C.G. Jung and Wotan’s awakening

Wotan, Woden, and Odin

The supreme Germanic deity—known variously as Wotan, Woden, and Odin—presents a complex history of linguistic divergence, classical syncretism, and vivid literary adaptation. While the Roman historian Tacitus first recorded his worship in the first century CE by linking him to Mercury through interpretatio romana, the deity fully emerged as the cornerstone of Germanic paganism between the seventh and eighth centuries. Historical linguistics traces these regional names back to the reconstructed Proto-Germanic root *Wōðanaz, meaning “lord of frenzy” or “leader of the possessed.” As Germanic tribes migrated, this root fractured along regional lines. In early medieval Britain, the Anglo-Saxons developed the name Wōden, associating him with the dead and cementing his legacy in the English weekday “Wednesday.” On the European continent, the Second High German consonant shift transformed the name into the Old High German Wuotan, which eventually became the modern German Wotan.
By the thirteenth century, this pan-Germanic figure was extensively documented in Scandinavia as Odin, the central sovereign of Icelandic literature. Classical frameworks mirror this supreme status, aligning his cosmic authority with Zeus and Jupiter, or his psychopompic and messenger roles with Hermes and Mercury. Though Christianization swept across Europe, a vestigial shadow of this ancient god lingered in the High German literary tradition, appearing via subtle, highly secularized allusions in the Middle High German epic poem, the Nibelungenlied.

The lupine triad Geri Freki and Fenrir

Within the primary Old Norse texts of the Poetic and Prose Eddas, this sovereign authority is visually and symbolically defined by a striking lupine triad that represents both Odin’s martial dominance and his ultimate vulnerability. His constant celestial companions are the wolves Geri (“the greedy one”) and Freki (“the ravenous one”). Sitting beside his throne in Valhalla, these beasts function as physical extensions of the predatory nature of war. In the Prose Edda, Odin requires no physical food to sustain his immortality, consuming nothing but wine; consequently, the Allfather dispenses all the meat from his grand banquet table directly to his two wolves. This dynamic is immortalized in the Poetic Edda poem Grímnismál, which observes that the weapon-glad war-father feeds his ravenous wolves while living on wine alone. Geri and Freki as loyal companions roaming mortal battlefields, cementing Odin’s grim status as a god of the dead.
The third wolf, however, introduces a profound eschatological contrast to these loyal companions. Fenrir, the monstrous offspring of Loki, represents the chaotic antithesis of the domesticated wolves at Odin’s feet. Kept in check by the gods during his youth, Fenrir’s growth eventually threatens the cosmic order, setting up a devastating literary irony that underpins the entire mythology. While Odin spends an eternity nurturing and mastering the minor hunger of Geri and Freki at his dining table, he is ultimately destined to be consumed by the absolute hunger of the cosmos. At Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, Fenrir breaks his supernatural bonds and marches across the worlds with jaws stretching from the earth to the heavens. In the final confrontation, the great wolf swallows Odin whole, ending the reign of the Allfather and demonstrating that the very forces of destruction the war-god sought to harness would eventually devour him.

Symbolist painter Franz von Stuck – The Wild Hunt

This exact frenzy found its visual culmination in the late nineteenth century through the haunting, prophetic work of the German Symbolist painter Franz von Stuck. Capturing the raw, elemental gravity of the archetype on canvas, Stuck remarked that with his imagery he wanted to show the terrifying elemental force that breaks over humanity when the ancient spirits of the homeland break their chains. Stuck masterfully anticipated this collective psychological explosion across two distinct iterations of his masterpiece, The Wild Hunt (Die Wilde Jagd), which depict a manic, wild-eyed Wotan leading a spectral, charging procession over a landscape of tangled bodies. The initial 1888 version, painted on a compact wood panel and inscribed by the artist as his very first oil painting, captures a raw, claustrophobic burst of frantic horizontal motion as horses and wolves tear through a pitch-black abyss. A decade later, his larger 1899 canvas—now housed in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris—deepens the composition with brooding ochre tones and introduces a screaming, skeletal Gorgon to the foreground, heightening the terrifying depth of a civilization’s impending psychological shadow.

In the realm of C.G. Jung’s modern depth psychology

In the realm of modern depth psychology, this ancient figure undergoes a profound conceptual transition from historical myth to a living component of the human mind. Carl Jung interpreted Wotan not as a dead pagan relic, but as an autonomous, primordial archetype residing within the collective unconscious, embodying the psychological force of storm, frenzy, and emotional seizure (Ergriffenheit). Within this psychological framework, the lupine triad undergoes a parallel transformation; the companion wolves Geri and Freki manifest the untamed, predatory instincts of the personal shadow, while the adversarial Fenrir represents the catastrophic threat of a psyche completely consumed by its own destructive, chaotic impulses. Observing the volatile capacity of this underlying current, Jung famously declared that Wotan is a restless wanderer who creates unrest, stirs up strife, and functions as the god of storm and frenzy who unleashes passion and the lust of battle.

Wotan as Archetype of Storm and Frenzy

Jung wrote extensively on the Wotan archetype and its specific constellation within the German psyche. His deep interest in mythology allowed him to recognize the lethal potential of irrational movements. He was consistently compelled by the study of semi-religious state cults (such as those imposed by Stalin, Hitler, and Mao). These systems are framed by neo-pagan metaphors as a substitute for the created religious void. In this void, the State does not merely govern; it possesses. The ‘predatory beast’ does not disappear under civilization; it simply waits for the ‘containers’ to crack. When they do, the resulting dissociation allows a rational society to participate in an archaic, predatory frenzy while believing itself to be fulfilling a ‘higher’ destiny. In his 1936 essay “Wotan,” he identified the eruption of a furor teutonicus beneath the thin veneer of Christian heritage and Enlightenment culture. “Jung’s research hypothesis—that archetypal structures condition collective behavior and symbolic imagination through which a society is either understood or unconsciously lived—finds its confirmation here. He identified the phenomenon of “dissociation”: a cultural rift wherein a rational, advanced society believes it has overcome “primitive stages,” while those stages have, in reality, only been suppressed. From this state of repression, they inevitably return.

The Wild Hunt (Wotan) Stuck 1888 – LenbachH

In “The Psychology of Dictatorship” (1936), Jung discusses how the “void” forces a return to archaic, tribal structures: “ The collective unconscious is a real fact in human affairs. …It is understandable, therefore, that there is such a force as the collective unconscious of a nation; … And the trouble about a nation is that it does not keep its word and has no honor, at least on the level of the collective unconscious. A nation as such, for all the claims of the totalitarian states, is a blind force.“

Wotan is not a dead myth but an “autonomous psychic factor,” a restless wanderer who creates unrest and stirs up strife. Jung describes him as the “god of the storm and the frenzy, the leader of the Wild Hunt and the wolf-daemon” (CW 10, §375). In the psychoid ground, “storm” represents a non-local field of energy that overrides individual agency. When this field is activated, the collective psychic equilibrium shifts toward predatory shadow-identification, a “subjective determinant” that produces overwhelming effects in the collective life of a people.

Wotan’s Wolves and Sovereign Violence

In the Norse mythological landscape, Wotan represents the archetype of the “Full Warrior”—the Ergreifer or “Seizer” who embodies a state of sacred, orderly or disorderly aggression. Yet, the moral and psychological direction of this warrior-energy is not contained within the God alone; it is mirrored in the dual propensity of his wolves. Here, the wolf-vessel bifurcates into two distinct psychoid possibilities: the integrated “Supportive Hunter” and the autonomous “Predator Shadow.”

As the Sovereign Warrior, Wotan is flanked by Geri and Freki (“the greedy” and “the ravenous”). In the state of the Warrior’s “Fullness,” these wolves are not mindless monsters but high-functioning companions representing integrated instinct. They act as Supportive Hunters, channeling the raw hunger of the “infra-red” biological ground into the service of the state. They embody the virtues of the pack—loyalty, collective intelligence, and teleological coordination. In this integrated state, the predatory energy of the wolf is “socialized” through a psychoid covenant with the Warrior, providing the necessary “meat” or vitality to sustain the civilization. This is the wolf as a peer and protector, the Mac Tíre who acknowledges the Sovereign’s authority.

However, the mythic field also holds the potential for the Predator Shadow, manifested in the catastrophic figure of Fenrir. Fenrir represents the wolf-instinct that has been repressed, chained, or dissociated from the “Full Warrior.” Like the King falls into the shadow—becoming either the Tyrant who abuses power or the Weakling who fears it—the “Supportive Hunter” disappears. The wolf then grows into an autonomous, world-ending force that can no longer be contained by the “civilized” persona. Fenrir is the eschatological result of a warrior-energy that has lost its wisdom and its mission. He is the devouring shadow that eventually breaks his chains to consume the very “God” (the Social Order) that failed to integrate him.

Thus, Geri and Freki on one hand, and Fenrir on the other, represent the two poles of archetypal probability. They serve as a diagnostic mirror for the state of the collective: when the Warrior is in his Fullness, the wolf is a supportive ally; when the Warrior is in Shadow, the wolf becomes the predator that heralds the collapse of the world.

The wolves Geri and Freki, who flank Odin’s throne, symbolize the duality of, “Sovereign Violence” necessary to maintain the state or win a war. This sub-chapter explores the wolf as the provider of predatory legitimacy. For the dictator or sovereign, the wolf serves as a mirror of the “predatory instinct of the primitive group.” As Jung stated in The Psychology of Dictatorship, a ruler in this state “must always have an enemy… someone to hunt, or the pack will turn on itself.” The wolf-vessel here transitions from a biological peer to a tool of absolute, non-human power.

Jung’s Essay on Wotan and Collective Activation

In his 1936 essay, Jung identified the eruption Wotan he likened to the of a furor teutonicus beneath the veneer of Enlightenment culture. In fact, Jung just foresaw the events a “powerful eruption” of the collective unconscious, the “awakening of Wotan from thousand years sleep”, and the uprising of the Germanic soul in Nazi Germany against the “rationalism”. He argued that because “traditional containers—the Church and its symbols—had become hollow,” primordial forces broke through the floor of the house (Preface of Essays on Wotan).

C.G. Jung called Hitler 1938 in an interview with US-Journalist H. R. Knickerbocker,a historical phenomenon, a loudspeaker of the German soul “ Hitler is a medicine man, a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity or even better, a myth”. C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters (edited by William McGuire and R.F.C. Hull), the H.R. Knickerbocker interview titled “Diagnosing the Dictators”

Jung’s “Diagnosis” confirms that the more we believe we are “advanced” (Enlightenment) or morally superior , the higher the probability that the suppressed wolf-nature will return as a “furor.”Hitler functioned as a catalytic medium through whom latent archetypal contents achieved collective symbolic expression. He provided the voice for the furor teutonicus. Because his power was “magical” and “anti-intellectual,” it bypassed the rational “Enlightenment” filters and connected directly to the infra-red biological ground (instincts) of the people.

When a society believes it has “overcome” its primitive stages, it falls into “dissociation.” This cultural rift allows a rational society to engage in archaic frenzy while believing itself to be modern. In totalitarian systems, the state becomes a “surrogate religion,” and the dictator a “demi-god” or “medicine man” of the tribe.

“The state has taken the place of God… when the traditional containers (the Church and its symbols) had become hollow, the primordial forces broke through the floor of the house.” –Preface to Essays on Wotan, C.G.Jung

Essay on Wotan

By Dr Carl Gustav Jung

[First published as WOTAN, Neue Schweizer Rundschau (Zurich). n.s., III (March, 1936), 657-69. Republished in AUFSATZE ZURZEITGESCHICHTE (Zurich, 1946), 1-23. Trans. by Barbara Hannah in ESSAYS ON CONTEMPORARY EVENTS (London, 1947),

WOTAN

En Germanie naistront diverses sectes,

S’approchans fort de l’heureux paganisme:

Le coeur captif et petites receptes

>Feront retour a payer la vraye disme.

— Propheties De Maistre Michel Nostradamus, 1555

When we look back to the time before 1914, we find ourselves living in a world of events which would have been inconceivable before the war. We were even beginning to regard war between civilized nations as a fable, thinking that such an absurdity would become less and less possible on our rational, internationally organized world. And what came after the war was a veritable witches’ sabbath. Everywhere fantastic revolutions, violent alterations of the map, reversions in politics to medieval or even antique prototypes, totalitarian states that engulf their neighbours and outdo all previous theocracies in their absolutist claims, persecutions of Christians andJews, wholesale political murder, and finally we have witnessed a light-hearted piratical raid on a peaceful, half-civilized people.

With such goings on in the wide world it is not in the least surprising that there should be equally curious manifestations on a smaller scale in other spheres. In the realm of philosophy we shall have to wait some time before anyone is able to assess the kind of age we are livinging. But in the sphere of religion we can see at once that some very significant things have been happening. We need feel no surprise that in Russia the colourful splendours of the Eastern Orthodox Church have been superseded by theMovement of the Godless — indeed, one breathed a sigh of relief oneself when one emerged from the haze of an Orthodox church with its multitude of lamps and entered an honest mosque, where the sublime and invisible omnipresence of God was not crowded out by a superfluity of sacred paraphernalia. Tasteless and pitiably unintelligent as it is, and however deplorable the low spiritual level of the “scientific” reaction, it was inevitable that nineteenth-century “scientific” enlightenment should one day dawn inRussia.

But what is more than curious — indeed, piquant to a degree — is that an ancient god of storm and frenzy, the long quiescent Wotan,should awake, like an extinct volcano, to new activity, in a civilized country that had long been supposed to have outgrown the Middle Ages. We have seen him come to life in the German Youth Movement, and right at the beginning the blood of several sheep was shed in honour of his resurrection. Armed with rucksack and lute, blond youths, and sometimes girls as well, were to be seen as restless wanderers on every road from the North Cape to Sicily, faithful votaries of the roving god. Later, towards the end of the Weimar Republic, the wandering role was taken over by thousands of unemployed, who were to be met with everywhere on their aimless journeys. By 1933 they wandered no longer, but marched in their hundreds of thousands. The Hitler movement literally brought the whole of Germany to its feet, from five-year-olds to veterans, and produced a spectacle of a nation migrating from one place to another. Wotan the wanderer was on the move. He could be seen, looking rather shamefaced, in the meeting-house of a sect of simple folk in North Germany, disguised as Christ sitting on a white horse. I do not know if these people were aware of Wotan’s ancient connection with the figures of Christ and Dionysus, but it is not very probable.

Wotan is a restless wanderer who creates unrest and stirs up strife, now here, now there, and works magic. He was soon changed by Christianity into the devil, and only lived on in fading local traditions as a ghostly hunter who was seen with his retinue, flickering like a will o’ the wisp through the stormy night. In the Middle Ages the role of the restless wanderer was taken over by Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, which is not a Jewish but a Christian legend. The motif of the wanderer who has not accepted Christ was projected on the Jews, in the same way as we always rediscover our unconscious psychic contents in other people. At any rate the coincidence of anti-Semitism with the reawakening of Wotan is a psychological subtlety that may perhaps be worth mentioning.

The German youths who celebrated the solstice with sheep-sacrifices were not the first to hear the rustling in the primeval forest of the unconsciousness. They were anticipated by Nietzsche, Schuler, StefanGeorge, and Ludwig Klages. The literary tradition of the Rhineland and the country south of the Main has a classical stamp that cannot easily be got rid of; every interpretation of intoxication and exuberance is apt to be taken back to classical models, to Dionysus, to the puer aeternus and the cosmogonic Eros.No doubt it sounds better to academic ears to interpret these things asDionysus, but Wotan might be a more correct interpretation. He is the god of storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the lust of battle; moreover he is a superlative magician and artist in illusion who is versed in all secrets of an occult nature.

Nietzsche‘s case is certainly a peculiar one. He had no knowledge of Germanic literature; he discovered the “cultural Philistine”; and the announcement that “God is dead” led to Zarathustra’s meeting with an unknown god in unexpected form, who approached him sometimes as an enemy and sometimes disguised as Zarathustra himself. Zarathustra, too, was a soothsayer, a magician, and the storm-wind:

And like a wind shall I come to blow among them, and with my spirit shall take away the breath of their spirit; thus my future will sit. Truly, a strong wind is Zarathustra to all that are low; and this counsel gives he to his enemies and to all that spit and spew: “Beware of spitting against the wind.”

And when Zarathustra dreamed that he was guardian of the graves in the “lone mountain fortress of death,” and was making a mighty effort to open the gates, suddenly

A roaring wind tore the gates asunder; whistling,shrieking, and keening, it cast a black coffin before me. And amid the roaring and whistling and shrieking the coffin burst open and spouted a thousand peals of laughter.

The disciple who interpreted the dream said to Zarathustra:

Are you not yourself the wind with shrill whistling,which bursts open the gates of the fortress of death? Are you not yourself the coffin filled with life’s gay malice and angel-grimaces?

In 1863 or 1864, in his poem TO THE UNKNOWN GOD, Nietzsche had written:

I shall and will know thee, Unknown One,

Who searchest out the depths of my soul,

And blowest through my life like a storm,

Ungraspable, and yet my kinsman!

I shall and will know thee, and serve thee.

Twenty years later, in his MISTRAL SONG, he wrote:

Mistral wind, chaser of clouds,

Killer of gloom, sweeper of the skies,

Raging storm-wind, how I love thee!

And we are not both the first-fruits

Of the same womb, forever predestined

To the same fate?

In the dithyramb known as ARIADNE’S LAMENT, Nietzsche is completely the victim of the hunter-god:

Stretched out, shuddering,

Like a half-dead thing whose feet are warmed,

Shaken by unknown fevers,

Shivering with piercing icy frost arrows,

Hunted by thee, O thought,

Unutterable! Veiled! horrible one!

Thou huntsman behind the cloud.

Struck down by thy lightning bolt,

Thou mocking eye that stares at me from the dark!

Thus I lie.

Writhing, twisting, tormented

With all eternal tortures,

Smitten

By thee, cruel huntsman,

Thou unknown — God!

This remarkable image of the hunter-god is not a mere dithyrambic figure of speech but is based on an experience which Nietzsche had when he was fifteen years old, at Pforta. It is described in a book by Nietzsche’s sister, Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche. As he was wandering about in a gloomy wood at night, he was terrified by a “blood-curdling shriek from a neighbouring lunatic asylum,” and soon afterwards he came face to face with a huntsman whose “features were wild and uncanny.” Setting his whistle to his lips “in a valley surrounded by wild scrub,” the huntsman “blew such a shrill blast” that Nietzsche lost consciousness —but woke up again in Pforta. It was a nightmare. It is significant that in his dream Nietzsche, who in reality intended to go to Eisleben, Luther’s town, discussed with the huntsman the question of going instead to”Teutschenthal” (Valley of the Germans). No one with ears can misunderstand the shrill whistling of the storm-god in the nocturnal wood.

Was it really only the classical philologist in Nietzsche that led to the god being called Dionysus instead of Wotan — or was it perhaps due to his fateful meeting with Wagner?

In his REICH OHNE RAUM, which was first published in1919, Bruno Goetz saw the secret of coming events in Germany in the form of avery strange vision. I have never forgotten this little book, for it struck meat the time as a forecast of the German weather. It anticipates the conflict between the realm of ideas and life, between Wotan’s dual nature as a god of storm and a god of secret musings. Wotan disappeared when his oaks fell and appeared again when the Christian God proved too weak to save Christendom from fratricidal slaughter. When the Holy Father at Rome could only impotently lament before God the fate of the grex segregatus, the one-eyed old hunter, on the edge of the German forest, laughed and saddled Sleipnir.

We are always convinced that the modern world is a reasonable world, basing our opinion on economic, political, and psychological factors. But if we may forget for a moment that we are living in the year of Our Lord 1936, and, laying aside our well-meaning, all-too-human reasonableness, may burden God or the gods with the responsibility for contemporary events instead of man, we would find Wotan quite suitable as a casual hypothesis. In fact, I venture the heretical suggestion that the unfathomable depths of Wotan’s character explain more of National Socialism than all three reasonable factors put together. There is no doubt that each of these factors explains an important aspect of what is going on in Germany, but Wotan explains yet more.He is particularly enlightening in regard to a general phenomenon which is so strange to anybody not a German that it remains incomprehensible, even after the deepest reflection.

Perhaps we may sum up this general phenomenon as Ergriffenheit — a state of being seized or possessed. The term postulates not only an Ergriffener (one who is seized) but, also, an Ergreifer (one who seizes). Wotan is an Ergreifer of men, and, unless one wishes to deify Hitler– which has indeed actually happened — he is really the only explanation. It is true that Wotan shares this quality with his cousin Dionysus, but Dionysus seems to have exercised his influence mainly on women. The maenads were a species of female storm-troopers, and, according to mythical reports, were dangerous enough. Wotan confined himself to the berserkers, who found their vocation as the Blackshirts of mythical kings.

A mind that is still childish thinks of the gods as metaphysical entities existing in their own right, or else regards them as playful or superstitious inventions. From either point of view the parallel between Wotan redivivus and the social, political and psychic storm that is shaking Germany might have at least the value of a parable. But since the gods are without doubt personifications of psychic forces, to assert their metaphysical existence is as much an intellectual presumption as the opinion that they could ever be invented. Not that “psychic forces” have anything to do with the conscious mind, fond as we are of playing with the idea that consciousness and psyche are identical. This is only another piece of intellectual presumption. “Psychic forces” have far more to do with the realm of the unconscious. Our mania for rational explanations obviously has its roots in our fear of metaphysics, for the two were always hostile brothers. Hence,anything unexpected that approaches us from the dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and, therefore, as real, or else as an hallucination and, therefore, not true. The idea that anything could be real or true which does not come from outside has hardly begun to dawn on contemporary man.

For the sake of better understanding and to avoid prejudice, we could of course dispense with the name “Wotan” and speak instead of the furor teutonicus. But we should only be saying the same thing and not as well, for the furor in this case is a mere psychologizing of Wotan and tells us no more than that the Germans are in a state of”fury.” We thus lose sight of the most peculiar feature of this whole phenomenon, namely, the dramatic aspect of the Ergreifer and the Ergriffener. The impressive thing about the German phenomenon is that one man, who is obviously “possessed,” has infected a whole nation to such an extent that everything is set in motion and has started rolling on its course towards perdition.

It seems to me that Wotan hits the mark as an hypothesis. Apparently he really was only asleep in the Kyffhauser mountain until the ravens called him and announced the break of day. He is a fundamental attribute of the German psyche, an irrational psychic factor which acts on the high pressure of civilization like a cyclone and blows it away. Despite their crankiness, the Wotan-worshippers seem to have judged things more correctly than the worshippers of reason. Apparently everyone had forgotten that Wotan isa Germanic datum of first importance, the truest expression and unsurpassed personification of a fundamental quality that is particularly characteristic of the Germans. Houston Stewart Chamberlain is a symptom which arouses suspicion that other veiled gods may be sleeping elsewhere. The emphasis on the Germanic race — commonly called “Aryan” — the Germanic heritage, blood and soil, the Wagalaweia songs, the ride of the Valkyries, Jesus as a blond and blue-eyed hero, the Greek mother of St Paul, the devil as an international Alberich in Jewish or Masonic guise, the Nordic aurora borealis as the light of civilization, the inferior Mediterranean races — all this is the indispensable scenery for the drama that is taking place and at the bottom they all mean the same thing: a god has taken possession of the Germans and their house is filled with a “mighty rushing wind.” It was soon after Hitler seized power,if I am not mistaken, that a cartoon appeared in PUNCH of a raving berserker tearing himself free from his bonds. A hurricane has broken loose in Germany while we still believe it is fine weather.

Things are comparatively quiet in Switzerland, though occasionally there is a puff of wind from the north or south. Sometimes it has a slightly ominous sound, sometimes it whispers so harmlessly or even idealistically that no one is alarmed. “Let the sleeping dogs lie” — we manage to get along pretty well with this proverbial wisdom. It is sometimes said that the Swiss are singularly averse to making a problem of themselves. I must rebut this accusation: the Swiss do have their problems, but they would not admit it for anything in the world, even though they see which way the wind is blowing. We thus pay our tribute to the time of storm and stress in Germany, but we never mention it, and this enables us to feel vastly superior.

It is above all the Germans who have an opportunity,perhaps unique in history, to look into their own hearts and to learn what those perils of the soul were from which Christianity tried to rescue mankind.Germany is a land of spiritual catastrophes, where nature never makes more than a pretence of peace with the world-ruling reason. The disturber of the peace isa wind that blows into Europe from Asia’s vastness, sweeping in on a wide front from Thrace to the Baltic, scattering the nations before it like dry leaves. or inspiring thoughts that shake the world to its foundations. It is an elementalDionysus breaking into the Apollonian order. The rouser of this tempest is named Wotan, and we can learn a good deal about him from the political confusion and spiritual upheaval he has caused throughout history. For a more exact investigation of his character, however, we must go back to the age of myths, which did not explain everything in terms of man and his limited capacities, but sought the deeper cause in the psyche and its autonomous powers. Man’s earliest intuitions personified these powers. Man’s earliest intuitions personified these powers as gods, and described them in the myths with great care and circumstantiality according to their various characters.This could be done the more readily on account of the firmly established primordial types or images which are innate in the unconscious of many races and exercise a direct influence upon them. Because the behaviour of a race takes on its specific character from its underlying images, we can speak of an archetype “Wotan.” As an autonomous psychic factor, Wotan produceseffects in the collective life of a people and thereby reveals his own nature.For Wotan has a peculiar biology of his own, quite apart from the nature of man. It is only from time to time that individuals fall under the irresistible influence of this unconscious factor. When it is quiescent, one is no more aware of the archetype Wotan than of a latent epilepsy. Could the Germans who were adults in 1914 have foreseen what they would be today? Such amazing transformations are the effect of the god of wind, that “bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, nor whither it goeth.” It seizes everything in its path and overthrows everything that is not firmly rooted. When the wind blows it shakes everything that is insecure, whether without or within.

Martin Ninck has recently published a monograph whichis a most welcome addition to our knowledge of Wotan’s nature. The reader neednot fear that this book is nothing but a scientific study written with academic aloofness from the subject. Certainly the right to scientific objectivity is fully preserved, and the material has been collected with extraordinary thoroughness and presented in unusually clear form. But, over and above all this, one feels that the author is vitally interested in it, that the chord ofWotan is vibrating in him, too. This is no criticism — on the contrary, it is one of the chief merits of the book, which without this enthusiasm might easily have degenerated into a tedious catalogue. Ninck sketches a really magnificent portrait of the German archetype Wotan. He describes him in ten chapters, using all the available sources, as the berserker, the god of storm, the wanderer,the warrior, the Wunsch- and Minne-god, the lord of the dead and of the Einherjar, the master of secret knowledge, the magician, and the god of the poets. Neither the Valkyries nor the Fylgja are forgotten, for they form part of the mythological background and fateful significance of Wotan. Ninck’s inquiry into the name and its origin is particularly instructive. He shows thatWotan is not only a god of rage and frenzy who embodies the instinctual and emotion aspect of the unconscious. Its intuitive and inspiring side, also,manifests itself in him, for he understands the runes and can interpret fate.

The Romans identified Wotan with Mercury, but his character does not really correspond to any Roman or Greek god, although there are certain resemblances. He is a wanderer like Mercury, for instance, he rules over the dead like Pluto and Kronos, and is connected with Dionysus by his emotional frenzy, particularly in its mantic aspect. It is surprising that Ninck does not mention Hermes, the god of revelation, who as pneuma and nous is associated with the wind. He would be the connecting-link with the Christian pneuma and the miracle of Pentecost. As Poimandres (the shepherd of men), Hermes is an Ergreifer like Wotan. Ninck rightly points out that Dionysus and the otherGreek gods always remained under the supreme authority of Zeus, which indicates a fundamental difference between the Greek and the Germanic temperament. Ninck assumes an inner affinity between Wotan and Kronus, and the latter’s defeat may perhaps be a sign that the Wotan-archetype was once overcome and split up in prehistoric times. At all events, the Germanic god represents a totality on avery primitive level, a psychological condition in which man’s will was almost identical with the god’s and entirely at his mercy. But the Greeks had gods who helped man against other gods; indeed, All-Father Zeus himself is not far from the ideal of a benevolent, enlightened despot.

It was not in Wotan’s nature to linger on and show signs of old age. He simply disappeared when the times turned against him, and remained invisible for more than a thousand years, working anonymously and indirectly.Archetypes are like riverbeds which dry up when the water deserts them, but which it can find again at any time. An archetype is like an old watercourse along which the water of life has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it has flowed in this channel the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return to its old bed. The life of the individual as a member of society and particularly as a part of the State maybe regulated like a canal, but the life of nations is a great rushing river which is utterly beyond human control, in the hands of One who has always been stronger than men. The League of Nations, which was supposed to possess supranational authority, is regarded by some as a child in need of care and protection, by others as an abortion. Thus, the life of nations rolls on unchecked, without guidance, unconscious of where it is going, like a rock crashing down the side of a hill, until it is stopped by an obstacle stronger than itself. Political events move from one impasse to the next, like a torrent caught in gullies, creeks and marshes. All human control comes to an end when the individual is caught in a mass movement. Then, the archetypes begin to function, as happens, also, in the lives of individuals when they are confronted with situations that cannot be dealt with in any of the familiar ways. But what a so-called Fuhrer does with a mass movement can plainly be seen if we turn our eyes to the north or south of our country.

The ruling archetype does not remain the same forever,as is evident from the temporal limitations that have been set to the hoped-forreign of peace, the “thousand-year Reich.” The Mediterraneanfather-archetype of the just, order-loving, benevolent ruler had been shattered over the whole of northern Europe, as the present fate of the ChristianChurches bears witness. Fascism in Italy and the civil war in Spain show that in the south as well the cataclysm has been far greater than one expected. Even the Catholic Church can no longer afford trials of strength.

The nationalist God has attacked Christianity on abroad front. In Russia, he is called technology and science, in Italy, Duce,and in Germany, “German Faith,” “German Christianity,” or the State. The “German Christians” are a contradiction in terms and would do better to join Hauer’s “German Faith Movement.” These are decent and well-meaning people who honestly admit their Ergriffenheit and tryto come to terms with this new and undeniable fact. They go to an enormous amount of trouble to make it look less alarming by dressing it up in a conciliatory historical garb and giving us consoling glimpses of great figures such as Meister Eckhart, who was, also, a German and, also, ergriffen. In this way the awkward question of who the Ergreifer is is circumvented. He was always”God.” But the more Hauer restricts the world-wide sphere ofIndo-European culture to the “Nordic” in general and to the Edda in particular, and the more “German” this faith becomes as a manifestation of Ergriffenheit, the more painfully evident it is that the”German” god is the god of the Germans.

One cannot read Hauer’s book without emotion, if one regards it as the tragic and really heroic effort of a conscientious scholar who, without knowing how it happened to him, was violently summoned by the inaudible voice of the Ergreifer and is now trying with all his might, and with all his knowledge and ability, to build a bridge between the dark forces of life and the shining world of historical ideas. But what do all the beauties of the past from totally different levels of culture mean to the man of today,when confronted with a living and unfathomable tribal god such as he has never experienced before? They are sucked like dry leaves into the roaring whirlwind,and the rhythmic alliterations of the Edda became inextricably mixed up withChristian mystical texts, German poetry and the wisdom of the Upanishads. Hauer himself is ergriffen by the depths of meaning in the primal words lying at the root of the Germanic languages, to an extent that he certainly never knew before. Hauer the Indologist is not to blame for this, nor yet the Edda; it is rather the fault of kairos — the present moment in time — whose name on closer investigation turns out to be Wotan. I would, therefore, advise the German Faith Movement to throw aside their scruples. Intelligent people who will not confuse them with the crude Wotan-worshippers whose faith is a mere pretense. There are people in the German Faith Movement who are intelligent enough not only to believe, but to know, that the god of the Germans is Wotan and not the Christian God. This is a tragic experience and no disgrace. It has always been terrible to fall into the hands of a living god. Yahweh was no exception to this rule, and the Philistines, Edomites, Amorites and the rest,who were outside the Yahweh experience, must certainly have found it exceedingly disagreeable. The Semitic experience of Allah was for a long timean extremely painful affair for the whole of Christendom. We who stand outsidejudge the Germans far too much, as if they were responsible agents, but perhaps it would be nearer the truth to regard them, also, as victims.

If we apply are admittedly peculiar point of view consistently, we are driven to conclude that Wotan must, in time, reveal not only the restless, violent, stormy side of his character, but, also, his ecstatic and mantic qualities — a very different aspect of his nature. If this conclusion is correct, National Socialism would not be the last word. Things must be concealed in the background which we cannot imagine at present, but we may expect them to appear in the course of the next few years or decades.Wotan’s reawakening is a stepping back into the past; the stream was damned up and has broken into its old channel. But the Obstruction will not last forever;it is rather a reculer pour mieux sauter, and the water will overleap the obstacle. Then, at last, we shall know what Wotan is saying when he “murmers with Mimir’s head.”

Fast move the sons of Mim,and fate

Is heard in the note of the Gjallarhorn;

Loud blows Heimdall, the horn is aloft,

In fear quake all who on Hel-roads are.

Yggdrasill shakes and shivers on high

The ancient limbs, and the giant is loose;

Wotan murmurs with Mimir’s head

But the kinsman of Surt shall slay him soon.

How fare the gods? how farethe elves?

All Jotunheim groans, the gods are at council;

Loud roar the dwarfs by the doors of stone,

The masters of the rocks: would you know yet more?