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Updated: May 7, 2025
The word signifies Divinity, he says, among the old Saxon, German and all Teutonic Nations; the adjectives formed from it all signify divine, supreme, or something pertaining to the chief god. Like enough! We must bow to Grimm in matters etymological. Let us consider it fixed that Wuotan means Wading, force of Movement.
Or what if this man Odin, since a great deep soul, with the afflatus 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 "Wuotan," "Movement", Supreme Power and Divinity, of whom to his rapt vision all Nature was the awful Flame-image; that some effluence of Wuotan dwelt here in him!
To them, as yet without names for it, he was noble and noblest; Hero, Prophet, God; Wuotan, the greatest of all. Thought is Thought, however it speak or spell itself. Intrinsically, I conjecture, this Odin 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 word Wuotan, which is the original form of Odin, a word spread, as name of their chief Divinity, over all the Teutonic Nations everywhere; this word, which connects itself, according to Grimm, with the Latin vadere, with the English wade and such like, means primarily Movement, Source of Movement, Power; and is the fit name of the highest god, not of any man.
The idea that Satan would gamble for a human soul is of mediaeval origin and may have been taken by Baudelaire from Gérard de Nerval, who in his mystery play Le Prince des Sots has the devil play at dice with an angel, with human souls as stakes. As a dice-player Satan resembles Wuotan. Mr. H. G. Wells in The Undying Fire has Diabolus play chess with the Deity in Heaven.
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? "Wuotan?" All men answered, "Wuotan!"
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