Last Saturday, Thor’s Oak Kindred celebrated our ninth annual Yule blót. We managed to schedule it on the date of the actual winter solstice, the longest night of the year.
Here in Chicago, that marking of midwinter seemed strangely out of sync with the season we see around us. The faded remnants of green summer grass and the soggy remains of fallen autumn leaves still covered the ground. The temperature was cold, but not extremely so.
Even as we gathered to celebrate the return of the light and the lengthening of the days, we knew that the real winter weather will arrive in January and February of next year. We felt suspended between seasons, with a feeling in our bones that the real winter storms will be coming in early 2025.
We have similar feelings about what’s in store for the wider world as we turn the page on 2024.
Clever and devious
A core part of our midwinter blót is the ancestor round. Standing in a circle around the altar, we pass the drinking horn, and each member takes a turn hailing an ancestor and telling us about that person.
For ourselves, we simply and broadly define ancestor to mean “someone no longer alive who is important to us.”
On Saturday night, members hailed an author, a composer, an educator, and relations both newly departed and long gone. As always, it was beautiful and meaningful to hear each other speak of love and loss, of insight and inspiration.
Last month, my column for The Wild Hunt focused on how we can truly honor the ancestors “by living our lives in ways that turn words into deeds that measure up to theirs.”
I was a bit vague about what exactly those deeds can and should be. In the wake of Luigi Mangione’s assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, I’d like to be more specific.
The central focus of our annual midwinter blót is Odin and the associated Odinic concepts of wisdom, learning, and growth.
This particular year, it also seemed important to hail Odin as a god of strategy.
Odin with his wolves and ravens, from The Story of the Middle Ages by Samuel Bannister Harding (1912) [Public Domain]
In the Old Icelandic Eddas and sagas, Thor is generally straightforward as he faces obstacles with hammer in hand. Aside from undergoing a sham wedding in drag to get the better of a giant or endlessly asking for poetic terms in order to delay and defeat a dwarf, Thor generally resorts to wide-open frontal assaults.
Odin is much more oblique. His regular mode of action is to use the misdirection of disguise and the obfuscation of magic. Clever and devious, he will use any means necessary to accomplish his goals.
In the Old Icelandic Hávamál (“Sayings of the High One”), Odin sets out a theory of relationships that prioritizes deception and treachery as weapons to be used against enemies.
To his friend a man should be a friend
and repay gifts with gifts;
laughter men should accept with laughter
but return deception for a lie.To his friend a man should be a friend
and to his friend’s friend too;
but no man should be a friend
to the friend of his enemy.You know, if you’ve a friend whom you really trust
and from whom you want nothing but good,
you should mix your soul with his and exchange gifts,
go and see him often.If you’ve another, whom you don’t trust,
but from whom you want nothing but good,
speak fairly to him, but think falsely
and repay treachery with a lie.(All Hávamál verses in this column are from Carolyne Larrington’s translation.)
We surely and sorely need some cleverness and deviousness right now. We need the moxie to get off our duffs and into the streets. We need the chutzpah to stop going high when they go low and, instead, to brazenly take the fight to those who fight against us.
As more of us finally realize who are friends are and who our enemies are, we are past due for joining together against our common foes. We need to get serious about the struggle for positive change and about real resistance to repressive and retrograde forces.
And we need to be strategic about it.
Defeating dragons
In the 13th-century Saga of the Völsungs, the young hero Sigurd encounters Odin three times. In each case, the god is in disguise as an old man with a long beard. In one case, he gives his name as Fjölnir, meaning “very wise” and/or “concealer,” needful attributes for our current period.
In their third and final encounter, Odin advises Sigurd on the proper way to kill a dragon while avoiding drowning in its gushing blood.
“Dig several ditches for the blood to run into; then you sit in one of them and thrust at the heart of the worm.”
The dragon that Sigurd defeats is named Fáfnir, which means “embracer.” Born the human son of a human sorcerer, he kills his own father in order to take the cursed treasure Loki took from the dwarf Andvari (“careful”). As Fáfnir embraces the hoard, he becomes “the most evil serpent” and jealously guards it from any possible thief.
Like so much of the Old Norse corpus, this tightly woven bit of saga has many threads to pull.
The dragon is the one who prioritizes wealth accumulation over all else, fully willing to murder his own father in order to enrich himself. Right now, the world’s richest human being is a man who gleefully embraces what J.R.R. Tolkien calls “the dragon-sickness.”
Elon Musk has never been elected to any public office, but he has been so active in Washington wrangling that politicians, pundits, wags, and trolls have been referring to him as “President Musk.”
The goal of his political machinations? To steal from the poor and give to the rich.
To pay for yet more tax cuts for billionaires – and to add the billions of dollars he already receives from government subsidies – Musk has leapt into the incoming Trump administration in an attempt to force $2.5 trillion in spending cuts.
On the chopping block are Medicare, Social Security, and veterans’ health care, with mooted plans to “slash benefits, cut the Social Security cost-of-living adjustments that ensure seniors’ benefits keep pace with inflation, raise the retirement age, and more.”
Odin tells Sigurd to stab the dragon from below, which is clearly the direction from which all those of us who aren’t billionaires must strike from. Although the number of billionaires is only about 0.0003% of the world population, they have a completely insane amount of power over the rest of us who make up the 99.9997%.
Together, we have all the power. Or we would, if we were willing to take it.
Odin’s advice to dig channels for siphoning off the blood of the dying dragon reminds us how dangerous it is to take on the beastly ones. It also reminds us that we must protect the targeted and endangered communities among us, even as we fight the good fight.
Sigurd stabs Fáfnir from below, by Arthur Rackham (1901) [Public Domain]
Despite all the cheering on social media, Luigi Mangione’s path of openly murdering a member of the ruling class is not something I can get behind. Accepting murder as a means of social change inevitably drags us deeper down into the maelstrom of violence engulfing our lives today. We need less gun violence, not more.
But that doesn’t mean throwing our hands up and just continuing to complain. Action is needed.
If the high elites can completely disrupt our personal lives without actually shooting us, we can surely do the same to them.
The profitable minority
The first step is to stop giving them our money.
If you still use Musk’s Twitter to get world news and reach a wider audience (like I do), absolutely don’t pay for a blue check. Block every single advertiser. He spent $44 billion to purchase a platform now valued at $9.2 billion. We can help him continue to lose money.
Don’t use Musk’s AI. Don’t buy a Tesla. It should be obvious, but don’t get his “brain-machine interface” installed in your head. Really, just don’t support any of his companies.
This also means divesting yourself of any investment in his businesses, including those that may be hidden in your retirement accounts (if you’re lucky enough to still have one). Instead, support some business, any business, with even a tiny bit of conscience and decency.
The big money is in the federal handouts and government welfare that divert our tax dollars into his pocket. To stop that, we need to fight for a new approach to government that smashes the financial funnel delivering our funds into billionaire pockets.
We need to throw out the old guard (and I do mean old) and do the hard work needed to get new, younger, more determined, and more willing-to-tear-it-all-down-and-rebuild people elected to public office.
Part of that work is confronting the elderly seat-holders in power and making it impossible for them to continue the nonsense that they’ve always been up to.
Tie up their phone lines with constant calls. Flood their email inboxes with regular petitions. Go to their official offices and block anyone from meeting with them. Track down their fundraising events and make it impossible for donors to enter the venues. Attend their public events and make it impossible for them to be heard.
No violence is needed. Just a punk rock attitude, a sizable number of those who keep declaring themselves to be “allies,” and – sorry! – a willingness to get arrested. Read some books on the Civil Rights Movement and the Indian Independence Struggle to see what’s at stake and what it will cost.
In 1966, Charles Mingus improvised his own version of the Pledge of Allegiance, which included these lines:
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America
The white flag, with no stripes, no stars
It is a prestige badge worn by a profitable minorityYeah, I pledge allegiance to the United States of America
I pledge allegiance to see that someday
They will live up to their own promises
To the victims that they call citizens
It’s well past time for us victims to embrace our role as citizens and take on the profitable minority.
Instead of murders committed by individuals, we need focused and sustained nonviolent action by large groups. There are so, so many more of us than there are of them.
In other countries, recent protest crowds have measured as large as 29,000 or 42,000 and up to hundreds of thousands.
We can do this, too, if we want to.
Without firing a shot
When Odin discusses friends and enemies in Hávamál, he says,
Again, concerning the one you don’t trust,
and whose mind you suspect;
you should laugh with him and disguise your thoughts:
a gift should be repaid with a like one.
Let’s repay some gifts.
If paid-for members of Congress can shut down the government, we can shut down Congress.
If the corrupt and purchased members of the Supreme Court can make decisions that intimately affect our private lives, we can make their public duties undoable.
If CEOs can determine the course of our lives, we can make their business dealings difficult and unprofitable.
And we can do it all without firing a shot or striking a blow.
In both History of the Danes by Saxo Grammaticus and the anonymous Eddic poem Reginsmál (“Sayings of Regin”), Odin teaches the wedge formation to warriors, showing them strategies for fights to come.
“Those who can see,” he says in the poem, “get the victory.”
Those who can see clearly today must be ready to drive the wedge into the forces of wealth and power that have their boots on our necks.
Mangione identified the proper forces to oppose and seems to have (at least temporarily) highlighted class warfare for the masses, but – as a lone individual with a predilection for murder as tool – he took the wrong step.
Like the followers of Odin in the long-ago time, we must be strategic.
We must form the wedge that can break through the shield-wall that the richest of the rich have trumped up for themselves, a barricade built with filthy lucre and made of men willing to be bought.
Unfortunately, change isn’t comfortable.
Politely following the rules set by politicians and police and quietly holding a posterboard sign at the assigned location during the allotted hours will do precisely nothing.
Massive, widespread, and sustained protests that disrupt daily life on a large and lengthy scale are necessary, if we actually and truly want to stop the Trump administration from instituting the fascist wish list of Project 2025.
Announcing a strike with less than 1% of a company’s workforce, walking out of a tiny number of workplaces for only three days, and doing nothing to affect shipments and deliveries – as happened recently at Amazon – will do absolutely nothing to hurt the pocketbook of or change worker treatment by Jeff Bezos, the second richest human.
Massive, widespread, and sustained strikes that completely shut commerce down are necessary, if we actually and truly want to force corporate forces to provide living wages, real benefits, and humane working conditions.
This will be much harder than simply pulling a trigger. It will take much more strength than just shooting someone. Those are the coward’s ways. We need to be tougher.
In a Hávamál verse that is often cited but rarely followed, Odin provides this advice:
Where you recognize evil, call it evil,
and give no truce to your enemies.
Let’s call out the evil, loudly and clearly.
Let’s stand against it, together.
Let’s give it no truce, no obeying in advance.
Let’s put on our walking boots, get out into the street, and support those who stand up.
It’s not a gun that is needed. It’s a strategy and a backbone.
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