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The Origin Story of the Witch

Wiccan, Wicca, Wicce, Witch

Over the past few months, I’ve been digging into the 9th to 11th centuries in early English history. This was a tumultuous period to say the least. A time of warfare in which two very different possible futures hung in the balance.

It was also during this time that the word wiccan (“witches”) made its first appearance in the textual sources.

Nowadays, most understand Wiccan to refer to a single practitioner of the neopagan religion Wicca. For the early English though, wiccan was always plural, and a wicca was a male witch. The feminine form of the noun, wicce, eventually became our modern word “witch.”

(Yes, Gerard Gardner chose the singular masculine form of the noun to name his religion. How…utterly unsurprising of him.)

Over the centuries, “witches” have been blamed for all manner of social ills—everything from the ritual murder of infants (a version of the antisemitic blood libel accusation) to blighting crops and causing disease (both of which were also accusations used to wipe out entire communities of European Jews). The meanings of the word “witch” have shifted over time. It’s become something of a malleable term, all too often weaponized. A tool for policing behavior, enforcing dogma, and exerting control.

But that is not the subject of today’s post. That ground is well-trodden enough. No, today I want to talk about the original meaning of the word “witch” and, more importantly, its relationship to early English Heathenism.

The Witch Appears

One of the earliest mentions of the Old English plural form of “witch”, wiccan appears in a passage from the prologue of King Alfred’s Dombōc (law book) (Elsakkers 2010). Now, there is an earlier attestation of the related word wiccungdōm in Cædmon’s Paraphrase that likely dates back to the 7th century (Thorpe. p. 223). However, for this post, I’m going to limit myself to sources including the words wicce, wicca, wiccan and wiccecræft, as well as the verb wiccian.

Anyway, back to Alfred’s Dombōc. The prologue of the Dombōc included sections of chapters 20-22 from the Book of Exodus, ostensibly translated into Old English.

Unsurprisingly, we first find the word wiccan in Alfred’s “translation” of Exodus 22:18 (“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”):

Þa fæmnan þe gewuniað onfon [anfon] gealdorcræftigan [galdorcræft] 7 scinlæcan 7 wiccan, ne læt þu ða libban.

(The women who are wont to receive [and assist] gealdorcræftigan and scinlæcan and wiccan, let them not live.)
(Elsakker 2010)

As you can see from the above quote, Alfred’s treatment of this verse is more reinterpretation than translation. Where the author of the Hebrew Bible punished the mekhashepa, Alfred instead punished the women who welcomed them into their homes and helped them.

But why?

Alfred’s Source

Alfred’s main source was the Vulgate, a 4th century translation of the Hebrew Bible. However, that does not seem to have been his only source. Consider the Vulgate translation of Exodus 22:18 below.

“XXII. 18 maleficos non patieris vivere.”

As you can see, the Vulgate translates the Hebrew word mekhashepa as maleficos, a word that originally meant “evil doers” and carried no connotations with magic in earlier Latin texts. A terrible translation by any measure. But in the defense of the Vulgate’s translator, no other translation was possible. Thanks to the Theodosian Code anything even vaguely related to magic was considered maleficium (“evil doing”) and had been for decades before his birth. For 4th century Romans like Jerome of Stridon (the translator in question), there simply was no difference between charm-muttering healers and sorcerers (Hutton 2017). So, the fact that Alfred used three words where the Vulgate only used one suggests he must have had a secondary source.

“It’s me. Hi! I’m the problem. It’s me.”
– Alfred, never.

The most likely candidate for that secondary source is the Vetus Latina. This is a collection of Latin translations of the Septuagint, a 3rd century Greek translation of Hebraic traditions produced by Jewish scholars who were fluent in both Greek and Hebrew. Unlike the Vulgate that followed it, the Vetus Latina retained the nuance of the Septuagint. And this—more specifically, the Vetus Latina version of Exodus VII.11—is likely the source of Alfred’s own nuance (Elsakkers 2010). Because instead of the evergreen “maleficos” of the Vulgate, the Vetus gives us a trio of practitioners.

However, neither of Alfred’s sources explain the most significant change of the Dombōc version: the target. For that, we’ll have to widen our net.

An Old Norse Parallel?

When I first read Alfred’s law, I was struck by how similar it was to what we find in later Old Norse texts. The peripatetic seeress/magical practitioner that goes from house to house plying her trade is one that crops up in a number of sources, the most famous of which being Þorbjörg Lítilvölva from Eric the Red’s Saga. However fame aside, I think a better parallel to Alfred’s law (at least in sentiment) is verse 22 of the Poetic Edda poem, Völuspá.

”Bright Heiðr they called her
At all the houses she came to,
A good seer of fair fortunes
—she conjured up spirits who told her.
Sorcery (seið) she had skill in,
Sorcery (seið) she practised, possessed.
She was ever the darling
Of an evil wife.”
(Dronke trans.)

In my opinion, Alfred’s choice to condemn the women who received and assisted the practitioners in their homes instead of the practitioners themselves owed more to attitudes prevalent in his own culture than his sources. A culture that shared a common root with and engaged in centuries of interaction and exchange with the Norse.

However, unlike with the Romans, Alfred’s law wasn’t as simple as banning all magic. The presence of magical elements such as verbal charms and ritual acts in early English healing practices would have made such a ban impossible. They may as well have been trying to ban healing itself! An untenable position for any ruler, but especially for one whose rulership was under threat.
And this, friends, is where we come to a key part of this puzzle.

Christians, Danes, and Witches, Oh My!

At the time of the Dombōc’s writing, Christianity was in a perilous position in the English kingdoms. The conversion of the would-be English had begun in 597 CE with the arrival of the monk Augustine in Kent. Over the next two-and-half centuries, Christian missionaries spread their faith throughout the English kingdoms, with the city of Canterbury as their base. However, not all in the kingdoms were eager to receive the new teachings, leading the missionaries (on the pope’s orders) to “sweeten the pot” by co-opting Heathen practices and places of worship instead of simply banning them and tearing them down.

Generally speaking, Christianity spread first among the rulers. However, even after that initial conversion among the kings in the 6th century, some—such as Redwald of East Anglia—were persuaded back to the ways of their ancestors. And even when a king remained devoutly Christian in life, there was no guarantee his heirs would share his devotion. At least two of the kingdoms officially reverted to Heathenism with the ascent of Heathen heirs to their thrones in the 7th century (Knapp. The Fight Against The Threat).

And Christianity seems to have been even more precarious at the popular level. As Karen Jolly notes on page 45 of her book Popular religion in Late-Saxon England:

“The pagan hierarchical structure disintegrated rapidly in the seventh century in the face of Christianity’s systematic organization. But folk practices were all-pervasive in everyday life. The animistic character of Germanic belief prior to Christianization, with its emphasis on nature, holistic cures, and worship at wells, trees, and stones, meant that it was hard to counteract on an institutional level of organized religion. Small religious sites were everywhere; people carried amulets to ward off misfortune and relied on the belief in spiritual agents as explanations for many life experiences.”


That’s not to say that everyone at the popular level was practicing exactly as they had prior to conversion though. Over time, these practices were syncretized with Christian elements (Jolly. 45). Education in Christianity also seems to have been a concern for the church, as few at the popular level were literate—a situation that would remain well into the 11th century.
Then in the late 8th century, the Danes came. This was the world Alfred was born to and the wider context of his law book and education program. A world in which centuries of struggle to fully Christianize a land met a new challenge in the form of Heathen invaders.

Witches, Heathens, and Law

Alfred’s law book wasn’t just the first to mention witches, it was also likely a large part of why “witches” became synonymous with maleficos (and in turn, fordæða in Old Norse). Once included though, witches and witchcraft remained a part of the early English law codes, and persisted in English law long after other terms for practitioners fell away.

(A short note before I proceed: the following laws are pulled from M.J Elsakkers “Reading between the lines: Old Germanic And Early Christian Views On Abortion, which you can find linked at the bottom of the page.)

The first law code to actually sentence the witches themselves was the 10th century law code of Æthelstan, Æt Greatanleage II, which states (ModEng trans. only this time):

“Concerning witchcrafts (wiccecræftum). And we have pronounced concerning witchcrafts (wiccecræftum) and sorceries and secret attempts on life, that, if anyone is killed by such and he (the accused) cannot deny it, he is to forfeit his life”

This is repeated (along with a sentence of outlawry) in the 11th century law Eadward, Alfred and Guþrum:

“If witches (wiccan) or sorcerers (wigleras), perjurers, or murderers or foul, polluted, manifest whores are caught anywhere in the land, they are then to be driven from this country and the nation is to be purified, or they are to be completely destroyed in this country, unless they desist and atone very deeply.”

When we get to article 5.1 of Cnut’s law code from 1020-1021 though, we finally get a possible hint as to the motivation underlying Alfred’s choice to punish the female hosts of magical practitioners instead of the practitioners themselves.

”It is heathen practice if one worships idols, namely if one worships heathen gods and the sun or the moon, fire or flood, wells or stones or any kind of forest trees, or if one practises witchcraft (wiccecræft) or encompasses death by any means, either by sacrifice or divination, or takes any part in such delusions.”

As we can see here, wiccecræft was clearly considered a part of Heathenism in Cnut’s time. If this was also the case in Alfred’s time (more than likely), then it would have made sense for him to find ways to limit contact between the faithful and the Heathen. From this perspective, we might see his amendment to Exodus 22:18 as a way to cut off those contacts by targeting a key vector of transmission: the female hosts.

Ælfric and the Witches

Unfortunately, that is where the legal evidence of wiccan dries up without getting into the Latin translations of those earlier English laws. However, witches also appear in the work of the 11th century homilist, Ælfric of Eynsham. And as infuriating as Ælfric can be to read, he also provides us with some important clues as to how the early English thought about and interacted with witches.

In On Auguries, Ælfric warns his fellow Christians against consulting witches (wiccan) for divination/prophecy, claiming devils as the reason why their predictions prove true. (According to Ælfric, everything a witch could do was down to devils.) In the same text, he also speaks against going to witches for advice about health, a far more holistic concept at the time which not only pertained to physical health but matters of luck, prosperity, and safety. And more curiously, he rails against Christians making offerings at trees and earth-fast stones for healing “as the witches teach.”

“Evergreen content…yeah.”

You may have already noticed this, but the roles of the early English wiccan as alluded to by Ælfric, are not so different from what we attributed to the seiðkona, Heiðr, in the Völuspá passage quoted toward the beginning of this essay.

Moreover, I would go so far as to say that those roles sound somewhat cultic. Things a priest/ess might do.

And yes, I know everyone decided this particular line of thought was bullshit decades ago. But if you ask me, we threw out the baby with the Margaret Murray bathwater.

The Witches In The Glosses

Moreover, these possible associations between cultus and wiccan are further strengthened by the Aldhelm glosses. These were Old English translations of Latin words added to a manuscript after its production to aid comprehension. This really isn’t so different from modern readers designed for language learners where you have the target language text and a small glossary of the more difficult words at the bottom of the page.

The relevant glosses are found in the Digby MS 146 manuscript and date back to the 11th century. There we find wiccan glossed with words like p(h)itonissam (or “pythoness,” a term that derived from the oracular priestess of Apollo at Delphi), and ariolum (diviner, seer). We also find wiccan cited as a cognate for helrunan, and wiccecræft used as a gloss for necromantia or “necromancy.” A gloss we find repeated in the 12th century manuscript, MS Royal 6.B.VII.

The Meaning In The Witch

Finally, we come to the etymology of “witch.” As I said at the top of this post, our modern word derives from the feminine form of the OE noun, wicce. Beyond that though, a number of possible etymologies have been proposed. The one I cite below is that found in Gus Kroonen’s Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic:

“*wikkōn- w.v. ‘to practice sorcery’ – OE wiccian w.v. ‘id.’, WFri. wikje w.v. ‘to tell the future, warn’, MDu. wicken w.v. ‘to practice sorcery’, MHG wicken w.v. ‘id.’*uik-néh₂- (WEUR).

Derived from the same root as found in *wiha- 1 and *wiha- 2 (q.v.). The verb served as the derivational base for OE wicca m. ‘witch’, wicce f. ‘id.’ < *wikka/ōn- and MHG wicker m. ‘soothsayer’. Also cf. OE wigol adj. ‘prophet ic’ <*wigala- and OE wĭglian, (M) Du. wichelen ‘to practice divination’.

*wiha- 1 adj. ‘holy’ – Go. weihs adj. ‘id.’, OHG wih adj. ‘id.’*uéik-o- (WEUR) – Lat. victima f. ‘sacrificial animal’ < *uik-tm-ehz-. Also cf. Go. weihan w.v. ‘to bless, consecrate’ < *wihen- and ON vígja, OFri. wi(g)a, OS wihian, Du. wijden, OHG wihen, G weihen w.v. ‘id.’ < *wih/gjan-. Related to *wiha-2 and *wikkōn- (q.v.).
*wiha- 2 m./n. ‘sanctuary’ – ON vé n. ‘mansion; sanctuary’, OE weoh, wig m. ‘idol’, OS wih m. ‘temple’ (WEUR). Closely related to *wiha- 1 ‘holy’ (q.v.).”

How interesting that once again we find ourselves back in the realm of cultus!

Final Words

This post has been long and something of a winding road. However, the picture that emerges is surprisingly coherent, spanning a variety of textual sources, and has strong parallels with themes found in later Old Norse material.

I’ve actually been wanting to write this for a while for a couple of reasons. The first is that I’ve found myself getting increasingly frustrated by the perennial discourse surrounding the matter of what a witch is and who gets to call themself a witch. So, I hope this provides some helpful context for these discussions going forward – or at least encourages more precision with regards to the era of witchcraft being discussed.  Secondly, I wanted to highlight the connection between those original wiccan and Heathen cultus, and to begin drawing attention to the parallels in ON accounts of seiðr. For a multitude of reasons (many shitty), the label “witch” has been somewhat stigmatized in modern Heathen communities, something to be avoided, and primarily associated with modern Wicca. I would like for that particular discourse to also shift.

As for whose cultus I think the wiccan might have belonged to? My personal guess would be that of Ing, the early English Freyr, but I’ll have to save my reasoning for that for another post.

For now though, let’s just concentrate on getting that proverbial baby back into the bathtub. Murray’s work may be riddled with issues, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and I think there is enough here to conclude she was right that the witch’s roots lie in pre-Christian belief, likely in the realm of cultus.

With that said, be well all!

Oh, and before I forget, I’m giving another class on Sunday. This time I’ll be looking at the matter of luck, what it is, its implications for magic, and how to work with it. Interested? You can find tickets (along with more info) here. All ticket holders receive recordings after the class. This time, the attendee pack is also coming with a little book as well.

Sources

Bouterwek, K. “Die Angelsächsischen Glossen in dem Brüsseler Codex von Aldhelms Schrift De Virginitate.” Digizeitschriften. n.d. https://www.digizeitschriften.de/id/345204107_0009%7Clog30?tify=%7B%22view%22%3A%22info%22%7D

“Caedmon’s Metrical Paraphrase of Parts of the Holy Scriptures in Anglo-Saxon : Caedmon, Benjamin Thorpe : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” Internet Archive. Accessed September 19, 2024. https://archive.org/details/caedmonsmetrica01thorgoog/page/n265/mode/2up?q=magic

Dronke, Ursula. The Poetic Edda: Volume III Mythological Poems II. 1969.

Elsakkers, M. J. “Reading between the lines: Old Germanic and early Christian views on abortion.” Research Explorer. Accessed September 19, 2024. https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/1578616/76079_article_08_embargo_twee_jaar.pdf

Hutton, Ronald. The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.

Jolly, Karen L. Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context. Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 2015.

Knapp, R. I. “The Fight Against the Threat of Witchcraft and Paganism in Anglo-Saxon England.” Lux et Fides: A Journal for Undergraduate Christian Scholars 1 (May 2023). https://pillars.taylor.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=luxetfidesjournal

Kroonen, Guus. Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic. Brill Academic Publishers, 2013.

“Old English Glosses : Chiefly Unpublished : Napier, Arthur S. (Arthur Sampson), 1853-1916 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” Internet Archive. Accessed September 19, 2024. https://archive.org/details/oldenglishglosse00napiuoft/page/n1/mode/2up

Pollington, Stephen. Leechcraft: Early English Charms, Plant Lore, and Healing. 2000.

“Pythoness – No, Not a Big Female Snake.” Notre Dame Sites. Last modified October 20, 2017. https://sites.nd.edu/manuscript-studies/2017/10/20/pythoness-no-not-a-big-female-snake

Simpson, D. P. Cassell’s New Compact Latin-English, English-Latin Dictionary. 1971.

Thorpe, Benjamin. The Anglo-Saxon Poems of Beowulf, the Scôp Or Gleeman’s Tale, and the Fight at Finnesburg. With a Literal Translation, Notes, Glossary Etc. by Benjamin Thorpe. 1855.
https://archive.org/details/anglosaxonpoemso00thor/page/12/mode/2up

“Thou Shalt Not Suffer A Witch to Live, A Murderous Mistranslation.” Haaretz | Israel News, the Middle East and the Jewish World – Haaretz.com. Last modified August 17, 2017. https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2017-08-17/ty-article/thou-shalt-not-suffer-a-witch-to-live-a-murderous-mistranslation/0000017f-e2c8-d804-ad7f-f3fa49340000)

Vulgate Latin Bible With English Translation. Accessed September 19, 2024. https://vulgate.org/

“Ælfric’s Lives of Saints/17aug – Wikisource, the Free Online Library.” Wikisource, the Free Library. Accessed September 19, 2024. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/%C3%86lfric%27s_Lives_of_Saints/17aug

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Reconstruction and Gnosis: The First Experiment

So there I was, standing on a little finger of land between two streams with my jacked-up Götavi grid drop-cloth. I was on my magical experiment bullshit again up a mountain in WV, perfumed with eau de DEET and wishing it wasn’t so fucking humid.

Crunch time had come; it was time to test my working theory. And come Hel or high water, I was going to test it—sweat patches and all!

(Oh the glamour!)

But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself here. Allow me, dear reader, to wind things back a little.

The Story So Far

This series began as a single post that was supposed to stand alone. But the more I wrote, the clearer it became that I had too much to say on this topic to fit in a single post. Eventually (and much like my antiperspirant in WV), I had to concede to a greater force, and thus this series was born.

If this post is the first you’ve seen of this series, I encourage you to go back and read the rest in order. There have been five posts so far. Five posts filled with research, musings, and discussion that you won’t want to miss out on going forward. It’s all necessary context for what comes next. I’ve even linked them below to save you the trouble of hunting them down.

One
Two
Three
Four
Five

Why Is Life So Busy?

It’s been a while since the last installment and you may have been wondering where I was. Well, life got kind of exciting! I got jumped by a bunch of deadlines and facilitated a week-long devotional magical practice for the Cult of the Spinning Goddess group. I also held some community-building events called Spin ‘n’ Witches, gave a class, and kicked off a podcast with Morgan Daimler. In the middle of all of that, I’ve also been working on several books, learning Japanese with my kid, and studying Welsh (as well as doing all the usual life-y stuff).

And that’s even without mentioning my personal magical practices (both the daily and experimental). For me, there are no words on the screen without the dirty boots, sweat patches, and magical adventures. As weird as it may sound, this kind of work is also really whole-making for me, a key part of my wellness. It’s a good portion of the roots that help the tree that is me to grow.

In one way or another, practice forms a large part of the foundation for pretty much everything I produce. And I will absolutely move some projects to the back burner if it means reclaiming some time for the work that makes my souls sing. Which is what happened to these blog posts for a while, and I’m never going to apologize for that.

But anyway, as Machine Gun Kelly and/or Corpse Husband say/s in their joint masterpiece, Daywalker: “I came back.”

From Books To Boondocks

When I last left you, I’d just finished talking about the research and planning phases of magical experimentation. In this post, I’m going to talk about that first experiment and how it all shook out. This is where the gnosis is really going to start to come in. If that isn’t your thing or reading other people’s gnosis makes you rage, then I advise you to hit the back-button.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

For those of you who stick around, I hope these posts serve to illustrate how wonderful it can be when research and gnosis meet. Because frankly, it’s amazing and I hope some of you feel inspired to go make your own magical adventures.

Before we go any further though, did you know that the word “boondock” comes from the Tagalog word bundók, meaning “mountain”? If I ever get to name a mountain, I’m calling it “Bundók-Pendle Mountain” so it means “Mountain, Hill, Hill, Mountain.” You know, as you do.

Prologue To An Experiment

So anyway, I initially began researching the grid in 2019. However as it turns out, nothing wrecks plans for magical mischief and mayhem like a global pandemic. But by the time May 2021 rolled around, things seemed to be getting back on track thanks to the advent of the first COVID vaccine. So I booked a cabin up a mountain in West Virginia with a couple of friends. We were going to hang out, do the experiment, then hang out some more.

When it came to the experiment though, my friends realized they weren’t actually all that comfortable with active participation. One was concerned about the possibility of adverse effects on their health issues, and the other just didn’t want to do something with such a high degree of uncertainty attached.

These were both sensible concerns. Some forms of magic really aren’t good to participate in if you’re already sick. And some people have vulnerable folks in their care to think of too. So while I would have loved for them to have also taken part, I’m also really glad they didn’t. When you’re attempting to work with historical magic in this way, you need to know and be honest about your limits. And I’d much rather my friends tell me “Hey, this isn’t for me,” than participate and have something potentially bad happen to them.

Instead, my friends acted as observers, which meant my experiment also had the benefit of an outside perspective as well.

And that was one hell of a silver lining.

Back To The Experiment

Anyway, back to that little finger of land between two streams (and those sweat patches).

Before setting up, I made offerings to the local spirits and explained what I was going to do. The mountain was active; I’d been catching glimpses of the local beings since I’d arrived. It would have been rude to not ask.

There was a sense of acceptance toward my request, but also the feeling that it was only good until nightfall, and so I proceeded. Despite my earlier plans to set up the grid after circumambulating, I quickly realized I wouldn’t be able to see where I’d walked without first setting up the grid. The ground was too uniform to discern marker points. So I opened the grid and set up posts at the north-northeast edge.

From that point on, the set-up went pretty much as planned. I circumambulated the space counterclockwise and made an offering of wine to Hel, asking her to allow temporary passage for some from her realm. Then I settled at the southwest edge of the grid.

According to my notes, I heard a male voice while circumambulating but couldn’t make out what he was saying so began to sing the dirge. Whenever I sing this dirge in ritual, I do so in a light trance in order to visualize/see the journey between the realms. This time when I peered at the road, I saw a blonde-haired man dressed in a white tunic.

A suspiciously shining man, as it happened.

As I finished the song, I heard what sounded like geese. And when I checked doorposts to the north of the grid, to my satisfaction, the space between the posts appeared “pixelated.”

There was a cool breeze like wove its way like a ribbon through the trees and the skies above grumbled, three thunderous complaints.

“Yes!” I remember thinking to myself. “This is working just like I thought it would!”

The Curveball (Because What’s An Experiment Without One?)

But that’s when the shift happened and my working theory went down like Das Boot. I’d originally theorized that the grid worked like other intermediary spaces I’d worked with like as crossroads effigies and doorposts. However, the shift that had taken place was more like what I’d experienced in my mound sitting experiments instead. When I’d sang the dead through doorposts or crossroads effigies in the past, I’d felt them enter into the space. Usually, their entrance came with a cool breeze that flowed from whichever medium they’d passed through. But most importantly, all of this would take place within an intermediary space rooted in this Middle Earth.

My experience with mounds though, is that the space shifts so that it’s no longer rooted in Middle Earth. It reminds me of the difference between being inside a different nation’s embassy while still within your own country and in your nation’s embassy while within another country.

Recognizing that feeling from those experiments with mound sitting, I moved onto the cloth, my ears filled with a buzzing that sounded like white noise. The cloth felt cool to the touch, and I had the feeling that someone was on their way.

I was both shocked and delighted by the discovery.

Unfortunately though, that thunder had only heralded a coming storm. I wasn’t able to spend as much time feeling out my discovery as I would have liked. So I began the process of wrapping things up. I sang the dead back and made offerings of gratitude to Hel. Then I closed down the doorposts and grid, before circumambulating clockwise to return the space back to how it was before.

(Or so I thought.)

The Experiment: Observer Perspective

From talking to my two wonderful observers, I learned that during the circumambulation they’d seen the leaves to the north of me appear to “twitch.” From their perspective, it appeared as though whoever was making the leaves twitch was moving toward me.

One observer seems to have seen the same ribbon of wind I’d seen, and described it as coming from the east, before veering to the north, west, and south to wrap around the space. What’s especially interesting to me is that this ribbon of wind seems to have moved counterclockwise as I had during the circumambulation.

“Greetings! Have you heard the word of Beyla?”

The next main observation was that as I was getting into the rite, a big bee appeared in front of the door to the covered porch they were observing from. Apparently, this bee seemed to be trying to get in and was loud enough to drown out my voice. They (as in the bee) went on their merry way again once the rite had ended.

The Aftermath I

As I mentioned before, I only had the benefit of observers because my friends hadn’t felt comfortable with active participation. Again, I’m going to reiterate the fact that you really don’t know what’s going to happen when creating magical experiments based on historical sources, places, or objects. And this is also true for the aftermath.

The first thing I noticed in the aftermath was that I kept seeing the blonde man in the white tunic in the land outside. There was something very elven about him, but his presence confused me at that time given my location. (Now I’m a few more experiments in with the grid,  his presence makes total sense.)

The next thing I noticed was that the cloth itself had a certain energy to it, and was still chill to the touch. The lights in the cabin dimmed as I brought it in, and one of my friends expressed the concern that it might not be safe to drive with in the car. Agreeing with her, I worked up a quick and dirty chaos magic sigil for containment on a plastic bag big enough to hold the cloth and stuffed it in.

The room visibly brightened.

Once that was taken care of, I made sure to purify myself as I always do after clarting around/potentially clarting around with the dead and settled in for the night.

The Aftermath II

The afternoon gave way to the evening and eventually night. We ate dinner together and got comfy in the lounge to hang out and shoot the shit. After a while though, we began to notice that there were creaking noises coming from an empty wooden chair in the lounge area. It sounded exactly like the kind of creaking older chairs make when someone moves, shifting their weight. Curious, I put my hand out to feel the space and felt a cool presence there.

We had an unseen guest.

He (because he felt like a “he”) would remain with us for the rest of the evening and into the next morning.

When something like that happens, I generally find that you have a few options. You can ignore them and hope they don’t cause trouble. Another option is to kick them out. But my preferred option (at least in this case) was to offer him hospitality in the form of a cup of mead in exchange for him being a good guest. There can be a level of protection in the host-guest relationship, and when it goes right, everyone leaves happy.

And he was a good guest, though he would show his displeasure by creaking his chair and flickering the lights whenever we talked about other ghosts who were assholes while trading stories. Whenever this happened, we’d reassure him we didn’t mean him and he’d calm down again.

It was a real “not all ghosts” moment.

After the After-Aftermath

So that was the first experiment with the grid. Looking back, there were a lot of mistakes and my working theory was just plain wrong. However, this is all par for the course with this kind of magical experimentation. If that’s not something you can handle—that uncertainty—then I recommend you steer clear of this work. You need to be able to think on your feet and McGyver solutions relatively quickly. And I’m not saying that to be an elitist. It’s just that there’s so much you can’t know or plan for as the first human (often) to work with a space/object/kind of magic in a thousand-or-so years.

But that uncertainty and those first experiment fuck-ups is where the next step comes in: evaluation and optimization. And that is what I’m going to talk about in the next post in this series.

Be well.

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Reconstruction and Gnosis: Building Experiments II

Welcome back to my series taking a look at blending reconstruction and gnosis! This series has grown to be a monster, and I still (shockingly) have so much more to say.
But this post is where we finally start to translate that research/gnosis/prior results/experience into practical application. (I mean it this time.)

So, let’s jump right into the fuckery. And as always, we begin with a working theory.

My Working Theory (Take One)

When I put my first Götavi grid experiment together, my working theory was that the grid was a way to call up the dead. You know, some good, old-fashioned, pants-shitting necromancy.

By that point, I’d already experimented with calling up the dead. I’d worked with doorposts and crossroads effigies and sang them forth with dirges. And at the time, I thought the grid might work in a similar way. My expectation was that it would create some kind of portal with similar effects to what I’d experienced before. Effects like a discernible drop in temperature, “winds” that seem to move with intent, noises, apparitions, psychic communication etc.

But hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. Looking back now, this working theory is laughable—a massive oversight.

It was also far from my only fuck-up as well.

If you get this, you’ve probably gone a little too far and may need to consult this helpful post for advice on dealing with “Code Draugar” situations.

But mistakes aren’t just to be expected in this kind of work; they often turn out to be the best teachers we have. Without my mistakes, I literally wouldn’t have the insights I have now or a workable grid practice.

Like the late, great Bob Ross used to say, “We don’t make mistakes. We just have happy accidents.”

(Unless of course those mistakes get you killed, and then we replace “happy” with “deadly.”)

As an aside, did I mention this isn’t exactly safe?

Reconstruction And Magical Stories

Once you have your working theory (as jacked up as it may be), then it’s time to take a look at the components of the magical story you want to tell.

You may have noticed that I think of magic in terms of story. And there are a whole bunch of reasons for this. But for now, let’s just say the story analogies in this post are an easy way to convey a lot of ideas relatively quickly.

Now, think back to the post covering the research phase of this process. What did I do?

Well, first I gave a description of the Götavi grid (or as I like to call it, the “Devil’s Hopscotch”). Then, I deconstructed the various elements of the grid, which included the number nine, islands/mounds, posts, the SW orientation, and kinds of offerings found. As a part of this deconstruction, I discussed similar finds and their contexts as well as any possible symbolism.

In other words: I attempted to dig into the background stories of each of those elements in order to form a theory about the meta plot.

By the end of that post, I’d outlined a range of textual and archaeological evidence supporting my initial (gnosis-based) theory that the grid’s ritual story was eschatological in nature.

Here is where we get to the question: What now?

This seems to be a sticking point for a lot of people. They’re fine with the research or fine with the woo, but find it hard to bridge the two. (Hey, that rhymes!) The transition from research to practice, and especially in a way that incorporates gnosis, can be hard to imagine. But it doesn’t have to be that way, especially not when you choose to think about magic as story.

All The Ritual Space Is A Stage…

Think about the average theater production. After all, ritual is a type of performance (a perspective the Norse seem to have shared).

Now ask yourself: What do you need to put on a performance?

You need a setting, actors, props, choreographed actions, and a script—all of which need to come together coherently to tell the story.

In the context of my grid experiment, the grid and its orientation were the setting. The actors would be the ritualists as well as any beings that showed up. From my perspective, that cast also included some of my ritual tools as well, though I know not everyone thinks that way. The choreography for the production were the ritual actions, and the script was…well, it was the script.

From studying the description of Hermóðr’s Hel-ride, scholarship analyzing conceptions of death and mounds, and potential examples of eschatology in archaeology, I even had a basic plotline from which to derive a framework. I summarize it here as follows (please feel free to write some fanfic if inspired):

“Area ritualist opens doorway to dead in symbolically potent space that possibly symbolizes the Hel-Road in order to facilitate the passage of dead into ritual space for communication.”

Ugh…I got it so fucking wrong. But hopefully you get the point about the story thing.

Reconstructing The “Stage”: The Physical Elements

I have many regrets in life, but one of my greatest is that I wasn’t born rich and therefore able to buy real estate on a salt marsh. As you might imagine, growing up barely hugging the poverty line while Maggie Thatcher broke unions and snatched milk was a huge impediment to me. (Those Poll Tax riots were pretty lit though!) The sad fact of the matter is that the intergenerational poverty I was born into not only prevented me from buying a salt marsh for weird, necromantic experiments, but also stopped me from hiring a construction crew to build a grid on that hypothetical salt marsh as well.

(In case it wasn’t clear, that entire last paragraph was sarcasm.)

Smasher of unions, snatcher of milk, ruiner of dreams. Current status: Dead (DO NOT RESURRECT. THE WORLD HAS ENOUGH PROBLEMS ALREADY.)

When I think about the utter fripperies the über rich spend their money on instead of trying to solve world hunger/the climate crisis/buying salt marshes and reconstructing (theoretical) Viking Age necromantic tech, I just…

(Okay, that bit wasn’t so much sarcasm as genuinely held sentiment about solving world hunger and the climate crisis.)

Well anyway, I don’t have those resources, so I had to get a little creative.

One of the key take-aways from the Færeyinga saga grid is that grids could be drawn and temporary.

Or in other words: no wild construction projects needed.

Now, we obviously don’t actually know for sure that the saga grid had the same design as the salt marsh grid. But sometimes you just have to say “fuck it!” and do the thing anyway. (Also, the description was pretty damn close to what the archaeologists dug up.)

Reconstructing the Grid and Posts

The easiest option for reconstructing the grid would obviously be chalking it on a floor somewhere. You could even make some ritual chalk for the purpose, incorporating layers of herbal and charm magic into the process. But as we had a carpet back then and I’d already decided the first experiment would be away from my family, I went a different way instead.

Drawing magic circles on drop cloths from the paint department of your local DIY store is old hat in the occult community. And this is the direction I decided to go in as well. So, off I toddled to my local big box LowesDepot and picked up a drop cloth and some of those jumbo sharpie markers. I also recommend picking up one of those huge wooden rulers as well if you do this and care about straight lines. (Which I don’t.)

The OG Devil’s Hopscotch was 15m x 18m or 49ft x 59ft. For those of you who measure by alligators, this would be roughly equivalent to one large American alligator wide and one large American alligator plus a fifth of another large American alligator long.

Area alligator minding their own business, completely unaware that they’re being used as a unit of measurement by metric-averse USians.

Unfortunately though, those dimensions were way too big for any space I could imagine myself using. There’s no way a large alligator would fit in my living room, and I wanted the option of using the grid chez moi if all went well. So in the end, I wound up freehanding my first grid on a 6ft x9ft canvas drop cloth and sort of said “That’ll do!” while laughing maniacally.

And here is where my second fuck-up happened.

Because I had that really unfortunate thing happen where my photograph of the grid got flipped, placing the square on the wrong side…which I then replicated on the cloth and didn’t realize until later. I also couldn’t find any photos of the grid with the directions marked out. All I knew back then was that it had a SW-NE orientation, and that the blood and fat business end of things was in the NE. I had no idea which end of the grid was supposed to be in which direction.

This, by the way, is one of the many reasons why the evaluation and tweaking stages are so important.

But anyway, I had a jacked up grid cloth to go with my jacked up working theory.

The next thing I wanted to recreate was the posts, and here is where I ran into another issue. The information in Nine Paces about their number and location is quite unclear. It could also be the case that archaeologists simply couldn’t get an accurate count of them as well. But given the prevalence of doorpost/thresholds within necromantic/funerary contexts, and me going balls-to-the-wall on my working theory, I was going to have some fucking doorposts. These wound up being a couple of fallen branches I found then chanted over before my first experiment.

Classy, right?

(Don’t worry, I’ll get to the chanting later.)

Reconstructing the “Stage”: The Action Elements

Once I had my jacked up grid, I turned my attention to recreating the island/mound element. Between the work cited in the research post and my dream about landscape/ritual space reflecting cosmology/story, I knew that I had to find a way to incorporate them into my experiment. So, I opted to do so symbolically, through circumambulation while pouring out water and chanting. As the Götavi people built the island first before the grid in the salt marsh, I decided the symbolic recreation of an island had to come first in my experiment as well.

There’s a lot of ire in some Heathen communities regarding ritual spaces that happen to be circular in shape. For many, circles are “what Wiccans do” and their use therefore automatically, “Wiccatru.” A nefarious vector for Wiccan cooties, and also probably a leading cause of men losing the ole “man card.”

“Sir, we have received reports you danced/circumambulated/expressed emotion/liked some colors other than regulation blue and maybe gray. We hereby confiscate your ‘Man Card’ (TM)! Have a terrible day, cuck!”

Okay, that was going a little too far.

However, despite these more modern ideas and the (thankfully lessening) accompanying irrational fears of things like circumambulation/drumming/entheogens/dance, circumambulation and/or turning is attested in conjunction with magic in OE and ON sources.

Circumambulation And Directionality

In the OE sources, the most obvious example is the Old English Journey Charm, the first part of which reads:

”I encircle myself with this rod and entrust myself to God’s grace,
against the sore stitch, against the sore bite,
against the grim dread,
against the great fear that is loathsome to everyone,
and against all evil that enters the land.
A victory charm I sing, a victory rod I bear,
word-victory, work-victory.
May they avail me;”

The above charm, at least according to scholars like Karin Rupp, was originally intended to be performed. In other words, the traveler was to physically turn in a circle while speaking the charm, effectively casting a protective circle around themselves. (You can read all about it here.)

There’s no mention of directionality here. However, if we look to other examples of ritual turning in the OE sources, we can infer a clockwise direction. One example of this can be found in the Æcerbot (“field remedy”) charm, a charm for removing curses or poison from agricultural land. In the charm, the ritualist is instructed to “turn thrice with the sun’s course (clockwise) as part of the preparatory stages for the main ritual in order to bless four sods from each corner of the affected field. The Field Remedy has an undeniably Christian veneer. However, Jolly considers it “highly likely” that parts of the charm are survivals of a pre-Christian predecessor that was co-opted and Christianized (Jolly, Popular Religion, 7, 26).

Outside of the Field Remedy, circles feature a number of times in the OE magico-medical manuscripts. In one adder bite charm, they’re used to create a protective circle around the bite to prevent the poison from spreading. In another charm, the healer is instructed to make a circle of animal fats and wine and another of bone within which to prepare the cure (Storms, Anglo-Saxon Magic, 41, 86).

In the ON sources, counterclockwise/withershins circumambulation is attested within the context of baneful magic. At the time when I was putting together my first grid experiment though, I only knew of a single example from Grettis saga.

In cha. 79, the “full-cunning” woman, Þuríðr, circumambulates a log backwards and against the course of the sun (ansœlis) as part of her baneful magic against the outlaw Grettir. Once she’s done, the log is then pushed out to sea where it drifts out to Grettir’s hideout on Drangey and torpedoes his remaining luck. This eventually leads to his death (Price, The Viking Way, 273)

In addition to the historical sources, I also had previous experimentation and ritual experience to go on as well. Interestingly, the results of my experimentation have aligned with what we find in the sources. I’ve found it best to circumambulate clockwise when building, healing, or performing ritual to the Holy Powers. And for baneful magic, destruction, communication with the Dead and/or Other, I walk against the sun, sometimes even backwards.

And that is how a person winds up circumambulating widdershins while chanting and pouring out water to fake a mound!

Reconstructing the “Stage”: The Power of Speech

As much as I’ve bemoaned my lack of salt marsh and construction crew in the past two posts, the fact of the matter is that they’re not actually necessary. Speech is a weighty thing in the ON sources. In the Hauksbók version of Völuspá, we’re told that (contrary to the popular perception of spinning) the Norns choose and speak the ørlög of men (Bek-Pedersen, The Norns, 182).

But the power of choice made real by fateful, weighty speech isn’t limited to Nornir. The prophecies of völur also seem to have been a matter of choice and speech as well. In cha. 3 of Hrólfs saga kraka, the völva, Heiðr, hastily recants a negative prophecy and speaks a more positive one out loud (and into being) in order to avoid physical harm. And in cha. 12 of Víga-Glúms saga, Saldís berates the völva, Oddbjörg, for what she sees as a bad prophecy for her sons with the following words:

”I should have thought good hospitality deserved something better, and you’ll be driven
away if you go round predicting evil“

(Bek-Pedersen, Nornir, 201-202.)

Moral of this story, kids? Be careful who you read or work magic for!

So, both Nornir and völur have the power of fateful speech, and more importantly, the power of choice.

But even outside Nornir and völur, speech was a weighty thing. In her book, The Norns in Old Norse Mythology, Karen Bek-Pedersen highlights multiple examples of non-magical people displaying hesitance around making future predictions lest they come true (Bek-Pedersen, The Norns, 186-191).

By the by, the word “fate” is derived from the Latin fatum, which is the past participle of the verb fari, meaning “to speak.” One way we can understand this word is “that which was spoken,” which is one of the main reasons why I continue to use the word “fate” within a Heathen context. Other reasons include compelling arguments like:

“There are six different words for different types of “fate” in ON, and we don’t have clear definitions of what they all mean anyway.”

(Source: Me bitching about ON fate words.)

Speech To Create, Speech to Manipulate

As magical practitioners, we can and should understand speech to be a powerful, world-changing act. Returning to my earlier point about magic and story, it’s important to note that speech is key to one of our oldest forms of storytelling. Nowadays though, we live in a world in which words seem cheap (even as national and global actors wield them as Noopolitical weapons.)

We would be wise to reacquaint ourselves with this power.

Perhaps the best and most useful summaries of speech as a magical tool that I’ve found comes from Shamans, Christians, and Things, a paper by Mr Frog. Ostensibly, he’s discussing the differences between the worldview and mechanics of shamanic magic and those of the tietäjä institution. But this discussion leads to some interesting considerations regarding the “Germanic technology of incantations.”. Specifically, Mr Frog argues that the underlying mechanics of the Finnish tietäjä’s charming practices are rooted within that Germanic incantation technology.

To (partially) quote Mr Frog with this wonderful summary of how charms work:

”…this was the verbal interface with ‘the unseen world,’ which it simultaneously represented and manipulated, actualizing unseen aspects of reality in order to change the experiential world.”

So, never underestimate the power of speech to create what you need when building your experiments.

The salt marsh really doesn’t matter.

Fun fact: My mum used to tell me that Maggie Thatcher would get me if I didn’t behave when I was a kid!

Speaking Into Being

To return to Mr Frog’s words above, your speech is the vehicle through which you represent and manipulate the unseen world. In my case, there were two elements I wanted to include but could not in a physical manner. The first was the water around the mound. We can interpret this water as a representation of the water the dead must cross when traveling between our world and theirs. Then there were the doorposts, which we can possibly interpret as a representation of Hel’s gate.

Working theories for rituals tend to lead to working theories about the purpose of the various elements comprising the ritual. These “second order” working theories about purpose and place in cosmology are what will allow you to create the verbal elements, or “script.”

Technically speaking, when representing otherwise impossible elements for magical experimentation, your magical speech needs to do the following:

Effectively introduce the element you wish to represent.
Locate that element within the cosmology within which your magic experiment is “set” (according to your initial working theory)..
Delineate the function of the element within the context of the ritual or magical story you’re creating.

Speaking Into Being: Prose and Function

Fancy liturgy is wonderful when done well. If you can write that kind of liturgy while meeting the above criteria, that’s wonderful! But I want to be clear that there’s also nothing wrong with being blunt and to the point either.

Saying, “These sticks are now the doorposts of the mighty Helgrindr!” might not sound great, but it gets the job done. I think even the most skilled liturgist gets blunt when things go sideways and they have to work quick and dirty.

Look at me extolling the virtues of bluntness! (It’s the shocking plot twist absolutely everyone who knows me saw coming.)

We just can’t always have amazing liturgy, you know? So, no one should feel ashamed about theirs for not being fancy enough. It’s far more important to have accurate speech than speech that sounds wonderful but has more “plot holes” than Swiss cheese. And especially when there are plenty of beings out there who are known for exploiting those holes.

On that note, it’s always good to have some charms memorized that you can pull out as needed. Hallowing charms, protection charms, and exorcism charms are all useful to have floating around in the brain for if (when) things get “spicy.” I already gave you one in the first verse of the Old English Journey Charm quoted above. Just adapt the first couple of lines to better fit your own worldview, and get memorizing!

Oh, and like any magical skill, don’t forget to practice performing those charms.

One final thing I want to mention before giving a specific example, is to pay attention to rhythm if you have the luxury to do so. One of the benefits of working with poetic meters like the ON galdralag (“magic spell meter”) is that it has a good rhythm for chanting when done well. This is excellent if you have to chant a charm over and over again. It makes it easier to remember, harder to fuck up, and also helps you into an altered state. There’s a transformative element within the final lines of the meter as well, which I find does some of the work for me. Handy, right?

Prose And Function: A Handy-Dandy Example

Anyway, here’s an example of the kind of thing I might say while circumambulating with water:

”Step by step,
Against the sun
The moat of a mound I make
A Gjöll on the Hel-Road
A ring between
Within this ring the dead reside
Within this ring the dead remain”

Now, that wasn’t great, but hopefully you see what I mean. When combined with the actions themselves, I’ve communicated what I’m doing and what that action symbolizes. I also locate the mound moat/Hel-road river within the wider cosmology, conveying the general idea of a body of water separating the realms of living and dead. Finally, I name the purpose of the mound-moat/Hel-road within the context of the ritual. Because it doesn’t just serve to symbolize cosmology but also needs to contain any dead who show up as Hel or the mound contain the dead. As a part of this, I use an approximation of galdralag. This allows me to also take advantage of the transformative function conveyed within the final two lines of the charm.

When actually calling the dead though, I rely on a different form of speech: song. For the grid experiment, the most natural choice for me given my working theory was an adaptation of an old dirge called A Lyke Wake Dirge. The original—which likely would have been sung over a corpse—describes the journey to the afterlife. This journey was very much as a Christian might have seen it during the time the song was composed. So, to better reflect the story I wanted to tell, I needed to create an adaptation.

What’s in *your* afterlife journey? (Seriously, start thinking about this now.)

This is coming entirely from experience, but there really is nothing quite like wailing a dirge to a slow beat to call up the dead.

Good times.

Putting It All Together

Moving on from physically and verbally reconstructing the various elements, the next thing I focused on was figuring out the “order of business.” This is basically when you sit down and figure out the most logical way to bring together the various elements of your ritual. Another way to think about this is along the lines of ordering the elements of your story so that it forms a coherent narrative.

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made when putting together experiments before is overcomplicating what I’m doing. So, I try to keep things as simple as possible and try to avoid adding extraneous elements and/or steps.

Shockingly (especially with all of my other fuck ups by this point), I did actually manage to keep things simple for my first grid experiment.

The Order Of Business (Take One)

  1. Get out cloth and chant over “posts.” Make sure I have everything I need.
  2. Create/delineate ritual space through incantation and circumambulation with water.
  3. Open up grid cloth within ritual space. Ritual speech locating the cloth in cosmology and delineating function according to my working theory.
  4. Speak charm over sticks to make doorposts. Install in the NE. Speak charm locating the posts in cosmology and delineating function.
  5. Make initial offering to Hel asking her to open Helgrindr and allow some of her subjects to temporarily visit. (I included this step because it’s both good manners but smart to include relevant death deities when potentially working necromancy IME.) Deposit offerings in NE.
  6. Move to SW. Enter light trance so as to monitor physical and magical effects. Sing adapted dirge (the version that describes the journey from Hel.)
  7. Make offerings to any dead who show up to welcome them. See what happens. React accordingly. (Welcome to the “find out” section of this flavor of “fuck around and find out”)
  8. Express gratitude for their presence when done and make a final offering to them. If no one showed up, make offering anyway in case they did but you just didn’t perceive them.
  9. Sing/guide any dead back using the version of the dirge describing the journey to Hel. (Important: perform this step anyway even if you felt/saw nothing!)
  10. Express gratitude to Hel and make final offering.
  11. Chant another incantation over the posts to return them to being sticks and take them up.
  12. Take up the grid cloth once you’re sure any visitors are gone. (Monitor for environmental changes associated with dead and perform divination if unsure.)
  13. Circumambulate clockwise, chanting a charm returning the space to its previous state.
  14. Purification, assessment, and more purification.

Remaining Concerns

Once I had all of the above figured out/in place, the only things left to figure out were offerings and location.

Offerings

As I discussed in the post on research, the evidence of offerings on the grid demonstrates offerings of blood and fat made to the NE of the grid and less bloodier ones to the SW. Price also suggests in Nine Paces that the grid was likely a site of blood sacrifice as well.

However, blood and fat were not really doable options for me. Especially seeing as I also planned to conduct that first experiment away from home. One potential solution to this could have been melted lard and blood from meat purchased from the supermarket. The latter is something I’ve offered before in the vein of Kormaks saga to the ælfe; I have no issue doing that. But blood congeals when exposed to air and fat congeals when it cools, which would have made it impossible to pour out either substance. So, with all of that in mind, I leaned into the symbolic again and went with red wine.

If it helps, you can think of it as “grape blood.”

Location

As far as I know, I was the first human to experiment with the grid in this way since the Götavi site was discovered. This meant that I had absolutely no idea what to expect (if anything) going into that first experiment. Because of this, I opted to perform the first experiment away from home and basically in the middle of nowhere. I may not have known what was going to happen, but my instincts were telling me something was</em? going to happen. Moreover, I couldn’t shake the feeling that that “something” would be pivotal in some way.

But events can be “pivotal” in many ways. For example, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was pivotal as fuck, and that turned out terrible for millions of humans. I didn’t want to expose my family and neighbors to any potentially dangerous effects stemming from my experiments.

So naturally, I booked a cabin up a mountain in WV with some friends.

“WEST VIRGINIIAAAAAA, MOUNTAIN MAMAAAAA…”

I’ll talk about that first experiment in my next post.

Be well.

Sources

Bek-Pedersen, Karen. Nornir in Old Norse Mythology
Bek-Pedersen, Karen. The Norns in Old Norse Mythology
Frog, Mr. Shamans, Christians, and Things in between: From Finnic–Germanic Contacts to the Conversion of Karelia.
Jolly, Karen. Popular Religion in Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context.
Price, Neil. Nine paces from Hel: time and motion in Old Norse ritual performance.
Price, Neil. The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia.
Rupp, Katrin. The Anxiety of Writing: A Reading of the Old English Journey Charm
Storms, Godfrid. Anglo-Saxon Magic.

 

 

 

 

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Reconstruction and Gnosis: Building Experiments I

A Note On The Term “Reconstruction”

Welcome back to another thrilling installment of this blog series examining the intersection of reconstruction and gnosis!

Before I get stuck in though, I just wanted to add a quick note about my use of the word “reconstructionism,” in this series. This can be something of a nebulous word among modern Heathens. At its core, it’s a methodology that allows scholars to experience a thing in as accurate a way as possible to potentially gain insights about that thing. However, it’s also come to signify a movement within modern Heathenry that sits at the opposite end of the (fake) spectrum from “woo.” This was the meaning we first began with in the beginning of this series. Some might even argue that this “recon” movement has developed a dogma of its own over time, thus making it a kind of sect. (And a weirdly evangelical one at that.)

Okay, not the most accurate, but it made me laugh.

Within the context of this series, I use the term “reconstructionism” and its variants to refer to either the methodology as I approach it or the movement as it relates to the “recon – woo” scale. When referring to the research phase of the process, I also use “scholarship” or “research,” as that’s the bulk of the work involved at that stage. However, it’s important to note reconstruction doesn’t just include research but experimentation and post-experiment evaluation as well.

Some Limitations Of Reconstructing Magic

It should probably go without saying, but magical reconstruction is a completely different kettle of fish from reconstructing medieval bow shooting (for example). I’ve discussed this before in previous posts, but there are a couple of extra points we need to bear in mind when reconstructing magic.

The first is that the ON primary sources were written from the observer’s perspective, often long after the events they describe took place. Sometimes there are further clues from archaeological finds (especially when they seem to support the textual sources and vice versa). However, the vast majority of the time, interpreting those finds is (to put it crudely) ultimately a matter of educated guesswork.

Actual depiction of my magical experimentation (take 1)

The second point relates to outside influences. Even textual sources that appear to have been written for practitioners are not without their problems. The most relevant example of this within the context of my own work are OE magico-medical texts like the Lacnunga. Though they clearly contain earlier remnants, these texts were written hundreds of years after the English officially converted. So, while there may be Heathen elements, there are also clear Christian and Classical influences in the mix as well, and it can be difficult to tease those different strands apart.

Step One: Building A Working Theory

One of the first things you’ll notice if you try experimenting with historical magic, is that there are “gaps.” We often talk about different magical traditions or currents as systems. And like any other kind of system, there are certain processes/actions/objects required to make a magical system work.

Historical Heathen magic was likely no different.

I find it helpful to think of magical systems as languages for communicating with and mediating issues with the Holy Powers and Unseen of this world. As with any other kind of language, there needs to be a grammar-like framework as well as some agreement on performance if it is to be understood.

So, part of the work involved in creating magical experiments has to include a working theory of how the system you’re experimenting with may have worked. Don’t worry too much about getting things wrong. At this point, it’s best to think in terms of degrees of accuracy anyway. You’re not aiming for the magical equivalent of being able to write a book in a second language (big shout out to Daniela Simina for that one!). Your aim here is to figure out enough to do the equivalent of successfully ordering a hotdog at a gas station without confusing or pissing off the staff.

When formulating your working theory/theories, it’s important to remember that magical systems are not separable from worldview. They exist within the worldview from which they were born. So, for example, as magic is very much concerned with fate, it’s wise to learn everything you can about how Historical Heathens may have thought about “fate.” You would also do well to read up about souls and eschatology, as well as how they may have viewed their neighbors (both Seen and Unseen) in this wondrous Middle-Earth.

Once you have your working theory though, then you can begin to think about the elements they may have thought necessary, the order of ritual, and well…everything else. Because working theories—while daunting—give you a place to start figuring out some of the missing pieces.

Filling In The Missing Pieces AKA “Plotholes”

If you’ve been practicing magic for any amount of time, you can probably read a ritual, mentally walk it though, and have a good idea of whether it’s going to work. In doing this (whether you realize it or not), you’re effectively assessing the “story” of the ritual/spell/working for “plot holes.”

At times, these potential plot holes reveal themselves through sources of similar practices or comparable sites within your focus culture/s. Other times though, you may find yourself suspecting a plot hole when looking into similar practices from related cultures or cultures with whom your focus culture/s had a lot of interaction.

Much rarer (at least in my experience) is when the author unintentionally leaves a hint of a plot hole via a stock phrase. A phrase that seems to indicate a practice/action/incantation the author considered so basic and common to their intended audience they didn’t think it worth the bother of writing down. Those of you who have studied the Greco-Egyptian Magical Papyri are probably very familiar with the phrase “do the usual.” This is the kind of hint I mean here.

However a plot hole is revealed though, my first step is to widen my field of research to try and find something with enough of a similar “shape” to fill those gaps. This is when I begin to look into sources from related cultures or later time periods from the same culture. (Because we clearly also need to add in some comparativism and retrospective methods too.)

Finally, I also pay attention to my gnosis as well as lessons learned from previous experiences and incorporate those too. Remember how I extolled the importance of writing everything down in the last post? Well, this is where all of that recorded gnosis and XP starts to come in.

Filling In The Missing Pieces: The “Not Attested But We Know This Shit Keeps Us Safe” Parts

The last kind of plot hole to consider are the practices and precautions we have no historical evidence for but know from experience to be smart. These include (but are not limited to) some mainstays of modern witchcraft practice like grounding/centering/shielding and energy manipulation.

There can be a temptation to try and be the most authentic and accurate little magical explorer that could. But as a witch, I’m nothing if not practical, and I’ve seen what happens when people don’t have those so-called “basics” down when engaging in this kind of work.

Magic isn’t safe, and this is especially the case when working outside established traditions. Established traditions have structure and methods of working and people generally have an idea of how rituals are going to go. Moreover, when things do go wrong, a practitioner working within an established tradition has a layer of protection and backup people like myself don’t have. Let’s just say things can get a little wild when you’re building experiments from historical sources, frameworks of educated guesses, and gnosis.

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s also mad fun. This kind of work makes my souls sing and has led me to the most incredible experiences. Performing a ritual I’ve put together for an experiment with next to zero idea of what’s going to happen next is my happy place.

But it’s really not safe.

So, regardless of historical accuracy, I recommend adding some safety mechanisms to your experiments as well. Those so-called “basic” witchcraft skills can actually be the difference between “Eh, things got a bit hairy” and “Yeah, I was lucky to get out in one piece.”

As an aside, if you don’t believe the Unseen can really harm you and/or that you’re somehow in charge/are owed something/are more powerful because you’re a witch, then please keep away from this work. To put it bluntly: you’d be a danger to yourself, anyone who works with you, and eventually those who live with you as well.

Actual image of me off on an adventure.

I also recommend that you create amulets, make sure your go-bag includes apotropaics for if (when) shit goes sideways, and begin a purification practice if you don’t already have one. Some beings/energies/kinds of work aren’t exactly good for humans from a health/wellness perspective. So, find ways to get clear that work for you. (If you dig smoke cleansing, here’s the third in a series of posts about that very thing.) These are important for staying healthy/well. Ideally, you’ll have methods/things you can use directly after finishing an experiment and methods/things you can use when you get home and in the following days. Additionally, you may find that you have instincts that kick in after certain types of work. One example of such an instinct that Martin Coleman kind of also wrote about in Communing With The Spirits is post-necromancy horniness. As long as those instincts are not harmful to yourself or others, my advice is to go with them. Go forth and bang that necromancy out of your system (or whatever).

Finally, don’t forget to figure out some protocols for wrapping up your experiments, containing anything that needs containing, and getting clear of any influence/effects/interlopers before you get home. Please bear in mind that “going sideways” does include the possibility of things like possession and plan accordingly. It’s wise to have a buddy system in place; people you or your family members can call if extra help is needed.

Final Words

I was initially hoping to stick to a single post on experiment building. However, as with all things in this series, it didn’t quite work out like that, and when my post tipped 5000 words, I figured it was best to split it into two posts. In the next post (now I’ve gotten all of those caveats out of the way), I’m going to talk about how I put together my first Götavi grid experiment, the underlying reasons why I made the choices I did as well as all the fuck-ups along the way.
So, until next time. Be well.

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Reconstruction and Gnosis: Researching the Grid

Encountering the Götavi Grid

“Come climb inside my hole, friend!”

I first stumbled across the Gõtavi grid in a paper entitled Nine Paces from Hel: Time and Motion in Old Norse Ritual Performance by the archaeologist, Neil Price. I’d been down a rabbit hole researching eschatology, its possible relationship to mortuary behavior, and how it may be reflected in funerary archaeology. This, by the way, was all thanks to a dream I’d had, which I’ve blogged about before due to its initiatory nature. But just to give you the TL;DR version: I was carried down a Hel-Road and interred in a mound where I had a nice chat with the dead. Among the topics we’d chatted about was the advice to pay attention to how the land is shaped for the shape of the story being told. Or in other words: the setting reflects/is made to reflect the story. Given that they weren’t telling me to go out and murder someone or wife-swap like John Dee, I decided to get on that.

I remember reading through the section of Price’s paper discussing the grid with fascination, with this ember of excitement flaring to life deep in my belly along with a knowing that this was a thread I needed to follow.
And so follow it, I did.

A Quick Note on Threads, Gnosis, and the Process

Now you probably already noticed the gnosis sneaking in. This is one of the main reasons why I find it impossible to separate research from “woo.” As I said in my last two posts, they have never been entirely separate for me.
I am a thread-tugging Cat, and I will tug the shit out of any threads I’m inspired to go tug on.

But here is where things can get precarious.

Because if you’re not careful, the excitement can take over, making it easy to lose sight of where you began. And as with all things magical for me when every fiber of my being is shouting, ”GO DO THE THING NOW, YOU KNOW THIS SHIT IS GOING TO WORK!”, it becomes a drive.

Now, I’m going to be honest here: it can be really tempting to blow off the research phase and get right down to the experimentation. But trust me when I say it’s not worth it. In my experience, the rewards are always so much better when you see the process through.

So what do you do?

You tell that excitement “Not yet!”, you get to work and write everything down as you go. Write down your research and the sources you worked from. Write down the gnosis that crops up as you research. Be honest what came from where. All of it will likely come in later anyway, regardless of where you got it from.

So, let me tell you about this grid!

Describing the Götavi Grid

The grid I’m referring to here was found at a place called Götavi, in what was once the historic Swedish province of Närke. Götavi is thought to be a theophoric toponym, or a place name that refers to or bears the name of a god/s. When I was first researching this site, the only meaning I encountered was the one given by Neil Price. He translates Götavi as “sanctuary of the gods,” but I should mention here that the meaning of Götavi is still disputed by Swedish scholars (Price, Nine Paces, 182; Vikstrand, Ullevi och Götavi, 60-64). Don’t worry, I’ll refrain from posting a summary of the main theories about Götavi and the surrounding arguments. In the interest of full disclosure, I only managed to access them after the initial research phase, and well. I’m not going to pretend I found more than I did in this post.

So, back to the grid! It’s rectangular in shape, measures 15 x 18 meters (or roughly 49 x 59 feet), and was constructed in a salt marsh some time in the late tenth to mid-eleventh centuries (Common Era).Interestingly, the grid was buried under a layer/platform of clay, which would have hidden it from participants when the site was in use (Price, Nine Paces, 183).

Nine paces to Hel…nine hops and you fall down a hole – same diff, right?

This Devil’s Hopscotch was composed of nine parallel lines/enclosures packed with stone, as well as a stone-packed square in one corner. The site is oriented along a SW/NE axis—which I’ll discuss later. And there is a slight, bowl-shaped depression at the center (Price, Nine Paces, 183).

Along each of the short sides of the grid, there is evidence of timber fencing, as well as evidence for additional wooden posts, especially at the NE end of the grid. Though archaeologists (rightfully) hesitate to assign meaning to this site, there is little doubt its purpose was ritual in nature. Chemical analyses conducted on the clay surface show large amounts of fat and blood along the NE end, and especially near where the wooden posts would have stood. Evidence of further deposits (probably food remains), was found in the SE sector of the grid (Price, Nine Paces, 183; Svensson, Götavi – en vikingatida kultplats i Närke, 69).

So, that’s the long and the short of the grid in terms of its physical characteristics.

(It’s a rectangle, get it? Never mind.)

However, here is where we magic practitioners need to part ways with the archaeologists and scholars. Our foci and goals—our destinations, in other words—are too different to stay on the same path. Their task is to learn about the past from surviving evidence. And it would be inappropriate for them to assign meaning or make declarations of “What It All Means” (Price, Performing the Vikings, 71). However, as I discussed in the first post of this series, my goals are quite different. To reach them, I need to pull enough from the sources to develop practical experiments and hopefully have experiences which I can then evaluate and further refine into workable practices.

In many ways, this is like reenactment, only without the cool period garb. What differentiates my work from the reenactor (aside from garb), is that I need a working theory related to meaning and magical mechanics before I start.

Performing Ritual and Cosmology in Land

At the beginning of this post, I mentioned a dream I’d had in which I was dead, got carried down a Hel-road and interred in a mound, and had a nice little chat with the dead. As I said at the beginning, a big part of their message was that there is a connection between how the land is shaped and the shape of a story.

The story they were referring to was eschatology.

When most think of eschatology, they think about the end of the world/s. However, eschatology can also be the final things of a human life as well. This is a huge topic when you think about it, encompassing everything from the afterlife and the journey to get there, to necromancy, psychopomps, the possibility of rebirth, and the shape of a human soul. When I first read about the Götavi grid and its features, I was immediately reminded of this dream and began thinking about the grid in eschatological terms. There are a few source-based reasons for this (which I will go into), but ultimately, it felt like I was on the right path.

Despite my main driver being little more than a gut feeling, I knew I wasn’t alone in working from the perspective of story and setting. Ever since the archaeologist Anders Andrén demonstrated that the imagery on a group of Gotland picture stones could be “read” like sequential episodes from the story of Sigurðr, archaeologists have begun to examine mortuary behavior in terms of performing and representing narrative/story as well. The picture stones commemorate the dead and are generally set between property boundaries. They are neither in-field nor out-field. But what’s really striking about Andrén’s findings, is that the story is told intergenerationally, with the stone from each generation depicting a “chapter” (Price, Performing the VIkings, 64-65).

Photo by Berig.
“Catch the next funeral for the next, thrilling installment of ‘As the Island Turns’!”

Which, let’s face it, is kind of shit that you had to wait until someone died to catch the next episode. And we thought mid-season hiatuses sucked!

The consideration of story and setting isn’t limited to mortuary behavior and funerary archaeology either. Terry Gunnell, for example, writing on the origins of Norse drama, argued that some of the mythological material was written with performance in mind. And Olof Sundqvist has made the case for applying that same framework to the remains of cultic sites such as Gamla Uppsala (Sundqvist, The Temple, the Tree, and the Well: A Topos or Cosmic Symbolism at Cultic Sites in Pre-Christian Northern Europe?).

So, with all of that in mind, what made me think the “story” of the grid relates to eschatology?

Well, you know…aside from my gnosis and gut feeling.

Evidence For An Eschatological Story

Islands and Mounds

As I said above, the grid was constructed in a salt marsh and would have been hidden to observers thanks to that clay covering. This location would have also made the site a de facto island (albeit a pretty underwhelming one).
But this island-like construction may be significant in and of itself. In his paper Holy Islands and the Otherworld: Places Beyond Water, Eldar Heide demonstrates a long association between islands (as places that exist on the other side of water), and Hel and/or the Otherworld in Northwestern European textual sources. The evidence Heide cites isn’t limited to textual sources, though. He also points to a number of physical sites, such as the Iron Age graves on uninhabitable islets in Northern Norway and the relatively common occurrence of grave fields separated from living people settlements by streams.

Most relevant to us however, is Heide’s argument for considering burial mounds a parallel to those islands of the dead, citing archaeological pollen analyses conducted in the ditches surrounding the mounds of Borre. To summarize the findings: water plants grew in some of them there ditches.
What do you call a burial mound surrounded by a ditch filled with water?

What do you call a mound surrounded by water? An island. What do you call a mound on a boggy AF moor?
A PITA to get to and roughly fifteen minutes in the shower to warm your feet again when you get back!

Sounds like an island of the dead to me!

(And as someone who originally came from an island Procopius labeled as one big hangout for the dead, I think I know an island of the dead when I see it.f)

The Number Nine

The most obvious feature of this “Devil’s Hopskotch” (never not calling it that btw), is the pattern. Probably the easiest way to describe it is as a square with nine other shapes around it on all sides.

“Three,” as De La Soul once sang, “is the magic number.” But if you’ve been Heathening for any amount of time, you probably already know that nine is symbolically potent and (dare I say it?) a magic number in Old Norse sources. Rán has nine daughters, Heimdallr has nine mothers (don’t ask me how that works), Mengloð has nine maidens, and Gróa has nine spells (Price, Nine Paces, 184).

We also see the number nine in contexts related to death and/or the dead. For example, that one time in Völuspá 53 and Gylfaginning cha. 51—you know, that when Þórr gets a venom shower from Jörmungandr—he walks (staggers?) nine paces before dropping dead (Dronke, The Poetic Edda, 22; Sturluson, Edda, 54). Another example of the number nine being the magic (dead) number can be found in Gylfaginning cha. 49. This is when Hermôðr does everyone a solid after Baldr gets unalived by riding for nine nights to the river Gjöll on his way to Hel (Sturluson, 50.) And Gylfaginning cha. 34 tells us that Hel was “thrown into Niflheim” and given authority over nine worlds, or as they’re also known, “the worlds you can die in” (Sturluson, 27). Catchy, right?

But don’t worry, little brother, there’s more!

You’ve all heard of Óðinn, right? That whole thing in Hávamál vs 138 where he hung on a “windswept tree” for “nine days and nights,” while “pierced by a spear.” Sound familiar?

(By the way, don’t try that at home!)

Well anyway, we’re also told that he’s sacrificing “himself to himself.” If there’s anything Baldr’s story and the boss battle called “Ragnarök” can teach us, it’s that gods can die. So, it’s not unreasonable to assume a god can die from this whole “hanging from a tree while stabbed” business. Moreover, we’re told the tree is “windswept,” which adds another layer of symbolism to the scene. As Maria Kvilhaug points out, there are clear associations between wind and death, and windlessness and immortality in Old Norse Poetry. Maria’s interpretation of “windswept”? Deadly AF (Kvilhaug, The Seed of Yggdrasill, 662).

So we have nine nights on the tree, nine nights on a Hel-ride, and nine paces before a god dies—all examples of the number nine and its connection to the journey to Hel.

SW Orientation

Another significant feature of the grid is its SW/NE orientation. This orientation seems to be particularly associated with the dead or sites associated with the dead. In Doors to the Dead: The Power of Doorways and Thresholds in Viking Age Scandinavia, Marianne Hem Eriksen, which is an absolute banger of a paper (if you’re into that kind of thing), provides several examples of this SW/NE orientation in conjunction with sites associated with the dead (such as burial mounds). Hem Eriksen is all about the doors in that paper, so she focuses more on doors than other forms of access (like causeways).

One specific example she gives is of the catchily named “mound 30,” in Helgö, Sweden, which has a portal/threshold structure constructed to its SW. This is not the only example she gives, though. Hem Eriksen also points out that archaeologists have identified at least 80 examples of SW portals associated with mounds or other kinds of graves. And interestingly—like the Götavi grid—the majority of them contain no human burials.

A different kind of site she discusses with this orientation, is the grave field structure known as the Åby portal. Evidence suggests this was a large, pentagonal, free-standing monument constructed in the SW corner of a grave field, with a doorway in the SW of the structure. As you can see, they were really sticking to that SW theme. Unlike the grid though, the Åby portal does contain a cremation burial, which is clear evidence of its association with the dead. You know…if the grave field location wasn’t enough for you.

Going back to that Gylfaginning episode where Hermóðr missions it through a bunch of deep, dark valleys, we also discover that after you get to the river, Hel is in a “northward” direction from there (Sturluson, 50). So, okay, Peter Pan’s directions aren’t the worst out there. And it’s not NE exactly, but the idea is that Hermóðr (AKA the living god-person) is riding from the south to interact with the dead.

Posts?

You know, there’s a series of roundabouts in my hometown where the local council have gone absolutely hog wild erecting posts in that area. You’ve probably already heard the term “wonder of the world.” Well, take whatever comes to mind when you hear that term and imagine the antithesis, and it may get you close to the level of underwhelm I’m talking about here.

These are not the posts I’m talking about; they’re much too picturesque. Also, there’s no sea near the ones I’m talking about.

As I mentioned earlier, posts feature in the grid as well. Archaeologists have found evidence of a number of posts in the grid, especially in the NE. The Götavi grid however, isn’t the only post-containing site with features that also potentially connect it with the dead.

Enter: Lilla Ullevi, or the “little sanctuary of Ullr.”

Again, we have an usual stone feature that looks like a trapezoid shape with “legs” on the aerial photos. Archaeologists have interpreted it as a platform. But I’m not here to talk about that right now; I’m here for the posts.
Because the evidence suggests that there were actually more posts at Lilla Ullevi than at the aforementioned series of roundabouts in my hometown. If you happen to be a fan of erect wooden poles jutting out of the fecund earth, then you probably would have fucking loved Lilla Ullevi.

This place seems to have been a hive of activity back in the day. There’s a theory that the platform was a seiðhjallr, which sounds like a stretch. But seeing as archaeologists found the basket-like part of an iron “staff of sorcery” just outside the southern edge of the platform, that isn’t too wild (Price, Nine Paces, 182).

(I use double quotations here, because this is the usual interpretation of these objects vs certainty.)

Now, Lilla Ullevi didn’t just have posts, there were groups of posts. (Hooray!) The platform itself is oriented east-west (depending on how you look at it), but evidence suggests activities took place north-south. Around 15m east of the “platform,” there’s evidence of a north-south line of posts—my favorite! The area to the south of the platform seems to have been the place to be (unless you were the theoretical völva in this situation). There’s an area of baked soil south of the platform that had fires burned on it over and over again. And there’s evidence for groupings of 3 posts with 60 iron rings buried in the ground in lines between the groupings of posts. Archaeologists also found miniature shield amulets along with lances, arrows, and fire steels in this area too. And if that wasn’t enough, roughly 36 knives were found dug down into the dirt around the stone platform as well (Price, Nine Paces, 182).

Smells like apotropaic use of iron against the dead to me! (Here’s a paper about that very thing if you’re curious.) Either way, the south seems to have been the place for the ordinary living to hang out. That was my point there.
And sure, while we don’t know that the presence of posts are an indication of necromantic activities, I figured it was worth mentioning anyway.

Fat and Blood

Finally, there are the fat and blood stains in the NE of the grid to consider. Given the orientation, I’d expect these to be related to the dead in some way. But while there is evidence for feasting with cooked meat at graves/sites suggestive of graves, I think there’s a more useful parallel in the account of necromancy in The Odyssey.

Think: less BBQ with the dead and more “satiating the dead with blood.”

In book 11, lines 30-50, Odysseus decides to get his necromance on. He begins by digging a pit, which he fills with offerings to the dead. Then, he sacrifices a number of sheep, slitting their throats and allowing their blood to flow into the pit, while calling on the dead. After that, a whole load of rando dead people show up, which is pretty par for the course in these stories. Odysseus shits himself (figuratively, not literally like Cellini’s friend) and uses his sword to keep the dead back (apotropaic use) until he gets to talk to Tiresius (Homer, The Odyssey, 280).

Færeyinga Saga: A Potential Match?

So far, I’ve talked a whole lot about the possible meanings of the various features of the grid. However, the best evidence by far (at least in my opinion), that the “story” of the grid pertains to eschatology, comes from Færeyinga saga cha. 41. In this scene, a bunch of people are trying to find out how someone died, and so this guy called Þrándr sets up the following ritual:

“Þrándr had great fires made up in the hall, and had four hurdles (?) set up to form a square. Then he marked out nine enclosures from the hurdles, in all directions, and he sat on a stool between the fire and the hurdles.”
(Davidson, The Road to Hel, 161)

From there, the dead show up, they figure out how their boy Sigmundr Bretison got unalived, and then they get back on with their bullshit.
But just look at that description again.

Four hurdles set up to form a square. Nine enclosures from the hurdles in all directions.

What does that sound like? Could it be this?

What Might This Tell Us?

Now, assuming that the grid pattern found at Götavi and Þrándr’s grid are one and the same, we can make the following five conclusions:

  • That the grid or some of the uses for the grid are necromantic in nature.
  • Given the symbolism of the features discussed and the contexts in which they appear, the grid possibly functions by mapping out or opening up the passage between the worlds of living and dead. To return to Odysseus: when you believe the dead reside underground, digging a pit might be thought of as meeting them halfway.
  • Physical remains are not necessary to interact with the dead.
  • Grids can be created on a temporary basis; they are not bound to any one place.
  • The grid was a potentially known/recognized method for interacting with the dead beyond Närke.

This is exactly what I meant earlier when I said the rewards are better when you see the process through. Because now, we don’t just have a solid possible “story” for the setting that is the Götavi grid, we also have a bunch of other details and a framework for ritual mechanics as well.

In other words: all things we can use to cook up an experiment.

Final Words

So, first of all, congratulations for making it this far. This was a long-ass blog post, but unfortunately, splitting it up didn’t really seem feasible. In the next (hopefully much shorter) post, I’m going to talk about the process of putting my first grid experiment together, the further considerations I took into account, and how I went about constructing the grid. Unsurprisingly, it was super underwhelming compared with building a little island in a salt marsh, but unless I get some marshland and a construction crew, it’ll have to do. On the bright side though, there’s a lot you can do with supplies from your local hardware store, and I’m going to show you how.

Anyway, take care, and I’ll ramble at you again next time.

Be well.

Find The Other Posts In This Series

Part 1
Part 2

Sources Used

Davidson, Hilda Ellis. The Road to Hel
Dronke, Ursula. The Poetic Edda. Vol II
Dronke, Ursula, The Poetic Edda. Vol I
Heide, Eldar. Holy Islands and the Otherworld: Places Beyond Water
Hem Eriksen, Marianne. Doors to the Dead: The Power of Doorways and Thresholds in Viking Age Scandinavia
Homer (Emily Wilson trans.). The Odyssey
Kvilhaug, Maria. Seeds of Yggdrasill
Price, Neil. Nine Paces from Hel: Time and Motion in Old Norse Ritual Performance.
Price, Neil. Performing the Vikings: From Edda to Oseberg
Sundqvist, Olof. The Temple, the Tree, and the Well: A Topos or Cosmic Symbolism at Cultic Sites in Pre-Christian Northern Europe?
Sturluson, Storri (Anthony Faulkes trans.). Edda.
Svensson, Kenneth. Götavi – en vikingatida kultplats i Närke,
Vikstrand, Per. Ullevi och Götavi

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Reconstructionism and Gnosis: Some “Rules”

Reconstructionism and Gnosis: The Story (Of These Blogs) So Far

In my last post, I talked about the interplay between reconstructionism and gnosis as I experience it. If it wasn’t already abundantly clear: it is my very sincere belief that both are necessary if we are to create workable and effective magical practices.

When I first got the idea for the post that spawned this series, I had three main points I wanted to communicate/dig into:

  • The necessity of combining reconstructionism and gnosis when attempting to create modern versions of historically attested forms of magic.
  • How that process can look from the inside/up-close.
  • The historical argument for gnosis and why gnosis cannot be ignored in matters of ritual and magic.

My original plan was for this to be a three-part series, with this second post focusing on specific examples from my own practice. Essentially it would have been a storytime blog. But the more I thought about it, the less satisfied I was with the idea of just telling stories. Storytelling is one of the oldest teaching methods known to man, but stories have to be chosen and presented carefully if they are to be effective teachers. A collection of stories would only provide the same bird’s eye view of the subject as the gold mine analogy from the first post.

I make a plan for a simple, three-part series of blog posts and the whole f**king universe laughs

A New Plan Emerges

Instead, I would prefer to provide a more in-depth perspective to accommodate as many learning styles as possible. Because if there is one thing I’ve found from talking to people about this, it’s that many find it hard to imagine this process in practice. Part of this, at least in my opinion, is likely down to how the reconstructionist movement played out in Heathen spaces in the mid-to-late 2000s. From my perspective, the research phases of the method eclipsed the experimentation and evaluation phases. So, we don’t really have that space in our communities for the experimentation and evaluation discussions (yet). Moreover, when you wade into those warm, tempting waters of experimentation and evaluation, you’re inevitably getting into experience and gnosis. To return to a point I made last week: another mistake we Heathens made as a movement/group of movements back then was to largely neglect the subject of discernment. Instead, there was a tendency to either write gnosis off as “made-up-shit” or cling to it uncritically depending on where you sat on the fake “recon” vs “woo” spectrum.

So, rather than a round of storytelling, I’m going to take one story and use it as a framework to demonstrate my process of researching/creating experiments/conducting experiments/recording/evaluating/tweaking. Along the way, I will also highlight where gnosis makes an appearance, what I consider the “tipping point,” and touch upon discernment and assessing gnosis. I will also discuss the responsibility I feel to keep my family safe from any effects of my clarting around with old magical tech as well as what I consider to be necessary safety and wellness measures while engaging in this work.

Fair warning, but I have no idea how long this section of the series will be. This thing that started out as a single post seems to be spawning “babies” faster than rabbits in spring.

I guess we’ll get to the third section when we get there.

Some “Rules” For Blending Reconstruction And Gnosis

Before beginning the story though, I would like to discuss some of the unofficial “rules” I observe when engaging in this work. Though I refer to them as “rules,” I have found them to be far more helpful than restrictive. Please do not feel obligated to adopt them for yourself, but if you do, I hope you find them as helpful as I have.

Honesty

The first rule is honesty, and this applies in several ways.

In my experience, one of the biggest sources of contention between those who lean more to reconstruction vs those who lean more to gnosis boils down to labeling sources. Or in other words: not being entirely honest about where you got your information from. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen people trying to pass off gnosis as something textually attested. This is something that irritates me too even as a weird-experimenter and haver-of-gnosis.

PSA: This is what comes up if you use the search term “rules” on Pixabay. You’re welcome.

If anything, I think it’s even more important for those of us who are experimenting with magic to be honest about our work and sources than your average Heathen. And there are two main reasons for this:

The first is that it’s both dishonest and rude to the humans you’re interacting with. Moreover, when you’re found out, it ruins the credibility of your work for those who are interested.

The second and most important reason is that you essentially deny the experiences, Powers, and relationships from which that gnosis flowed when you deny their role. It’s incredibly disrespectful to pass that other-gotten-gnosis off as coming from a book. Sure, the humans you’re interacting with might take the gnosis you’re sharing more seriously. But what of your relationships with those who helped you? If you find yourself prioritizing the approval of human strangers on the internet over your working relationships with allies, then you may want to ask yourself why.

Another area in which honesty is important pertains to interactions with other-than-human people. It’s never a good idea to lie to the kind of beings you can come across in magic. So, be careful with your words. Don’t promise anything you won’t do or give. Don’t be afraid to use direct but polite speech instead of flowery words if you suspect those flowery words might get you in trouble. And remember that silence is an option and always better than a lie. Never underestimate the abilities of the beings you may meet, as the consequences can be dire.

Finally, be as honest as you can with yourself about what you experience. Make a point of recording your experiences as soon as you are able. Because once an experiment ends, you begin the journey into the same kind of territory as crime scene witnesses. So, try to get everything down as quickly as possible and be brutally honest with yourself. Don’t be afraid to add notes like “I also got the impression of _____ but I’m not sure that actually came from interacting with (being) or was an intrusive thought/my brain elaborating as I could feel the trance weakening and it sounds similar to something I saw/heard the other day.” The mind loves to make connections and elaborate on experiences, and often we don’t even notice it. With practice though, it can get easier to spot.

So, that’s honesty.

No One Is Under Any Obligation To Accept Your Gnosis

My second “rule” is that no one is under any obligation to accept my gnosis (but they’re welcome to it if it resonates).

In my experience, this is another bone of contention when it comes to gnosis. Gnosis is a funny old thing, and especially in a group of religious movements mostly made up of ex-Christians burdened with largely unexamined Christian baggage.

I’ve written about how Christian baggage is a proverbial elephant in the room for a lot of Pagans and Heathens. Too many of us pretend that we shook off all vestiges of Christianity or the influence of growing up in a Christian-dominant society as soon as we put on a hammer and picked up a drinking horn. But unfortunately, life (and religious conversion) isn’t nearly that simple. And is it really surprising? Changing a worldview isn’t some quick, dump-water-on-head-and-call-Odin-a-bitch thing—no matter how it’s portrayed in Christian narratives. In my opinion, one of the areas in which Christian baggage has influenced modern Heathens can be found in some of the reactions to gnosis.

Now, this isn’t just something that happens to the more “recon-minded.” I think we find the same underlying concepts playing out (albeit differently) among some of the more “woo” aligned folks as well.

I AM A VERY REALISTIC PICTURE

Ask yourself, “What does it mean to Christians when a Christian claims to have spoken to their god and received divine wisdom from him?”

It’s prophecy, right? Divine revelation that others must heed because it’s the Word of God.

This is the kind of thing wars have been fought over. Because that kind of a claim can be deeply problematic from a Christian perspective, especially if that message challenges dogma. There’s also the matter of who receives that communication and how they are viewed in the eyes of religion and society. What is their sex? Their social status? Their perceived closeness to god? The pope making divinely revealed pronouncements ex cathedra is fine, but it’s another matter if the person doing it is considered deficient or less holy in some way, or even simply too ordinary. That is when things have a tendency to get a little…spicy, shall we say?

And this is the framing that many are coming with to Heathenry and Paganism. Is it any wonder we see the reactions we do? The people with the gnosis who try to act like it’s imperative everyone goes along with it? The people who rule out the possibility of anyone interacting with a deity who doesn’t fit a certain, restrictive set of criteria? The defensiveness on all sides?

So, what do we do about it?

As someone who has a lot of gnosis, I think it’s imperative that we change the way we think about gnosis. We need to cultivate space for gnosis to simply exist without being a prophecy or divine revelation that everyone must follow. Not all communication with deities is revelation or prophecy that must be shared, or something that can only happen to certain, special people. And we do that by only considering our gnosis relevant to ourselves, listening respectfully to the gnosis of others, and retaining the right to accept or reject what you hear (preferably politely).

You Are Responsible For Keeping Others Safe!

Shockingly, conducting magical experiments based on historical sources isn’t always the safest way to pass the time. Things can happen that you had no way of foreseeing. You can find yourself experiencing unforeseen physical effects. And there’s always the chance of attracting the attention of unhelpful, opportunistic, or even hostile beings with your antics.

Unfortunately, if you’re not careful, the unforeseen consequences of your experiments can all-too-easily spread to the people around you.

Think about your roles in life and who you live with. I’m a mom; I have a little person entrusted to my care, and they tend to be attractive to a lot of beings. I’m also married, and my little family also counts a dog and a cat among us. These are all lives that I could inadvertently bring stress and harm to if I’m not careful. In addition to this, I live in a row house and my neighbors on both sides have family members who have been made vulnerable by sickness—yet more lives to take into account. And on top of that, the town where we live is bizarrely busy with the Otherworldly and generally strange activity.

(I say “bizarrely” as no one can figure out why the town where I live is so active. As an aside, it was like that before I moved in).

These are all factors that need to be taken into account when planning magical experiments. Because they don’t deserve to deal with any unwanted interlopers or other consequences from my activities, and it’s entirely down to me if they do.

“Cleanliness” is next to “Clean room” in The American Heritage College Dictionary.

So, I factor them into my planning. I build extra layers of containment and protection into my experiments. And when I really have no idea what could happen, I find the time to go and do my experiments somewhere away from other humans. I always keep a good supply of apotropaics handy. And I am careful with shutdown and clean-up.

Also important is what I do outside my experiments in my day-to-day life. I have and maintain close relationships with the deities I worship and my allies.  Those relationships are often a magical practitioner’s first form of defense. I also regularly meditate, practice basic skills, and check in with my souls. And as someone whose practice is also informed by the Old English magico-medical manuscripts, I am very careful with purification practices too. All of these are intended to ensure that I am as hæl as I can be going into my experiments, that I’m not out of practice, and that I remain me.

Final Word

The “rules” I have just given are not the only ones I observe, but they are the main ones. I will introduce others as they become relevant throughout the rest of the series. It should go without saying, but whether you choose to adopt them for yourself is entirely up to you. Either way, I hope the accompanying discussion has given you plenty of food for thought.

In the next post, I’m going to take you through the first stage of the reconstructionist process: research. This is where I’ll introduce you to a fascinating Swedish site archaeologists refer to as the Götavi grid. I’ll talk about where I first found out about it; the various features of the grid, their symbolism, and other examples of those features; potential references from textual sources; and possible meanings and interpretations. If the post doesn’t run too long, I’ll also talk about my first attempt to recreate the grid and what happened.

So, until next time!

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Why Not Both? Bridging Reconstructionism and Gnosis

Reconstructionism vs Gnosis: A (Lame) War Between Two Ideological Camps

Once upon a time (well, back in the mid-2000s) a complete and utter weirdo got involved in a reconstructionist community online. Things were kind of wild back then. I was teaching English in South Korea and had just met the love of my life. Like me, he was a Heathen, and through him, I was increasingly introduced to the US Heathen community.

Nowadays, I know that’s a silly thing to say. The “US Heathen community” sounds like a monolith when there are very clear regional differences. But as an outsider looking in, you tend to notice the broad strokes before the nuances.

One of those broad strokes was the fault line stretching between two seemingly separate ideological camps: the reconstructionists and the gnosis-focused (or “woo”) people.

Straddling Camps

As a neurodivergent person, reconstructionist spaces were much easier for me to inhabit with their clearly defined “rules of engagement.” I couldn’t talk about the stuff that made my soul sing—namely my experiments and experiences in magic. But that was a small price to pay for knowing where I stood. Conversely, the gnosis-centered groups were confusing and the rules far less clear. Sometimes people wanted to hear about my research and read my sources, but other times…well, I may as well have been offering them the option of sitting in a diarrhea-filled spacesuit.

This was a time during which one camp extolled the virtue of keeping gnosis to oneself (like genitals) and the other seemed to consider bookishness a barrier to gnosis.

(Fun fact: I was once told I was too bookish to have gnosis.)

If you were lucky enough to miss the whole thing, it was like Romeo vs Juliet, only with less death and mostly online.

0/10 would not recommend.

And the absolutely wild part of it all? It was completely unnecessary.

Reconstructionism and Gnosis, Sitting In A Tree…

Before continuing, I want to get something straight: there is nothing wrong with either reconstructionism or gnosis.

(Well, reconstructionism the methodology is fine. I’m not so keen on the weird sect-like version of reconstructionism found in online groups.)

They’re also not really at opposing ends of a spectrum either. I would even argue that reconstructionism is one of the most useful methodologies for reviving/creating workable magical practices rooted in accounts of historical Heathen magic.

However, if I have learned anything from my twenty-or-so years of experimenting in this way, it’s that scholarship (regardless of methodology) can only take you so far. At some point, you want gnosis to take over and guide you the rest of the way.

But what do I mean by this?

Seams of Gold and Old-Ass Mineshafts

I would like you to imagine for a moment a seam of gold under the earth. It’s a special seam of gold—let’s say it represents all the ritual and magical knowledge we’re currently missing. Now, you could just try digging for that seam without any instructions. But who in their right mind would do that? Mining comes with hazards, and if you’re not careful, you might miss the seam entirely and happen upon something you don’t want. Moreover, the soil in different places is…well, different. The composition is different, the kinds of rocks are different—these are all factors that affect how you dig.

This is where the sources and reconstructionism come in. Imagine that the sources contain the equivalent of geological data, analysis of the material you’re looking for, and possibly even instructions for how best to dig down.

Sometimes they may even purport to reveal the location of an older mine. A mine that the historical Heathens originally dug (but almost always never works out).

So, what to do?

Enter Gnosis

This is where reconstructionism ideally hands the baton over to gnosis.

Like many, I used to fall into the trap of thinking that historical record was the same as authenticity and/or efficacy. But years of research, experimentation, evaluation, and experience have taught me that gnosis/inspiration/guidance from the Holy Powers can be just as important. More often than not, it’s the latter that makes the difference between practices that work and practices that fall flat.

And regardless of era, the proof is always in the pudding with magic.

You see (and I’m probably going to blog about this in the future), magic has never solely been the product of human hands. As a technology, magic is inherently Other —- something that is passed from Themselves to us. There’s a good example of this exchange in the witch-familiar relationship as recorded in English and Scottish sources from the Early Modern Period. I wrote about it in more depth here, if you’re interested. But the quick version is that the source of the witch’s power and learning was the familiar (who was Otherworldly vs demonic in earlier accounts). It was the familiar who was in charge.

Pro-Tip: This is not your familiar (and neither is your dog/cat/hamster/opossum/fish).

I would argue that this makes interacting with that Other (as well as associated deities and ancestors) an important part of the process for creating workable practices rooted in accounts of Heathen period magic. It’s their tools we work with. And if anyone knows how to work with those tools (or how best to work with them over a thousand years after other humans used them), it’s Themselves.

You just have to get their attention first, and this is where reconstruction and other methodologies can help. Because in my experience, if you reconstruct enough for somebeing to recognize what you’re trying to do, then you might find somebeing who’s inclined to help you out.

(I’m sure that’s like a form of ergi for some folks out there, but whatever.)

Thwarted Words, Insufficient Mechanisms

Unfortunately, all of the above requires something called discernment. And if we’re being honest, the ridiculous war between Reconstructio and Gnosiet stymied a lot of necessary discussion about how to assess and process gnosis in a healthy way. I believe this has been to our detriment.

You see, there will always be people in any religious group who have a drive to go deeper and to experience more. There will always be those of us who need to be in those liminal spaces and working with weird practices.

One of the most curious things about modern US Heathenry is how protestant it can be at times. A number of Heathens are simply uncomfortable with other people having gnosis and even go so far as to refer to it as MUS (or “made up shit”). I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen the assertion that “magic isn’t a part of Heathenry” (despite accounts of magic in every genre of ON literature and probable physical evidence). And there’s a segment of Heathens who would probably be far happier if all of us subscribed to the “gods of limited access” model.

As humans, we all have varying levels of religious/mystical/spiritual needs. True communities (vs the protestant church model many seem to emulate) focus on inclusion instead of shunning. In an actual community, there are always people you don’t like and who believe differently than you. That’s normal; that’s just organic communities for you.

Moreover, when a religious community doesn’t address discernment in a useful way;when a community doesn’t provide tools and space for “woo-inclined” members to mutually support each other; or worse, when a community ostracizes the “weirdos,” then the ground is ripe for bad actors to come in. And when it comes to the magical and mystical, humans are especially vulnerable to exploitation.

This is something I’ve seen play out over and over again.

So, we need to have those conversations, I think. In the meantime though, Jason Miller created this excellent checklist for assessing gnosis. I encourage you to check it out.

Final Word

Thankfully, many Heathens (at least in the communities I’m in) have moved on from such hard divisions between scholarship and gnosis. Discussing gnosis has become less of a fraught proposition, and previously hostile communities have become less so.

If you are curious about the line where reconstruction (or any scholarship) can end and gnosis begin on a practical level, hopefully this post has given you some ideas. This is not the only way in which scholarship and gnosis can enrich, enable, and support each other either. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve given up on a line of research only to be told what to look for next in a dream. Or been told in a dream to look into something seemingly unrelated to my research interests only to find that lead panning out. On occasion, I’ve even had people randomly message me sources they felt they needed to send to me that filled in some research gaps.

In the next post, I’m planning to dig deeper into the gnosis element of my magical experimentation with some examples of things I’ve experienced (story time!). After that, I’m planning a post on the Otherworldly origins of magic and partnership between witches and the Other.

Finally, I’ll be holding a free online class on the 28th of January 2023 at 2pm EST on spinning. Nothing magical (you’d need to develop muscle memory first for that). Just a bunch of people learning to make yarn out of fluff with spindles. If that interests you, save the date. I’ll post an event sign-up later this week and guidance on beginner-friendly fluff and spindles. If you do not have any spinning tools or fluff, you will need to order them. Spots will likely be limited, so please only order after you’ve signed up.

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Joy and the Greed-Wolf in a Time of Towers

The Wolf in a Tower Time Oracle

Like many mornings during this period of time many call Tower Time, I woke up to a message from a friend about “weird shit.” My friend was asking me if I’d  seen John Beckett’s most recent blog post. You may have already seen it as it’s doing the rounds. But in case you haven’t, it’s about an oracular ritual during the Mystic South conference and the messages received by some of the participants.

I’m going to be honest here: None of these messages are particularly surprising to me. If anything, much of it tallies with what I’ve been getting from other sources.

But there’s one message in particular that I want to focus on today. It’s the message that there must be joy or “Fenris will eat the world.”

Wolves and Greed

On the surface, Bergrune’s message (an oracle I know personally) may sound simplistic and strange. But I’ve found myself turning it over and over in my mind. This past weekend I taught the second in a two-part series of classes about Animistic Heathenry and magic in which greed was a major talking point. This message dovetails nicely with my current meditations on how best to deal with greed.

In her book  The Seed of Yggdrasill, Maria Kvilhaug points out that wolves are associated with greed in the ON sources. This is something Snorri is quite clear on in Skáldskaparmál, the text in which he teaches the art of writing and understanding the language of poetry.

“But these things have now to be told to young poets who desire to learn the language of poetry and to furnish themselves with a wide vocabulary using traditional terms; or else they desire to be able to understand what is expressed obscurely.”

Sturluson, Snorri. Skáldskaparmál (Faulkes trans.). p. 64.

Those of you who are already familiar with Norse mythology will probably already know the names of Óðins wolves: Geri and Freki. Both names are words that mean “greed,” and both names can be used as common nouns for “wolf” in skaldic poetry (Sturluson. 135, 164). Along similar lines, it was also considered normal to refer to wolves in relation to blood and corpses as their food and drink (Sturluson 135).

The Meanings in the Myth

From Maria Kvilhaug’s perspective (which I share), the ON myths are not simply stories of gods and other beings. They contain true wisdom if you know how to look for it. Kvilhaug is someone who’s learned how to look for it. And if we listen to her, we can learn to look for it too.

Bergrune’s message mentioned Fenrir, which inescapably leads us to the Ragnarök myth – an appropriate choice in our collapsing world.

So, what wisdom can we find in the myth of Ragnarök? What lesson can we take from this?

As a wolf, Fenrir may be thought to represent greed, and greed brings destruction. His opponent at Ragnarök is Óðinn, the giver of our breath-soul. We should ask ourselves here about the possible meanings of the god who gave breath-souls to humans falling to greed.

To me, the battle between this soul-giving deity – one of our creators even – and greed indicates that this isn’t only a battle for gods. It is a battle that we humans face too.

The Nature of Greed

There are surprisingly few psychological studies about the causes of greed. But what I managed to dig up seems to suggest that greed often has its roots in feelings of lack, unmet physical/emotional needs, and anxiety about future struggles.
But what about countering greed? Here is where we can perhaps take wisdom from another myth of Fenrir.

Binding the Wolf

In Gylfaginning, the gods read prophecies predicting destruction by Loki’s children and decide to act. Snorri tells us they cast Hel into Niflheim and  Jörmungandr  into the ocean. With Fenrir though, they brought him home and raised him in their halls. But as he grew bigger, they became increasingly afraid and decided to try binding Fenrir with chains.
Here is where my personal conclusions diverge from Kvilhaug’s. This is only to be expected; a myth can be read from multiple perspectives and hold more than one truth.
The first chain is Læðing, which Kvilhaug translates as “Harm Council” (Kvilhaug 442). She also provides a second possible translation, but I’ll refrain from providing that here as it diverges from the points I want to make.
This idea of a chain called “Harm Council” reminds me of the kind of measures many attempt to overcome negative qualities. You’re probably already familiar with the kind of measures I mean. Everything from cruel self-talk, strict self-discipline (then more self-talk when it fails), and in extreme cases mortifying the flesh. In a sense, when we put it this way, it’s not hard to see those  measures as a “council of harms.”
This will probably come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever dealt with addiction. But it doesn’t take long for Fenrir to break that chain.
The second chain is Drómi, which means “Fetters.” An important point Kvilhaug makes is that “fetters” is a common metaphor for the gods themselves in Skaldic poetry.  When viewed through this lens, I’m reminded of people who cling to religion and the imagined wrath of a deity as a way to keep themselves in line. To force themselves into what they see as better, more virtuous behaviors.
This lasts longer. But in the end, Fenrir breaks that too.

Binding the Wolf and the River of Hope

The final chain was, Gleipnir, or “Open One,” a silk-like binding that they used to bind the wolf to a giant stone slab on an island. At first glance, this is reminiscent of an oubliette. This island is not only a place to bind a potential future danger, but to forget about it as well. But we’re not yet done here, because Fenrir reacted violently and tried to bite them. From his perspective, this was likely a grave betrayal; after all, they were his foster family, and that meant a lot back then.

In response to his lashing out, the gods stabbed him through the roof of his mouth with a sword. A clear foreshadowing of the final doom he would meet at Viðarr’s hand. Then, they left him howling in pain and drooling. We’re told his saliva forms a river called “Hope” (Sturluson. 29).

As always, hope is often the only thing to continue flowing when we’re otherwise trapped and/or in pain.

Of course, those bindings didn’t work either in the long run. If anything, I’d argue those actions only made everything worse. As with all prophecies, you run the risk of fulfilling them yourself if you’re not careful – something that becomes especially likely the more afraid you are.

There’s a lot to take from this myth, a lot to notice about our society. Like the gods, we prefer the wolf bound in a place where we can forget about it or pretend it doesn’t exist. Kvilhaug translates the name of the waters surrounding the island (Ámsvartnir) as “Deep Darkener,” which for me at least, suggests a kind of oblivion (Kvilhaug 441). How many people even engage with the notion that greed is a serious and dangerous problem? That the act of non-stop consumption at the root of so many of our modern problems  is something we need to reckon with before we bring about our own Ragnarök?

No. Best to ignore it.

Remember, kids: Don’t look up!

But What of Joy?

The message that Bergrune relayed, that message to embrace joy as a way of countering the “greed-wolf” seems simple on the surface. But here we need to ask ourselves how possible it is to feel real joy when you have unmet needs/a sense of lack/anxieties about the future that are so great they’ve collectively created a hole within your self and souls? A hole that seems bottomless and spurs an insatiable hunger to fill.
Here is where I believe the advice given via other oracular messages comes in.
These messages encourage us to interrogate those shadowy areas of self and souls. The advice to seek out those holes within us that gape like the maw of a wolf and try to understand them is excellent. It is also I believe, our way forward.
Because if we are to experience joy,  real joy, then we need to first sit with our own greed-wolves and get to know them. As the myth of binding Fenrir hopefully demonstrates, we can’t bind them or pretend they don’t exist. Would not the wiser path be to figure out what drives them – the hurts in the holes and what they really want?
The wolf within isn’t inherently bad, just very good at what they do. They’re hunters at heart, and in turn directed by the heart and its ever-changing sea of emotions and hurts in their efforts. Again, they’re not inherently bad. I would argue these “wolves” are a part of self – a soul even. If you follow Winifred Hodge-Rose’s Soul Lore work, this would be the hugr-soul.
But who could these “wolves” be when cared for and those anxieties removed?

Domesticating the Wolf

As a species, we’ve domesticated wolves before. We domesticated wolves before we started to keep cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens even. We domesticated wolves before we began growing grain.

Over the millennia, they’ve helped us to get food and stay safe. They’ve been our companions, workers, family members, protectors, and friends. Those wolves contributed immeasurably to the success of our species and eventually became dogs.

If you live with dogs and they’re anything like my little old man, you’ll know they show their love, pleasure, and joy in the most uninhibited and lovely ways. As a kid, my parents impressed upon me the importance of always raising dogs with love, kindness, and care; outside of genetic issues, the problems usually come when you raise them without those things.  But when raised with love, care, and their needs (physical, yes, but more than that, the need for pack and to belong) provided for, they become life-long companions and true friends.
And this, I think, is where we find the key to our question.

A Life’s Work

In a sense, I believe we’re each born with a canine. But whether we end our lives with a canine that becomes a greed-wolf, a domesticated wolf, or even a dog is largely up to us. I see the process of getting to know that canine and taming them as part of the work of a well-lived life. It’s a challenge on the path to wisdom, a peril to the wise, and part of how we find victory in our own personal Ragnarök. The message was to “fight” the wolf with joy. But without first getting to know the “wolves” in our hearts, without that attention, love, and care – without healing the hurts of those holes – that joy will be hard to come by.
Food for thought, no?
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Smoke Cleansing: From Leechbook to Modern Heathen Practice

Smoke Cleansing: The Proceduring

In the last post, I talked about some of the helpful herbs you can use for smoke cleansing. This is the third and final part of a series that began in 2014. Or rather, I wrote the first post in 2014, then was inspired to return to it, revise it, and add to it.

In this post, we’re going to take a look at an Old English procedure for preparing herbs for smoke cleansing.

Smoke Cleansing in Bald’s Leechbook III

The Charm

Dating back to the mid-tenth century, Bald’s Leechbook is a collection of remedies for everything from headaches to “elf-diseases.” There are two different procedures for preparing herbs for smoke fumigation that I’ve found, but I’m going to stick to the simplest. If you are curious about the second procedure, you can read it here.

In the charm we’re going to focus on, charm Lxii, we are given the following instructions:

“Against elf-disease: take marsh mallow, fennel, lupin, the lower part of bittersweet nightshade and the lichen from a holy crucifix and frankincense. Take a handful [of all of the plants]. Bind all the plants in a cloth. Dip [them] into a fountain with holy water three times. Let three masses be sung over them: one Omnibus Sanctis, another Contra Tribulationem, a third Pro Infirmis. Then put hot coals in a chafing dish and lay those plants in [it]. Smoke that person with the plants before 9 a.m. and at night, and sing litanies and credos and Pater Noster, and write the sign of the cross on each of his limbs, and take a little handful of the same plants of that kind, likewise consecrated, and boil in milk. Drip three [drops] of the holy water into [it] and sup [it] before his food. Soon he will be well.”

Source

Looks pretty Christian, right?

Well, not necessarily.

Healing, Smoke Cleansing, and “Middle Practices”

This was actually very close to the kind of healing the church fathers spoke out against. Contemporary writings show us that there was a clear preference for healing through prayer, or miracles. But herbal healing wasn’t viewed as necessarily being bad in and of itself for the most part. Simply making yourself some chamomile tea to settle a stomach and maybe speaking a blessing over it was fine. And really, that’s not all that different from what millions of Christians do today when they pray before eating. But when you’re using prayers and Christian liturgy as spells and throwing in a few ritual acts, that cure then transitions into the gray space between “magic” and “miracle” referred to by Karen Jolly as “middle practices” (Jolly 89).

So what do we have in our Leechbook charm?

We have the healer collecting the herbs and dipping them into holy water three times. In the Lacnunga, we see the number three usually associated with holiness. Alternatively, singing a prayer three times could also be a way of timing whatever the healer was doing.

Then, the herbs are hid under the altar while three masses are sung over them. Is this blessing or Christian prayers as galdor? See what I mean about that gray area?

Finally, the person is fumigated with the herbs – both in the morning and at night – while the healer sings further prayer/spells. (Plus draws crosses on the patient and feeds them some of the consecrated herb mixture boiled in milk with holy water.)

Adaptation

So, how do we take that procedure and Heathenize it for our own purposes? If Aelfric can replace spoken charms (galdre) with blessings, we can replace prayers and blessings with galdre.

(Fair’s fair, my dude!)

1. Collecting the Herbs

The first step comes in collecting the herbs. Here is where I look to a combination of the Nine Herbs Charm and the vervain charm from Harland. In both charms, the herbs are addressed as sentient beings in and of themselves. This is despite the 700-800 year gap between the Lacnunga and the charm recorded by Harland mentioned above.

“All-hele, thou holy herb, Vervin, Growing on the ground…”

So, you may want to say a few words of your own when approaching and pulling the herbs. Pray to them as the spirits they are and take respectfully.

And just a note on the herbs mentioned in the Leechbook. I don’t use that particular mix of herbs because I prefer to work with plants I know and can easily forage/grow. In my experience, this procedure is good for preparing a wide range of herbs for smoke fumigation.

2. Washing the Herbs

In the original charm, the herbs are bound in cloth and dipped in holy water three times. Now, I suspect the cloth was largely to prevent bits of leaves breaking off into the font, so I don’t bother with that part. I’m also a Heathen, and where they say “holy water,” I say “Lemme go hallow this water with some galdor.”

Water from a local spring you consider sacred also works.

Empowering, right?

Now, give your plant friends a little bath.

3. Three Masses?

Here we come to the final step for prepping the herbs for later use. (As opposed to prepping the herbs in order to go treat a patient as soon as possible.) And the way I do this is I lay out the herbs (nicely spread out on a cloth so they dry out) on my shrine and then I hold three rituals to my gods and plant spirits on three consecutive days. I make offerings, I ask the gods and spirits to make the herbs so holy that ill-wights flee from their smoke. I also address the spirits of the plants themselves again. If I’m working with mugwort, I speak the verse from the Nine Herbs Charm that reminds her of what she can do while asking her to bring her powers to bear. With other plants, I fall back on relating any stories I know about them, reminding them of what they can do and asking them to help.

Then, after the three days of rituals are complete (and the herbs are dry), I put them away for later use.

Final Word

Hopefully, this series of posts has been both informative and helpful.  What began as a revision of an old blog post that still does the rounds, grew into an examination of helpful herbs. We end here with a framework for preparing those helpful herbs for smoke cleansing.

So, until next time. Be well.

Sources
Lancashire Folk-Lore – John Harland
Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context – Karen Louse Jolly
Leechbook – Stephen Pollington
Leechbook III 

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Smoke Cleansing: Some Helpful Herbs

Smoke Cleansing: Step Away from the White Sage!

Yesterday I got a message from a friend. They were asking if it were okay to link one of my older posts about white sage on The Troth website. She’s working to educate people on the cultural appropriation and sustainability issues surrounding white sage and palo santo. This is especially important for a community that aspires to inclusivity, so I agreed.

But then I remembered an issue with the pictures on my older posts. Some of them are missing their pictures – an issue I fix as I go. So, I asked for some time to go through and check. But when I took a look this morning, I found a whole bunch of issues. And the biggest was that it needed a bit of a rewrite to match what I now know.

Now, I don’t normally like to do this, but a post entitled “Step Away from the White Sage!” is kind of catchy. It’s easy to remember – the kind of thing people share. So, I wanted to make sure the post that people are more likely to remember is accurate (while noting my older fuck ups).

As I wrote though, I decided it would be a good idea to talk about what herbs would be good to use, and hence this post was born.

Smoke Cleansing Outside of Indigenous Cultures

In the revised version of the older blog post, I talked about how there is nothing wrong with smoke cleansing or smoke fumigation. After all, there are examples of smoke fumigation in multiple European traditions (along with practices such as carrying fire and sprinkling water).

As a Heathen, I tend to look to the Old English and Old Norse sources for magical tech – especially the Old English magico-medical manuscripts. And luckily for us, there’s a set of instructions for smoke fumigation in Bald’s Leechbook iii!

I’ll talk about these and look at how they can be adapted for modern non-Christian use below.

Helpful Herbs

So, first thing’s first! Which herbs are good to use for smoke cleansing? In this section, I’m going to talk about three different groups of herbs (plus mugwort) that I personally look to in my practices. As with anything herb-related though, be careful of sensitivities when working with them.

“Remember, Mugwort…”

First up is mugwort!

She is by far the plant ally I work with the most in this kind of work. Named the “Oldest of herbs” in charm 79 in the Lacnunga, mugwort is a badass. If she were in a D&D campaign, she’d be the tank of the group. The charm tells us that she “stands against three and thirty,” against poison and infection, and against “the evil that travels the land.” And she’s valued in healing traditions around the globe. She fights infection and cysts and brings on menses. Many also ingest her as a tonic. In great enough quantities, she has enough similarities with her sister, Wormwood, that she can also affect perception.

Mugwort can also be paired with vervain, garlic, or wormwood for greater effect.

She’s so awesome, I gave her her own section despite her really belonging in the next.

Magico-Medical Sources

Mugwort isn’t the only herb ally we learn about in the Old English magico-medical manuscripts though. There are a plethora of holy herbs in those texts!
You can find them in charms such as charm 63 in the text known as the Lacnunga. Charm 63, or as it’s better known, The Holy Salve charm, contains a huge list of herbs that were thought useful to put into the creation of a holy salve.  Among them are mugwort, fennel, bishopwort, rue, and vervain.

Another famous list is the so-called “Nine Herbs Charm” (AKA charm 79 mentioned above).

You can also find these holy and helpful herbs in many of the cures for “elf-diseases” (especially those involving perception impairment). Seriously, go digging into these texts. Ignore the Christian veneer – they didn’t use herbs or smoke in the same way during that period. (Incense was for carrying prayers, and herbs were a little too close to charms for the truly faithful.)

We have a lot more than we think we do.

Vervain and Rowan

Another strand in my magic comes from my birth region, Lancashire. The old county of Lancashire was notorious for magic and witches at one point. And fascinatingly, some of the recorded charms from the witch trials there are very similar to the OE narrative charms.

With such a reputation, it’s hardly surprising the county is thick with tales of boggarts, hauntings, witches, and the devil. Equally unsurprising are the traditional apotropaic herbs.

One that will likely already be familiar to people is mountain ash, or rowan. This was believed to stop bewitchment (and witches in general), and they would make the churn-staffs of butter churns from this wood. (Our witchy ancestors liked to fuck with people’s butter back in the day, I guess.) Despite its reputation for protecting people from bewitchment though, you also see rowan used as a magic wand in at least one folktale.

Another herb was vervain, which we already saw from The Holy Salve. This was considered seriously holy and gathered while speaking charms. John Harland records one such charm in his book Lancashire Folk-Lore, with the remark that such charms and their accompanying ceremonies were “infinite” (Harland 76)

Vervain was traditionally worn as protection against fairy-blasts and other otherworldly perils. And you often see magic circles constructed using vervain (sometimes along with bay leaves and holly) in folktales detailing necromantic adventures (Bowker The Sands of Cocker, The Christmas Eve Vigil).

Solar Herbs

The herbs you can look to are those known as “solar herbs,” or those herbs that are considered to correspond with the sun in Natural Magic. Now, this isn’t particularly Heathen, and I think we need to sit and think about the concept of correspondences within an animistic framework. But this works, and so I’m including them.

Solar herbs like bay laurel, ash, broom, rosemary, rue, rowan, St John’s Wort etc., are all incredibly effective for driving out ill. Anecdotally speaking, they seem to be particularly effective nowadays.

Just a quick note about rosemary before moving on: rosemary is both associated with remembrance of the dead and protection. Take from that what you will.

A Note about Smoke Cleansing Safety

Now, not all of these herbs are necessarily suitable for smoke cleansing. And different substances irritate different people’s lungs. Please be mindful of this in your practice, especially when working with older sources.

If you’re living in a situation where smoke cleansing absolutely isn’t an option, you still have options. One such option is making a room/house cleansing spray with holy herbs. Another, which is usually a better option when it’s a person that’s afflicted rather than a space, is an oil or salve.

You don’t have to only cleanse with smoke.

In the next post: How to adapt an old-ass procedure for preparing herbs for smoke fumigation. See you next time!

Sources

Lancashire Folk-Lore – John Harland

Goblin Tales of Lancashire – James Bowker

Encyclopedia of Natural Magic – John Michael Greer

Leechcraft: Early English Charms, Plantlore, and Healing – Stephen Pollington