Jew World Order

That this Wotan, in his wild Norse vesture, with his wild beard and eyes, his rude Norse speech and ways, was a man like us; with our sorrows, joys, with our limbs, features; — intrinsically all one as we: and did such a work! But the work, much of it, has perished; the worker, all to the name. “Wednesday,” men will say to-morrow; Wotan’s day! Of Wotan there exists no history, no document of it; no guess about it worth repeating. Wotan’s date, adventures, whole terrestrial history, figure and environment are sunk from us forever into unknown thousands of years.

How the man Wotan came to be considered a god, the chief god? — that surely is a question which nobody would wish to dogmatize upon. I have said, his people knew no limits to their admiration of him; they had yet no scale to measure admiration by. Fancy your own generous heart’s-love of some greatest man expanding till it transcended all bounds, till it filled and overflowed the whole field of your thought! Or what if this man Wotan, — since a great deep soul, with the affatus and mysterious tide of vision and impulse rushing on him he knows not whence, is ever an enigma, a kind of terror and wonder to himself, — should have felt that perhaps he was divine; that he was some effluence of the “Wotan,” “Movement,” Supreme Power and Divinity, of whom to his rapt vision all Nature was the awful Flame-image; that some effluence of Wotan dwelt here in him! He was not necessarily false; he was but mistaken, speaking the truest he knew. A great soul, any sincere soul, knows not what he is, — alternates between the highest height and the lowest depth; can, of all things, the least measure — Himself! What others take him for, and what he guesses that he may be; these two items strangely act on one another, help to determine one another. With all men reverently admiring him; with his own wild soul full of noble ardors and affections, of whirlwind chaotic darkness and glorious new light; a divine Universe bursting all into godlike beauty round him, and no man to whom the like ever had befallen, what could he think himself to be? “Wotan?” All men answered, “Wotan!” —

The world of Nature, for every man, is the Fantasy of Himself; this world is the multiplex “Image of his own Dream.” Who knows to what unnamable subtleties of spiritual law all these Heathen Fables owe their shape! The number Twelve, divisiblest of all, which could be halved, quartered, parted into three, into six, the most remarkable number, — this was enough to determine the Signs of the Zodiac, the number of Wotan’s Sons, and innumerable other Twelves. Any vague rumor of number had a tendency to settle itself into Twelve. So with regard to every other matter. And quite unconsciously too, — with no notion of building up “Allegories”! But the fresh clear glance of those First Ages would be prompt in discerning the secret relations of things, and wholly open to obey these. Schiller finds in the ‘Cestus of Venus’ an everlasting aesthetic truth as to the nature of all Beauty; curious; — but he is careful not to insinuate that the old Greek Mythists had any notion of lecturing about the “Philosophy of Criticism”! — On the whole, we must leave those boundless regions. Cannot we conceive that Wotan was a reality? Error indeed, error enough: but sheer falsehood, idle fables, allegory afterthought, —we will not believe that our Fathers believed in these.

A hero is a Hero at all points; in the soul and thought of him first of all. This Wotan, in his rude semi-articulate way, had a word to speak. A great heart laid open to take in this great Universe, and man’s Life here, and utter a great word about it. A Hero, as I say, in his own rude manner; a wise, gifted, noble-hearted man. And now, if we still admire such a man beyond all others, what must these wild Norse souls, first awakened into thinking, have made of him! To them, as yet without names for it, he was noble and noblest; Hero, Prophet, God; Wotan, the greatest of all. Thought is Thought, however it speak or spell itself. Intrinsically, I conjecture, this Wotan must have been of the same sort of stuff as the greatest kind of men. A great thought in the wild deep heart of him! The rough words he articulated, are they not the rudimental roots of those English words we still use? He worked so, in that obscure element. But he was as a light kindled in it; a light of Intellect, rude Nobleness of heart, the only kind of lights we have yet; a Hero as I say: and he had to shine there, and make his obscure element a little lighter, — as is still the task of us all.

We will fancy him to be the Type Norseman; the finest Teuton whom that race had yet produced. The rude Norse heart burst up into boundless admiration round him; into adoration. He is as a root of so many great things; the fruit of him is found growing, from deep thousands of years, over the whole field of Teutonic Life. Our own Wednesday, as I said, is it not still Wotan’s Day? Wednesbury, Wansborough, Wanstead, Wandsworth: Wotan grew into England too, these are still leaves from that root! He was the Chief God to all the Teutonic Peoples; their Pattern Norseman; — in such way did they admire their Pattern Norseman; that was the fortune he had in the world.

Thus if the man Wotan himself have vanished utterly, there is this huge Shadow of him which still projects itself over the whole History of his people. For this Wotan once admitted to be God, we can understand well that the whole Scandinavian Scheme of Nature, or dim No-scheme, whatever it might before have been, would now begin to develop itself altogether differently, and grow thenceforth in a new manner. What this Wotan saw into, and taught with his runes and his rhymes, the whole Teutonic People laid to heart and carried forward. His way of thought became their way of thought: — such, under new conditions, is the history of every great thinker still. In gigantic confused lineaments, like some enormous camera-obscura shadow thrown upwards from the dead deeps of the Past, and covering the whole Northern Heaven, is not that Scandinavian Mythology in some sort the Portraiture of this man Wotan? The gigantic image of his natural face, legible or not legible, expanded and confused in that manner! Ah Thought, I say, is always Thought. No great man lives in vain. The History of the world is but the Biography of great men.

The Valkyrs; and then these Choosers lead the brave to a heavenly Hall of Wotan; only the base and slavish being thrust elsewhere, into the realms of Hela the Death-goddess: I take this to have been the soul of the whole Norse Belief. They understood in their heart that it was indispensable to be brave; that Wotan would have no favor for them, but despise and thrust them out, if they were not brave. Consider too whether there is not something in this! It is an everlasting duty, valid in our day in that, the duty of being brave. Valor is still value. The first duty for a man is still that of subduing Fear. We must get rid of Fear; we cannot act at all then. A man’s acts are slavish, not true but specious; his very thoughts are false, he thinks too as a slave and coward, till he have not Fear under his feet. Wotan’s creed, if we disentangle the real kernel of it, is true to this hour. A man shall and must be valiant; he must march forward, and quit himself like a man,— trusting imperturbably in the appointment and choice of the upper Powers; and, on the whole, not fear at all. Now and always, the completeness of his victory over Fear will determine how much of a man he is. The first man that began to think in this Planet of ours, he was the beginner of all. And then the second man, and the third man; — nay, every true Thinker to this hour is a kind of Wotan, teaches men his way of thought, spreads a shadow of his own likeness over sections of the History of the world.

That Norse Religion, a rude but earnest, sternly impressive Consecration of Valor (so we may define it), sufficed for these old valiant Northmen. Consecration of Valor is not a bad thing! We will take it for good, so far as it goes. Neither is there no use in knowing something about this old Heathenism of our Fathers. Unconsciously, and combined with higher things, it is in us yet, that old Faith withal! To know it consciously, brings us into closer and clearer relation with the Past, — with our own possessions in the Past. For the whole Past, as I keep repeating, is the possession of the Present; the Past had always something true, and is a precious possession. In a different time, in a different place, it is always some other of our common Human Nature that has been developing itself. The actual True is the sum of all these; not any one of them by itself constitutes what of Human Nature is hitherto developed. Better to know them all than misknow them. “To which of these Three Religions do you specially adhere?” inquires Meister of his Teacher. “To all the Three!” answers the other: “To all the Three; for they by their union first constitute the True Religion.”

No, the Great Man does not boast himself sincere, far from that; perhaps does not ask himself if he is so: I would say rather his sincerity does not depend on himself; he cannot help being sincere! The great Fact of Existence is great to him. Fly as he will, he cannot get out of the awful presence of this Reality. His mind is so made; he is great by that, first of all. Fearful and wonderful, real as Life, real as Death, is this Universe to him. Though all men should forget its truth, and walk in a vain show, he cannot. At all moments the Flame-image glares in upon him; undeniable, there there! — “