Odin Is Missing an Eye, Not a Spine

Pagan Myths and the Courage of Knowing

Dino Alonso

Oct 15, 2025

“All wisdom is bought with pain.” — Norse Proverb

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The Hanging God

They say he hung there for nine nights.
No food, no water, no comfort.
Suspended between earth and sky, pierced by his own spear, Odin gave himself to the wind. He was not seeking glory. He was seeking understanding.

And the world, in its quiet cruelty, demanded a price.

When the Allfather traded his eye for wisdom, it was not vanity, it was necessity. He looked into the Well of Mimir and paid with part of himself to see the whole. That was the ancient covenant: the truth is never free, and knowledge always costs the knower.

The wind cut through his cloak. The branches creaked beneath the weight of his body. The silence pressed close. Each night, the pain deepened, and so did the seeing.

In our age, we worship comfort. We want wisdom without the wound, insight without the effort, revelation without the risk. We want to see, but we will not pay with the eye.

Odin knew better. The sacrifice of sight was the price of vision. And today, surrounded by the blinding light of cheap certainty, we have never been more afraid to look.

He hung in silence while we tap for answers.
He gave himself to the wind, and we hide from it.

The truth still whispers from the branches: to know is to bleed, to learn is to lose, and to look is to risk seeing what we’d rather not.

The Age of the Unscarred

We live in an age that mistakes ignorance for purity. A culture that sneers at expertise and calls it elitism. A movement that celebrates stupidity as authenticity, as if thinking were treason and learning a sin.

The old gods demanded courage. The new idols demand applause.

Across this fractured land, people call reason “corruption” and feeling “truth.” They call the search for fact a form of betrayal. They mock the scholar, fear the scientist, and crown the fool. Then they call it freedom.

I don’t think most people mean to run from truth. Fear is simply easier to dress as conviction. It’s easier to raise your voice than your standard. Easier to be loud than to be right.

The self-proclaimed patriots who rail against “intellectual elites” forget that every liberty they enjoy was conceived by thinkers, not loudmouths. Revolution, science, democracy—all born of curiosity and courage. But we’ve turned curiosity into heresy, and courage into a slogan fit for a bumper sticker.

We have become a nation of the unscarred—those who have never hung on the tree, never lost something for the sake of knowing. We celebrate comfort and call it strength, we embrace ignorance and call it faith.

When the sagas were sung, stories bound tribes together. Now we trade epics for echo chambers.

The wind remembers. It moves through our cities, through our shouting, searching for ears still willing to listen.

Odin bled for wisdom.
We scroll for confirmation.

The Well of Mimir

The myth says that deep beneath the roots of the World Tree lies the Well of Mimir—the source of all memory, all understanding. Odin gave his eye there, and in return, he saw the web of all things: life and death, war and peace, the cycles that bind mortals and gods alike.

The water is still there, dark and waiting, though we’ve built skyscrapers over it. The well has not dried; it has only been buried.

What would the Well of Mimir be now?
Maybe the archive. The library. The scientific record. The accumulated knowledge of humankind, guarded by those who still believe in the value of the search itself.

Yet, in our time, we treat these wells with suspicion. We drown truth in opinion, mock the record, and accuse the teachers of conspiracy. We are a people so desperate to be right that we have forgotten how to be wise.

To drink from Mimir’s well requires humility—a reverence before mystery, a patience with not knowing. But humility does not trend. Curiosity does not win elections. Doubt does not sell ads.

So we replace the well with the algorithm and call it progress.

We outsource thought to machines that monetize attention, and we confuse the flood of data for enlightenment. We scry the glowing screen instead of the dark water. The tragedy is not that we are ignorant; it’s that we are proud of it.

The gods we’ve built now have names like “Feed,” “Stream,” and “Trend.” They promise connection but feed on addiction. The more we drink, the thirstier we become.

The wind sighs over the surface of the well, rippling what remains of reflection. It is still calling, but few listen long enough to hear.

The New Cowardice

What passes for courage now is rage. What passes for conviction is cruelty.

We mistake shouting for strength and ignorance for independence. We do not want to climb the tree—we want to cut it down and sell the wood. We want the myth without the meaning, the power without the price.

But Odin reminds us: to see clearly is to suffer deeply. The truth is not a comfort, it is a calling. It asks you to look, to listen, to endure what the blind cannot.

The cowardice of our age is not in what we fear, but in what we refuse to learn.

We are not undone by evil so much as by apathy, by the slow rot of minds that will not open. When we sneer at knowledge, we invite the tyrant. When we exalt ignorance, we enthrone the liar.

Odin’s missing eye was a wound of honor.
Ours is a wound of choice.

We were meant to be learners, not loyalists.

There was a time when people studied to understand the world. Now they study how to dominate it. We treat wisdom as liability, empathy as weakness, nuance as betrayal. We build entire movements on resentment of anyone who dares to know more.

The barbarism we once feared from without now grows within. The most dangerous people in any civilization are not the uneducated, but the willfully blind. They worship certainty, fear questions, and mistake obedience for virtue.

Every empire that fell began with such blindness: the smug conviction that truth could be bent to will. The wind knows better. It carries the memory of every fall.

Between the Roots and the Sky

If the gods were watching, they would find our faith amusing.
We claim to worship freedom, yet fear every idea that challenges us.
We claim to value truth, yet treat it as optional.
We call ourselves strong, yet cannot endure discomfort without rage.

Perhaps Odin would not scorn us, but pity us. He, who traded an eye for clarity, would look upon a people who trade their sight for comfort. His was the sacrifice of strength. Ours is the abdication of it.

The wisdom he sought in agony, we reject in apathy. The truth he bled for, we bargain away in convenience. The eye he lost, we pluck out willingly—just to fit in.

But somewhere, someone still climbs.

A teacher still fights for curiosity in a system that punishes it.
A journalist still searches the archives for facts no one wants to hear.
A scientist still whispers to the void, hoping reason will echo back.
A poet still names the wind and listens for its answer.

There are always climbers. Always the few who would rather hang on the tree than live in the dark.

I have felt that wind myself, cold and patient, asking whether I still believe in the cost of truth. Some days I answer. Some days I look away.

Still, the branches wait.

The Eye That Sees

Picture him now—still hanging from the World Tree, his single eye reflecting the fires of our age.
He would see a people terrified of thinking, sedated by spectacle, shouting their certainty into the void.
He would see our comfort masquerading as courage.
He would see us choosing blindness, again and again.

And maybe he would laugh, that old god.
Because he knows what we’ve forgotten.
That the only vision worth having costs something.
That wisdom cannot be crowdsourced.
That truth does not bend to belief.

Somewhere out there, the wind still carries his whisper.
It speaks to the few who still climb, who still question, who still dare to hang for a night in the dark.
The artists, the scientists, the teachers, the seekers.
The ones who bear their scars not as shame, but as proof.

The wind still moves through the branches, calling for those who remember how to climb.
His one eye still gleams in the storm, waiting for ours to open.