Mimisbrunnr: The Well of Wisdom

Would you sacrifice an eye to the external world so that you could have an eye to the internal world and the Collective Unconscious?

In Norse mythology, Mímisbrunnr (Old Norse “Mímir’s well”)is a well associated with the being Mímir, located beneath the world tree Yggdrasil.
The god Odin once placed one of his eyes within the well… The well is located beneath one of three roots of the world tree Yggdrasil, a root that passes into the land of the frost jötnar where the primordial plane of Ginnungagap once existed.
The Prose Edda relates that the water of the well contains much wisdom, and that Odin’s eye sacrifice to the well was in exchange for a drink from it(Source)

(from Visions: notes of the seminar given in 1930-1934 by C.G. Jung, Volume 2, page 295)


Here we come to the symbolism of the eye in general. The eye of Horus played a very great role in Egyptian Symbolism…. It was all very esoteric and the meaning is lost; we only know that Horus sacrificed one eye for his father.
When his father, the god Ra, perceived Set in the shape of a black pig, he had a piercing pain in one eye and instantly became blind. The mere sight of the devil, of the black substance of the earth, was enough to put out one eye of the god.

Then Horus the son sacrificed one of his own eyes to Ra, so his sight was restored, but Horus then only had one eye.
Like Wotan [Odin], who sacrificed one eye to Mimir, the speaking fountainhead of the underworld – the unconscious in other words – in return for a draft of the wisdom giving water; and thereafter he had a connection with the wisdom of the earth.

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