Myself to Myself: When the Hanged Man Met the Ascetic
I know that I hung on a windy tree nine long nights, wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin, myself to myself, on that tree of which no man knows from where its roots run.
This is a story of the Crossroads Between Worlds, a place where the roots of Yggdrasil delve so deep they touch the heat of the cosmic cremation grounds.
Here, time is not a straight arrow, but a knotted rope.
Part 1: The Crucible of Two Storms
The North: The Hanging God
The wind did not howl; it screamed. It was the sound of Wut—frenzy—tearing at the fabric of reality.
Odin hung. The ash tree groaned under the weight of a god who desired to be more than a god. Gungnir, his own spear, had pierced his side, pinning him to the wood between heaven and hell. Below him roared the Well of Urd, a swirling vortex of fate that no eye could penetrate.
For nine nights, hunger gnawed at his belly and thirst cracked his lips. He was the king of the Aesir, yet he was lower than the lowest thrall.
“Why?” the wind demanded.
“Because power is blind,” Odin whispered through cracked lips. He had strength. He had armies. But he knew Ragnarok was coming, and swords cannot cut fate. He needed to see the threads.
On the ninth night, the pain became irrelevant. The ego—the golden-helmed chieftain who demanded tribute—began to suffocate. In the extremity of agony, the “I” dissolved. There was no longer Odin the sacrificer and Odin the victim. There was just the act of breaking.
“Myself to myself,” he choked out.
In that moment of total abnegation, the Well of Urd stopped swirling. The murky depths became clear. The shapes rose up—not jagged sticks, but singing symbols. The Runes. The architecture of reality.
With a final, terrible cry that birthed poetry into the world, he snatched them up with his mind. The rope snapped. He fell, hit the ground, and rose. He was older now. One eye was gone, left in the well as payment. But the remaining eye shone with a terrifying, cold brilliance. He was no longer just Wotan the Furious. He was Fjölnir, the Wise One.
The South: The Howler Becomes the Silence
Far to the spiritual South, another storm raged. This was Rudra, the Red Storm, the Howler. He moved with the Maruts, the tempest winds, striking terror into the rigid, ritualistic order of the Vedic gods.
Rudra was raw power, the untamed energy that predated organized religion. He saw Brahma, the Creator, growing arrogant. Brahma had sprouted a fifth head, a head made of pure, unadulterated Ahamkara (Ego), gazing lustfully at his own creation, drunk on his ability to generate matter.
The universe groaned under this unchecked expansion. Order required a limit.
Rudra felt the cosmic necessity rise within him like bile. He manifested as Bhairava—terror incarnate. With the tip of his thumb nail, he severed Brahma’s fifth head. The ego fell.
But the act of violence clung to him. The severed head stuck to his palm, a screaming reminder of the transgression. Rudra roared in madness, wandering the cosmos, unable to shake the weight of what he had done. He was the ultimate outsider.
He arrived at the great cremation ground of Kashi and looked at the roaring fires consuming bodies, turning kings and beggars alike into gray dust realising the futility of the howl. The noise was just a cover for the silence of the void.
Rudra sat down among the burning pyres. He took the hot ash—the final truth of all matter—and smeared it over his red skin. The heat of his fury turned inward, becoming Tapasya. He closed his eyes. The outer world faded. The inner eye—the Third Eye—opened.
The howling stopped. Rudra the Storm had become Shiva the Auspicious, the silent axis around which the chaotic universe spun.
Part 2: The Meeting at the Horizon
A thousand years later, or perhaps yesterday.
A figure trudged along a path made of frozen roots. He wore a tattered blue cloak and a wide-brimmed floppy hat that obscured his face. and carried a spear that looked like a walking stick. He called himself Gangleri, the Wanderer.
Odin was tired. The wisdom of the runes had not brought peace; it had brought burden. He knew too much. He was constantly moving, sowing strife here, granting wisdom there, desperately trying to stack the deck in his favor before the final winter.
The path opened up onto a clearing that smelled of ozone, burnt sandalwood, and ancient dust.
Sitting there, on a tiger skin spread over the gnarled roots, was a figure naked save for a loincloth. His skin was blue-gray with ash. Snakes coiled lazily in his matted hair, where a crescent moon sat tangled. He held a trident across his lap.
Odin stopped, leaning on his spear. His single eye scanned the being. He saw the terrible stillness, a counterweight to his own restless energy.
Shiva opened his eyes. They were pools of liquid tranquility, yet subtly terrifying. He saw the wanderer. He saw the missing eye, the scar in the side, the immense, anxious intelligence vibrating around him.
“You walk far, Graybeard,” Shiva said. His voice was like the deep resonance of a large bell.
“Movement is life,” Odin replied, his voice gravelly. “To sit still is to invite the wolves.”
Shiva smiled slightly. “To sit still is to realize the wolves are already inside you, and that they are hungry ghosts.”
Odin grunted and sat down on a nearby root, keeping a respectful distance. “I am called Gangleri.”
“I have a thousand names,” Shiva murmured. “Today, I am just the stillness in this graveyard.”
They sat in companionable silence for a long moment—the two great outsider gods of the Indo-European world. The magician and the yogi. The anxious father and the detached ascetic.
Odin pointed a gnarled finger at the trident. “A fine weapon. Three points. Past, present, future?”
Shiva nodded. “Creation, preservation, destruction. All held in balance.” He nodded at Odin’s spear. “And yours?”
“It never misses what I throw it at,” Odin said grimly. “Though sometimes I wish it would.”
“You carry a heavy burden,” Shiva observed. “You are trying to hold up the sky.”
“Someone must. The giants are gnawing at the pillars.” Odin leaned forward, the fire of ambition flickering in his lone eye. “I sacrificed myself to myself to learn how to stop them.”
“And I,” Shiva said softly, “cut off the head of the Creator to learn that it does not matter if they are stopped.”
Odin frowned. This was a wisdom that grated against his nature.
Part 3: The Ancestor Speaks
Suddenly, the air grew thin. The smell of ash and cold wind was replaced by the scent of ozone and pure, high-altitude air. A brilliant, almost blinding white light manifested between them.
It coalesced into a towering, translucent figure. It seemed made of marble and starlight, ancient and imposing, yet somehow faded, like a fresco exposed to too much sun. He wore a crown of thunderbolts and held a scepter of pure law.
It was Dyēus Pḥ₂tḗr. The primordial Sky Father. The ancestor they had both superseded.
The shining figure looked down at the two scarred, strange gods sitting in the dirt.
“What has become of my heavens?” Dyēus boomed, though his voice sounded distant, like thunder rolling in another valley.
Odin tipped his hat slightly, not rising. Shiva merely gazed calmly.
“Look at you,” Dyēus scoffed, gesturing at Shiva. “Naked. Covered in the filth of dead bodies. Keeping company with ghouls. Where is the shining splendor of the Devas? You are the Great God now? You look like a beggar.”
Shiva smiled, unstirred. “Splendor is a costume, Ancient One. The truth is naked. The ash is what remains when the illusions burn away.”
Dyēus turned his shining gaze to Odin. “And you. Wōðanaz. The furious little chieftain. You have usurped the seat of Týr. You broke faith to gain power. You practice the dark magic of women and hang from trees like a common criminal. You are no King of Heaven.”
“Tyr was honorable,” Odin said, his voice sharp. “But honor does not stop the Wolf. Tyr put his hand in the Wolf’s mouth and lost it. I learned the words to bind the Wolf’s jaw. The world has grown too dark for just shining lights, grandfather. It needs cunning. It needs sacrifice.”
Dyēus shook his head, radiant light shedding like dandruff. “Sacrifice? Sacrifice is what humans offer us. We are the Perfect Ones. We do not bleed. We rule. I am the Daylit Sky. I am eternal Order.”
“You are static,” Shiva said gently. “Order that does not account for chaos is fragile. Brahma thought he was eternal order too, until his ego grew a fifth head that needed pruning.”
“And the giants care nothing for your Order,” Odin added. “They will tear down your shining sky just to see what darkness lies behind it. You sit on a throne high above, blind to the roots rotting beneath you.”
The Sky Father looked bewildered. He came from a time when gods were simple concepts—light, rain, law. He could not comprehend these complex, tortured deities who internalized the darkness of the universe to master it.
“You are both mad,” Dyēus murmured, his light dimming. “One seeks death in the graveyards, the other seeks madness on the gallows tree. You have broken the pact between sky and earth.”
“We are the pact,” Odin said, standing up, his cloak billowing in a sudden wind. “I am the breath that connects them.”
“And I am the space in which they both dissolve,” Shiva added.
Dyēus Pḥ₂tḗr looked at them one last time, a mixture of pity and fear on his radiant features. “Then may your strange wisdom comfort you in the long twilight. My time is done.”
The light fragmented and dissolved into the upper atmosphere, leaving only the cold stars.
Part 4: The Departure
Odin and Shiva were alone again in the nexus.
Odin chuckled, a dry, rattling sound. “The old ones never understand, do they? They think being a god is about sitting on a high seat.”
“He was of the daylight,” Shiva said, rubbing a smudge of ash on his trident. “We are gods of the eclipse. We understand the necessity of the shadow.”
Odin adjusted his hat, ready to move on. There were kings to influence, wars to incite, secrets to gather. “I must go. The ravens call.”
“Will you ever stop running, Gangleri?” Shiva asked, not unkindly.
Odin paused. His single eye looked weary. “When the wolf swallows me. Not before. I have a world to save, even if I know I cannot.”
“And I will be here when you fail,” Shiva said with total serenity. “Waiting to dance the ashes back into creation.”
Odin nodded. It was not a threat; it was a promise of continuity. The Anxious Preserver and the Peaceful Destroyer acknowledged each other.
Odin turned and walked into the shadows between the roots, his spear tapping against the stones. Shiva closed his eyes, sinking back into the infinite silence of the cremation ground.