kylec | Slow Havamal: 159

In verse 159, Odin says he knows a fourteenth spell: he can count the gods for men and he knows the names of all the gods and elves.

The fourteenth spell seems to be entirely for the benefit of man. It allows Odin to count and name all of the gods and convey that information to humanity. It’s interesting to me that he gleans the names and number by a spell, not by learning in a more traditional manner, or through some census of experience. From where does the need to use magic arise? Perhaps the gods are reluctant to be known and counted, and only through craft can Odin nail them down. Or perhaps the notion of counting and naming these divine beings only makes sense to humans. Maybe there is no count or name on the spiritual plane, and the purpose of the spell is to take what is perhaps continuous (or otherwise) and render it discrete.

Maybe we tend to anthropomorphize gods because it makes them easier to understand for us. If the truth were something difficult—incomprehensible, even—we would need a map by which to relate to it. Odin doesn’t count and name the gods for his own benefit. He does it to make them intelligible to us. They might exist at a level beyond which the abstract concept of “quantity” applies, for example. And even our lowly human philosophers have spilled much ink on the act of naming. A thing is not what we call it, and to assign it that definite category that a name affords will always cleave some of the irreducible individuality from it. “Crow” reduces the thing before my eyes to a group by ignoring what doesn’t correspond to other crows, and even if I name him Magnus, I invoke a habit. The next time I see Magnus I bring memories and presuppositions to the table. They may or may not hold over time.

We can’t avoid this. By the names and numbers of the gods we fall into habits that I can’t imagine are complex enough to contain the entity we refer to. Maybe that’s why gods drift into and out of fashion, change their attributes, their sacred places, even their names over time. One way of relating hardly holds true over the life of a learning, growing being. I was Kyle when I crawled in diapers. What does that kid have to do with the person writing this essay? Would it make sense to treat us the same? So to take something as immense and nuanced as all of the living divinity in the universe and reduce it to a name and a number does in fact resemble a magic trick—one that we nevertheless find helpful in knowing how to act with regards to those named.