Odin and The Runes Myth

A version of Germanic mythology was preserved in Iceland and is now called "Norse Mythology", which is just a handful of stories that are quite a bit different in tone and content than classical world myths, like the Greek Mythology and the jumble of Mediterranean stories that is Jewish mythology.

Many of the Norse stories are quite obscure and are more of a puzzle for the reader to contemplate than some description of what "is" encoded in fictional form. The story of the Runes is one example. Odin hangs upside down from the world tree for 9 days and nights to receive the runes. 

What does "hang upside down" from the world tree mean? One possible interpretation is astronomical. For people who live far enough north, the sun does not rise above the horizon around the winter solstice. Most of the places people currently live in Norway and Sweden, though, don't experience days of nights around the solstice. Another interpretation is it's a parallel version of the human sacrifices the germanic peoples performed many centuries ago where they hung people from trees as an offering to their gods.

In the myth, Odin's sacrifice is like "Neo" in the matrix, he dies and "Wakes up" to the reality of the world of runes, i.e. symbols. However, as I discussed in previous posts, the symbol world/world of ego is the world of delusion.