Dansk Mjød has recipes from the 1700’s. It’s pricey, but so worth it—especially for special ritual purposes, like Samhain. I can’t stress enough how good the mead “high” is. Like a lover pouring warm, non-sticky honey all over you. Time slows down around you. Air becomes viscous.
But isn’t mead super-sweet?
I get it. I’m not a fan of super-sweet either. Get the kind with hops in it; it cuts the sweetness. Fair warning: this one is 19% alcohol.
The Norse Thread — What "Odin's Skull" Actually Means
This name is not marketing. It is a reference to something very specific and very old, and the fact that I’m drawn to it for this night is my instincts working correctly, apparently.
The Mead of Poetry—called Óðrœrir in Old Norse, meaning roughly "he who stirs up the spirit" or "the exciter of the mind"—is one of the central myths of Norse cosmology, and it is a myth about mead, creation, wisdom, death, and theft by a god.
The short version: the gods made peace after a great war by spitting into a vat together. From that collective divine saliva they created Kvasir, a being of infinite wisdom who could answer any question. Two dwarves killed him, drained his blood, mixed it with honey, and fermented it into three vats of mead. Anyone who drank it became a skald—a poet, a scholar, a knower of hidden things. A giant stole it and hid it inside a mountain. Odin went to get it back.
He bored through the mountain. He seduced the giant's daughter Gunnlöð, who guarded the vats. She gave him three nights with her and he asked for three sips—and in three sips he drained all three vats, turned himself into an eagle, and flew the mead back to Asgard. Some drops fell from his beak on the way. Those drops became poetry. What he held inside himself became the gift of inspired speech.
This is the origin myth of poetry, prophecy, and wisdom in Norse tradition: a god in eagle form carrying divine mead stolen from inside a mountain, delivered through seduction and transformation.
The Skull:
In Norse and proto-Germanic traditions, there is the custom of the minni—the memory cup—in which one drank from the skull of a powerful enemy or ancestor. To drink from a skull is to consume the remnant of a mind. The vessel that once housed the thoughts of the powerful now houses what you put into it. This was not horror-movie macabre. It was a technology for transmission—you receive through the drinking what the skull's original owner possessed.
Odin's Skull as a name means: you are drinking from the mind of the Allfather. You are taking in the remnant of the god of death, wisdom, poetry, war, seiðr, and the Wild Hunt. The vessel is his. What's inside it is now yours.
And here is the fact that makes this whole arrangement almost suspiciously perfect for October 31st:
Odin leads the Wild Hunt, and the Wild Hunt begins at Samhain.
The Hunt is the most ancient form of what Samhain actually is: the dead rising, the veil thinning, and Odin at the head of the procession of souls. To drink mead named for Odin on the night he rides out is not coincidence. It is alignment. The cosmos arranged this and I said yes without knowing exactly why. But now we all know why! Yay!