To get an idea of how deep the social contradiction went, one only has to imagine the god of medieval Christianity, with its capital penalties for many kinds of supposed sexual transgression, being clearly described in biblical texts as engaging in same-sex intercourse. Thus we have Odin—lord of the gods, divinity of war and poetry, patron of the royal elites to whom a masculine heterosexual ideal was central—also portrayed as the supreme practitioner of magic that was homophobically shameful for men to perform.
