The engineers of artificial intelligence systems that are supposed to detect emotion would have us believe that our feelings are simple and discrete, capable of easy measurement and analysis. A consideration of even the most supposedly basic emotions should disabuse us of this idea.
Consider the word “mad”. If we wanted to make the categorization of emotions simple, we could accept it as a straightforward synonym for the word “angry”. Such a reduction of madness, however, eliminates much of the meaning of the emotion, as my use of the word “madness” in this sentence suggests.
To be mad can mean to be strongly upset, or it can mean to be insane. These two definitions aren’t completely separate, though. Within the concept of madness is the idea that to be wracked with anger is to become insane, at least temporarily.
This confluence of aggressive outrage and insanity is found in the Proto-Germanic emotion of woda. Woda refers to the feeling of raging insanity, with tones of fury. However, woda also refers to the experience of inspiration. The term is related to the words for poetry in Latin, Irish, and other IndoEuropean languages.
The emotion of woda is also intimately linked with the Norse god Wodin, also known as Odin, who was famously furious, but also passionately driven in the pursuit of insight. Wodin was both bloody in battle and self-sacrificial, surrendering one eye and hanging himself on Yggdrasil, the tree of the world, in order to obtain a deeper vision of the world. Wodin was the god of war, but also of mead, the drink of creative insight.
A person with woda both feels mad and is mad.
