Wednesday, 25 February 2015

Odin the wandering deity

Odin is a prominently mentioned god throughout the recorded history of the Germanic peoples, from the Roman occupation of regions of Germania, through the tribal expansions of the Migration Period and the Viking Age. Odin continued into the modern period to be acknowledged in rural folklore in all Germanic regions. References to Odin appear in place names throughout regions historically inhabited by the ancient Germanic peoples, and the day of the week Wednesday bears his name in many Germanic languages.

The official etymology of the name of the old Norse theonym Óðinn (popularly anglicized as Odin) and its cognates, including Old English Wóden, Old Saxon Wōden, and Old High German Wuotan, says that it derives from the reconstructed Proto-Germanic theonym *wōđanaz. The masculine noun *wōđanaz developed from the Proto-Germanic adjective *wōđaz, related to Latin vātēs and Old Irish fáith, both meaning 'seer, prophet'. Adjectives stemming from *wōđaz include Gothic woþs 'possessed', Old Norse óðr, 'mad, frantic, furious', and Old English wód 'mad'.


But this etymology does not correspond to the role that Odin or Vodan seem to have originally had.

The earliest records of the Germanic peoples were recorded by the Romans, and in these works Odin is frequently referred to as the Roman god Mercury. The first clear example of this occurs in the Roman historian Tacitus's late 1st-century work Germania, where, writing about the religion of the Suebi (a confederation of Germanic peoples), he comments that "among the gods Mercury is the one they principally worship. In this instance, Tacitus refers to the god Odin as "Mercury"...


You could see how Mercury would be perfect deity for Vikings, the traders, the travellers and the thieves...

While I was discussing Radegast (Welcome guest) with one of my friends, he reminded me that one of Odins names was "far travelled guest"...

This is very interesting. 

In some dialects of South Slavic languages word "od" or "hod" means walk. "odi" or "hodi" means walks and "oditi" or "hoditi" means you walk, walking. "odi on" or "hodi on" means he walks, he who walks. Is odin = odi on = the one that walks, travels? It is Interesting that in Greek we have word ὁδός (hodós) which means threshold, road, path, way, journey, trip, expedition...The official etymology is that the Greek word comes form Proto-Indo-European *sodos. Cognates include Old Church Slavonic ходъ (xodŭ) and Sanskrit आसद् (āsad). I wander if the Greek word actually comes from South Slavic word "od, hod" meaning to walk...The word "odos" (path) would then be something you "od" walk on..."odaš, odiš" means you are walking, "oda si, odi si" means he is walking and "odao si" means you walked, both meaning travel, trip, expedition, journey...

Vodan is another name for Odin. In South Slavic languages word "vodi, voda" means leads, "vodi nas, voda nas" means he leads us and "vodi on, voda on" means he leads, leader...The word "vodja" means leader, "vodja naš" means our leader....Is Vodan = vodi + on = leads he = leader? 

This fits perfectly with the the Roman description of Odin, Vodan as the equivalent of Mercury, the traveller, messenger, guide...

But if this is true, why does Norse god have name whose etymology comes from Slavic languages? Is this just a coincidence? 

Serbian Historian from the 19th century, Miloš Milojević, claimed that Serbs and Danes were one and the same people. This is very interesting because the latest genetic evidence is showing us that Serbs and Croats have majority I2a and the Danes have majority I2b Y haplogroup. Basically they are the closest genetic cousins. You can see this clearly from these maps published on Eupedia:



We know that there was a lot of mixing between the western Slavs and Danes and that the most prominent Danish Viking dynasties descending from Harlad the blue tooth were of mixed Danish Slavic descent. Both Danes and western Slavs were renowned traders and pirates. The Book of Veles talks about western Slavs having the same customs as Germans. So it is entirely possible that Odin's name did come from the Slavic language. 

Another possibility is that Tacitus relied on a Slavic speaking informants who completely misinterpreted the word Vodan and Odin and understood them as the one who leads and the one who wanders. This could have lead to the erroneous linking of Odin, Vodan with Mercury...But this would put Slavic speaking people in Germania in the the first century AD...

A can of worm has been opened. Or more precisely reopened.


This is what he thought about conflict of the Æsir and Vanir. This is just the excerpt, you can find the rest on my blog post "The origin of the Anglo Saxon race".


And this is where we need to look for the origin of Odin and his name....

And this is why I believe that Odin's name reopens a can of worms which was shut after the first world war, when the Slavs became the bad guys of Europe...

So what do you think? 

Sunday, 22 February 2015

Radegost - Welcome guest




Or this one from Boa Island:










The importance of this is impossible to emphasize....





This is another sculpture from the Prillwickie idols group.























This is the chronology for the split of the R haplogroup

haplogroup R - c. 30000 BC
haplogroup R1 - c. 25000BC
haplogroup R1b-P25 - c. 20000BC


Saturday, 7 February 2015


The other day, while I was driving my son to school, we saw a flock of crows flying overhead. My son immediately uttered the following verse:

"Flock of birds before my eyes name the day of my surprise"

This little verse, which can also be found in this version: "A flock of birds before my eyes, what will be my next surprise", is all that is left today of the ancient practice of divination by interpreting the sound of birds and their behavior particularly flight. 

It was believed that birds, being able to fly in the sky, can commune with the sky god, which was inaccessible to humans. So all the people who used divination through flight and sound of birds, believed that the birds were messengers whose behavior carried encoded messages or signs sent to people by the sky god. 

According to the historical accounts, many nations used birds for divination among them Romans, Greeks, CeltsEtruscans, Egyptians, Arabians, Phrygians, Cilicians, Umbrians, Hindus, Chinese...and Slavs

A word for divination used in South Slavic languages is "gatanje". I believe that this word originally meant divination by interpreting the sound of flocking birds, particularly crows. I also believe that this word is extremely old and probably comes from the earliest layers of the language development in Evroasia. And this is why.  

In my post about Bran - Vran, I talked about the well known ability of crows to detect trouble and danger. Crows quickly learn that a moving car is no danger, but will rapidly flee if the driver stops and gets out. In areas where they are constantly hunted, they learn the difference between a hunter with a gun and a farmer with farming implements. Crows use a system of guards that observe and sound warnings to all other crows in the area. These sentinels guard fields of feeding crows. They also send scouts in advance of feeding forays to check for danger.  Crows are extremely territorial and will protect their colony against any potential predators. They are the only bird known to attack hawks and eagles and even peopleSo crows (vran, bran) have guards (bran) which defend (bran) the colony. People probably quickly noticed that crows use "g(r)a", "g(r)a" sound as warning signal to alert everyone that someone or something dangerous is coming. So people probably started associating the sound "G(r)a" with the meaning "I see him, it, something, danger is coming". On this video you can see the crows sounding the warning call.

Every time Crows sounded "G(r)a", people started looking around to see what kind of danger is approaching. I believe that people quickly started using the same sound to warn each other about the incoming danger. The link between the sound and the meaning already existed and all people had to do was to imitate the sound "G(r)a" to trigger the meaning of "I see danger".  "G(r)a" very quickly becomes "Ga" as "r" gets swallowed during shouting. So we end up with "GA" = "I see danger". What is interesting is that in Serbian "GA" means "him, it, that" and is used as a pointing sound accompanied with the pointing outstretched hand meaning "I see him, it, that". 

But it is not just crows that produce a sound that sounds like "GA" when they are agitated. It seems that all major flocking birds of Europe use a variant of the "GA" sound as a warning sound. These are the warning sounds made by rooks. These are the warning sounds made by ravens. These are the sounds of mallard ducks. These are the warning sounds of geese. These are the warning sounds of seagulls. 

Some people will say that this warning sound of the flocking birds sounds more like "k(r)a". And that is possible. Different people hear things differently. So if the sound that we hear is "k(r)a", it becomes "KA" as "r" gets swallowed during shouting. What is interesting is that in Serbian "KA" means "towards", at him, it, that...

Vidim GA - I see him, it, that
Idem KA - I am going towards him, it, that
Pokazujem KA - I am pointing at him, it, that

Both variants of the perceived sound have the meaning directly related to observing, noticing, identifying, signaling, informing. Is it possible that these two words developed from human imitation of the warning sounds of flocking birds? And if so how old are these words then? Are we looking at the true linguistic relics, which survived to this day from the Mesolithic or even Paleolithic times?

It seems that people listened to birds and interpreted their calls, flight and general behavior from very early days. Of all the flocking birds, the ones that lived in closest association with people have always been crows and ravens. So the "GA" warning sounds of crows and ravens were the ones people heard and interpreted most often. For our ancestors "gakanje", the sounding of crows and ravens, was not a meaningless noise, but a sound that carried a clear meaning: danger. So the "GA" sound of crows and ravens, and the crows and ravens themselves were associated with danger. And in the distant past danger usually meant mortal danger. Many thousands of years later, these birds are still considered the birds of black omen, death, even though the reason why this is so has been forgotten. 

So how long did it take before people started looking for other messages in birds sounds and behavior, including birds flight? And how long did it take before they started looking at other birds, not just flocking birds? Probably not long. And this is how divination by observing birds was born. Because what is divination, fortune telling, but the interpretation of the warning signs, in this case contained in the sounds and behavior of birds including flight. 

Knowing all this it is not a surprise to find that the word for divination in Serbian is "gatati". Gatati comes from ga + da + ti = ga (message in the "ga" sound of birds) + give + you = message given to you by birds. 

gátati - tell fortune, divine
gátanje - fortune telling, divination
gatka - mystery, riddle, puzzle
gatavac, gátalac, gatar, gatalo - fortune teller

This word is found in other Slavic languages as well as "gatati", "gadati" or "hadati" meaning both to divinate and to speak. The fact that this word means both divination and speech is extremely important, as it directly links speaking with fortune telling, warning, "GA" sound of flocking birds. We also find this word in Sanskrit as "gadati" meaning to speak, to say. And in Irish as a word isolate "gadán" meaning noise, shouting, human voice. This Irish word also directly links the noise of flocking birds with the human voice and language. This is probably a borrowing similar to Serbian "galama" meaning noise, human voices but even closer to the original Slavic root "gata, gada" meaning both to tell fortune and to speak. The distribution of these words leads me to believe that they come from an ancient R1a language family.

So. What do you think?

Tuesday, 3 February 2015


Today someone wrote this comment on my post about calendars

“The original Moon Calendar is from a Woman's Body, her Bleeding Cycle. Its time for people to get simple to get to our past.”

I wanted to reply to the comment in the original post, but my reply was too long, so I decided to publish my reply as a new post. I think this is an important issue to discuss and I hope you will find this post interesting.

I actually agree that the first cycles people noticed and used for measuring of the passing of time were natural cycles they saw around them, like menstrual cycle or seasons cycle. Women even today use their menstrual cycle to locate events in time. Like: "after my next period, every time just before my period". People still use seasonal vegetative cycles to locate events in time. Like brigands in Serbia who used to meet at their secret meeting point "kad gora zazeleni" meaning "when forest gets green". Pigs are still slaughtered in Serbia "after the first frost". Acorns are gathered when they get brown, ripe...But these cycles are only good for crude time calculation which is not mission critical. This is because all these cycles are variable cycles. They change in time and in place. Duration of women's menstrual cycle changes through woman's life and the beginning and the duration of the menstrual cycles vary from woman to woman. Spring sometimes comes earlier and sometimes later depending on the location and year. Oaks sometimes don't produce any acorns at all and sometimes acorns ripen early and sometimes late depending on the weather. So these cycles very quickly become unreliable as time calculating devices.

The problem is even bigger if you need to coordinate actions between many separated groups. If they all need to meet somewhere at the same time in the future, they can't determine that moment in time using menstrual cycle. They would all have to have access to the same woman and she better not get pregnant...Even vegetative cycles are not good enough for this type of planning as for instance spring comes and forests gets green at the different times in Scotland and in Cornwall. It is even worse if you have an altitude difference. Sometimes it is still winter in the mountains in May.... And if people wanted to meet somewhere to celebrate and do some matchmaking, trading, showing off, saying "let’s meet in the spring to have a party" is no good, because some people would arrive in February and some in May. So people had to find something that changes, but changes in the same way all the time and in every place and use this change cycle for time calculation and planning. And guess what, there was this shining thing in the sky, visible every night, or almost every night, which changes every night and it's change cycle is the same all the time in every place. The moon. So the first precise time calculations were made based on moon cycle. You could say: "let's meet in 10 moons from next fool moon for a bit of a light entertainment” and no matter where you were, Scotland or Cornwall you would all arrive at the party at the same time. But moon cycle does not correspond to the seasonal cycle and it is not possible to use lunar calendar to predict and organize events lined to the seasonal and vegetative cycle. 

Lunar calendar is ok for planning once off events, but not for planning repetitive events. If you want to have a party in the summer, so you can all run around naked and have a good time, you can't use lunar calendar to plan it. The lunar cycle and seasonal vegetative cycles are not in sync. You need something that is in sync with the vegetative cycle, and that is the solar cycle, because it is the sun's cycles that govern seasonal vegetative cycles....And solar cycles are also constant and repetitive and can be observed from any point in the same way. So you could say: "Hay Groo, that was a great party, let’s have it next summer as well. How about at the summer solstice?” And hey presto, every summer everyone arrived to the same place for the summer solstice and had a great fun together, drinking, dancing, singing, shagging and waiting for the sun to rise....

But then people tried to plan dates between the solstices by using lunar calendar. They would say: "Let's meet on the first full moon after the summer solstice". This sounds fine, but it doesn't work as the lunar cycle is not in sync with the solar cycle. The first full moon after the summer solstice can sometimes fall on the day after the summer solstice and sometimes 10 days after the summer solstice....People could have said: "Let's meet 10 days after the summer solstice". And that would work like a charm. But what about 234 days after summer solstice? To make this kind of planning easier, to be able to efficiently plan events between the solstices, people needed some cycle smaller than the solstice cycle and longer than the day cycle. So people decide to continue using the moon cycle but they had to abandon the actual moon for determining the beginning and the end of the moon cycles. They needed some means of counting the moon cycle without looking at the sky. And hey presto, the time measuring sticks were invented where you can sratch on line for each day and a cross or some other symbol for a moon...And you end up with lunisolar calendar....

Now people could say: "That party was great. Your son and my daughter seem to like each other very much. Let’s get them married. How about on the second moon after the summer solstice?" Now if you all agree that your moon has 28, or 29 or 30 days, or what ever number of days that you all agree on, and you all know when the summer solstice is and you all start counting days and moons from that day, then you will all meet at the same place in two moons and have another great party, whether your kids like it or not....

And this is it...No mystery, no Male or Female chauvinism. Just using what is practical and does the job.