that they don’t want to go into places and meet people because they don’t think that they’re enough? They don’t want to take on those challenges and those dreams because they don’t think they’re enough to do it. They don’t have enough resources, they don’t have enough time, they don’t have enough. Most psychological problems that lead to mental imbalances, issues with mental health that lead to physical illnesses oftentimes as well, is the result of us thinking we are fundamentally not enough—not good enough, not pretty enough, not whatever the “enough” is.

This is because what we have done is we have placed our fundamental beauty outside of our own house, and we are trained in society to go begging for it. You know, you have to earn a living, you have to prove your worth. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t earn, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t push and prove, but I am saying that if you love your body and you enjoy seeing it grow, you have emotional fuel. If you look at your body as a failure, if you look at yourself as a failure, you’re losing emotional fuel.

There’s a fundamental attitude difference here. In the one, you’re not good enough, and you’re purely driven by pain. That may really motivate you at first, and it’s good to use that to keep yourself going to the next level, but it’s one that ultimately drains you. If, on the other hand, you see yourself as resourceful, you see yourself as beautiful, you see yourself as good enough, as capable, suddenly you have the fuel, the energy, in order to do it.

When you face your challenges and you go, “I’m never going to be able to do this, I don’t have that,” and you look at other people like they’re the beauty—in other words, they’re better, they’re more capable, they’ve got everything sorted out—all you’re doing is you’re focusing not on them, you’re focusing on your own lack of it. You’re focusing on your ugly and not in your beauty.

I want you to listen to me very carefully—in fact, I don’t want you to listen to me at all. I want you to listen to your heart because it’s not wrong. Even though it might have led you in times and journeys that have ended up in heartache and in pain, it’s not a bad heart. You don’t have to hide it anymore. The parts where you had faith, where you had secret dreams and secret hopes, and it failed, and you got old, or you made mistakes—no, you don’t go and walk into a gym and work your biceps or your abs, your back or your muscles, whatever, and then the next day they’re sore as heck and go, “Well, clearly that is the law of attraction telling me I should never go back to the gym.” You understand that that hurt, that pain, is a sign of growth.

So when you extract your beauty from the environment and from people, places, times, and things, and you claim it back, when you start retrieving your soul, there’s gonna be hurt. That doesn’t mean your heart was wrong; it means it had to go through those breaks in order to become strong. You had to go through your own Qliphoth, your own Tree of Death, and you will still go through it many, many times as long as you are alive on this planet because that is how you grow. That is how you expand to become a more powerful being. The greater your vision is, the more you’re going to have to overcome, not because that’s what it costs in order to strengthen steel to become a sword. That is what it takes to become the magi, that is what it takes. You wouldn’t have been on that path if you weren’t capable of it.

But the reason you don’t see your capacity is because you’re looking with the other eye that needs to be sacrificed for the gnosis. You need to stop looking at your past, longing for the future. You need to stop wishing for how good things were or wishing you could get to something better and away from the pain you’re experiencing now. Stop doing that. Take back that part of you, retrieve your soul, bring it back into this moment, become present again. Find out what’s distracting you, give that up, sacrifice that to the Allfather, sacrifice that in your ritual, sacrifice your lie until you realize the truth that you are the beauty that this world needs.

Show up, show up completely, and let us see you. But we can only do that when you see you because we want to hear your story.

I’m Adam Nox, and remember: live deliciously.