 The following is essentially a personal narrative of my spiritual quest leading to my involvement with Odin on a variety of levels and of various aspects. It is therefore highly subjective and perhaps biased in places. A version of this article has been published in “Idunna”, the magazine of the Ring of Troth, U.S., at the request of Diana Paxson its editor, and I thought that it may make a quite nice addition to my website.
To quickly recap on my personal history. After an horrendous childhood in Holland subjected to ‘the system' and all that goes with it, I finally emerged into the world at the age of nineteen, and soon got involved with the occult. Having been taught the basics in a spiritualist circle and later on studied some years the material of the AMORC, I struck out on my own and emigrated from Holland to England to get involved with Wicca in 1980.
It was within this Wiccan context that I had my first inkling about Wodan, although I was aware of the existence of runes, as my first husband George introduced me to these. In 1980 through an amazing series of coincidences I ended up in the house of Alex Sanders in Bexhill, Surrey and was initiated into Wicca. A that meeting a young man with severe halitosis (I can still smell it) was waffling on about the Germanic gods and Adolf Hitler and he claimed on that occasion that he had been an SS camp commander, which totally put me off this god Wotan whom he kept mentioning. The same person in 1986(?) in a Runic Guild meeting claimed to have been von Stauffenberg! However after being initiated by Jim Bennett in Alex's coven I met Lionel and with him formed a coven in 1981. It was within the coven that I slowly became aware of Him, whose name I did not know at the time.
Everyone seemed to be worshipping all sorts of gods, from Egyptian to Greek and especially Celtic. Somewhere in 1980 I was given a book to review by the editor of an occult Thelemic magazine named Aquarian Arrow. The book, on the runes, was by Carlyle Pushong! Needless to say the book was shite
and I did not bother with the runes any further. Sometime after that, in 1982, during coven meetings a dark hooded figure was
seen time and time again every bloody meeting, standing outside the circle, waiting to be recognized and invited in. My good
friend Charlie who had this sight convinced us all that it was Saturn and, no, you did not want to invite him in! Charlie was a
Greek classical scholar from Cambridge as well as a Wiccan High Priest and none of us questioned him in this matter. |
