Odin, Elias, and the Hermit

Today is Wednesday, and one of the things the Hermit card of the Tarot of the Divine reminds me of is a picture I drew many years ago representing that day of the week. I no longer have those pictures of the days of the week, but I remember that one very clearly. Since Wednesday is associated with Hermes/Mercury and Odin/Woden, and with the third day of creation, when the stars were created, my picture depicted a man with a cloak, broad-brimmed hat, and staff, walking alone under a starry sky. The similarity to the Tarot card is obvious.

I am currently reading Orson F. Whitney's book-length poem Elias: An Epic of the Ages. In Canto II, Elias himself appears, as the Soul of Song, and is compared to a hermit (eremite):

The spirit's garb -- for spirit so he seemed -- 

Fell radiant in many a flowing fold;

A robe antique, by modern limners deemed

Befitting monk or eremite of old.

This reinforces the Odin connection, since both Elias (Elijah) and Odin are typically depicted as accompanied by ravens. Searching just now for images of Odin walking, I found several with ravens and one with something even more synchronistically apropos:

This (non-traditional, and presumably algorithm-generated) depiction has Odin not only accompanied by a hart but wearing antlers of his own, making him one of those "humanoid deer creatures" we've been hearing so much about.

An interesting coincidence is that Canto VII of Elias (which I have not yet read) is titled "The Arcana of the Infinite." Given the tradition of referring to the cards of the Tarot as the Major and Minor Arcana, and given that many dictionaries give "God" as one of the definitions of the noun Infinite ("Endless is my name," Joseph Smith has him say), this corresponds pretty closely to The Tarot of the Divine, the name of the deck whose Hermit card has recently been at the center of the sync-web.

Another coincidence is that the part of Elias I read today included "thy desert blooms" (an allusion to Isaiah 35, whence also "Then shall the lame man leap as an hart"), followed a few lines later by "One and Pure in Heart." One suggests the Hermit, a solitary, while Pure in Heart could be symbolized by a white heart (see "White harts").

Another Odin link is "The Hermit Portal and the Well Thing," which emphasizes the runes on Laura Bruno's Hermit Portal painting. Odin is supposed to have been the one who discovered runes. Bruno explicitly compares her hermit to Odin and also suggests that the man who taught her runes may have been Odin in disguise.