My grandfather would tell me old stories when I was a child. Stories from before the Catholics came and changed us all. He told me that before the Catholics came the world was not this simple round thing that it is now. It was part of something greater and more mysterious. All that exsisted was contained in a great tree, he told me. Yggdrasil. A tree that contained heaven in it’s branches, hell in its roots, and we dwelt between the two in it’s mighty trunk. The God of us all back then was called Odin the Allfather, a mighty and wise God who had one eye that could see into eternity. He old me of how, for seven days, Odin surrendered his Godhood and hung by his ankles from the branches of Yggdrasil. It was in those seven days that he was given the Runes, the ancient symbols that would protect and guide him. We are like Odin, he said. Vision is sorrow’s gift.
