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Chapter 7. At the Well of Urð 194
Whole. Indeed, saints and shamans both often describe their lives and the choices
they have made as if they are being driven or forced by otherworldly forces. 37
Óðínn’s quest for knowledge was not quenched by his little sip from Mímir’s
Well. He has a voracious appetite for knowledge which often resulted in his leaving
Ásgard to travel in disguise through other lands. In shamanic cultures, the shaman
is often seen to have a never ending pursuit of knowledge which leads him to leave
the village or community for periods of time only to return so that the knowledge
gained can be put to use. In a way, this is very much akin to the literary motifs of
“the Underworld Journey” or “the Hero’s Journey” in which an individual is driven
by either an internal of external force to leave the safety of his home only to return
with hard-won wisdom and maturity which is then put to use within the community.
The Germanic version of these motifs, however, placed the figure of the Whole-maker
outside the bounds of the community, working for the benefit of the preservation
on the Whole from without rather than from within as in shamanic cultures. Here,
then, is the primary difference between the ancient northern Germanic and true
shamanistic cultures.
The role of the wizard or Whole-maker in Germanic society was a precarious
one. On the one hand, he or she filled a certain need within a community to bring
it into Wholeness; on the other hand, whoever had dealings with a Whole-maker
was taking a walk across thin ice. This feeling that one should deal with wizards
gingerly has continued to survive in folk-culture so that even the Baum’s Wizard of
Oz or Tolkien’s Gandalf fall into this in-between state of being neither good nor bad.
The average man’s purpose of task and goal in mind are often different than the
Whole-maker’s, and just because one has obtained assistance from one of this kind
does not mean that all things are going to go well or that costly sacrifices will not
need to be made. Here one is reminded that Óðíinn often allowed favorite warriors
to die in battle. The diviners, herbalists, and charm-makers served the community
of man, but the Whole-maker served the higher purpose: the health and integrity
of the Tree.
Back again to the problem, then, of definition and whether of not these people
qualify as Norse shamans. Eliade early in his classic text on shamanism is quick
to point out that “shamanism in the strict sense is pre-eminently a religious phenomenon
of Siberia and Central Asia.” 38 He goes on to say that
“the presence of a shamanic complex in one region or another does not
37 See Joan Halifax’ Shamanic Voices, 1979 and Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Tech-
niques of Ecstasy, 1964.
38 ibid., p. 4.