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

Otherworldly Bleed, Consensus, and Magic

Otherworldly Observations

A few years ago, back when this idea of the otherworld bleeding through began to make its way into Pagan/Witch discourse, I had a curious incident at the side of a river with a witchy friend. We’d been on a walk together as we often did back then in the pre-plague years, end eventually (unsurprisingly) we’d begun to “talk shop.” You see, both of us had noticed the uptick in otherworldly activity, in a similar way to how hunters are often the first to notice disease in deer.

Now, please don’t get me wrong. I’m not comparing the Other with disease here (I wouldn’t dare). I’m just saying that as magical practitioners, we tend to be among the first to notice this kind of thing.

But we were both also getting messages from multiple people. Moreover, these were often from people who didn’t ordinarily experience our kind of strangeness, and that stood out.

At some point in our discussion, I mentioned the fact that a witch’s knowledge and power was believed to come from otherworldly sources where I’m from. And I wondered what the effects of this otherworldly “bleed” would have on magic and what we humans can do with magic. Naturally (because I’m an idiot like this), I grabbed a stick and drew a sigil I use when creating portals into the sand and silt of the riverbank.

The effect was almost instantaneous: a shifting sensation that used to take more effort to achieve.

I closed it and scrubbed it from the sand almost as soon as my friend and I noticed the shift. But I’ve been musing about the changing limits of magical possibility, consensus, and opposition ever since.

John’s Rising Currents

Discourse is a funny old thing. Sometimes we can have an observation or thought sitting in the soil of our mind for a long time without writing about it. But then, something will happen to water it, and it’ll take root and grow.

(As an aside, it’s interesting how we refer to events that spark action as “precipitating events.” Soil and seeds. Soil and seeds.)

I’m a firm believer that most things have their season. And if the blog John Beckett posted this morning is anything to go by, then this subject’s season has come.

In The Currents of Magic are Getting Stronger, John Beckett makes the same observation I did at the side of that river. Ironically, he uses the analogy of a river running higher and faster to explain his observation that the “currents” of magic are getting stronger and enabling an increase in possibility/greater results. He also goes on to cautiously suggest some possible causes, and this is where I feel like I have something to add.

Magic and the Otherworldly

I’ve blogged about this before, but in the historical witchcraft traditions where I’m from, the source of the witch’s power and knowledge was otherworldly. This is where we get into familiars and hierarchy. These are all complex topics, and more than I can cover in this blog, so I encourage you to read the posts I’ve linked here if you want to go deeper. That’s not to say that what we call the “otherworldly” is the only possible source of magic and knowledge though, nor the only possible framework through which these changes can be understood.

We also cannot ignore the fact that most of the discussion on this topic is coming from US sources.  I’m not saying that strange things aren’t also happening elsewhere—some of my mother’s stories from back in Lancashire have been decidedly stranger than usual of late. But we also cannot assume that just because this stuff is happening here, it’s happening everywhere.

In my opinion, an important consideration in this discussion of how widespread or localized this “trend” is, boils down to the relationship between a culture and the otherworldly beings they interact with. ( Assuming the relationship between Otherworldly beings and magic is found within those cultures in the first place.)

Fairy-like beings are found in lore pretty much all over the world, but not all cultures have responded in the same way to their presence over time. Some cultures—such as many Western European cultures—equated them with demons and/ fallen angels, destroyed their sanctuaries, and drove them out after humans converted to Christianity (LeCouteux, Claude. Demons and Spirits of the Land. Pp. 23-28, 68-80).

And I’m not saying that folk practices involving the otherworldly didn’t still exist, of course. We know they did. But as I’ll hopefully make clear in the next section, consensus (like all stories) is a powerful and often binding thing.

This process wasn’t limited to Western Europe either. If Cotton Mather is to be believed in his Wonders of the Invisible World, early colonizers in what would become the US also drove out “devils.” He even goes on to blame the apparent preponderance of witches in Salem on a counterattack by the devils, thus retaining that link between witches and the Otherworldly in his interpretation of events.

The otherworld is bleeding through, the devils are coming back, and they’re bringing us witches with them?

However in some places, maybe the Otherworld didn’t need to bleed back in from anywhere else at all.

Reality, Consensus, Possibility, and Feedback Loops

Another story now. Back in the mid-2000s, I came across an interesting interaction at a Pagan Conference in England between a gentleman from an African country (I didn’t get chance to ask him which), and a vendor who was selling these tacky, crystal-encrusted “wish books.” For her, even as someone who considered herself a witch, these books were just a bit of fun and to be commonly understood as such. There was no real expectation that writing your wishes in them would yield any concrete results. But her potential customer clearly had far greater expectations of the “wish book” than her and kept asking her in a deadly serious voice if it really worked.

As you might imagine, this became increasingly more uncomfortable the longer it went on.

To me though, as an observer, I couldn’t help but be struck by the wildly different expectations of magic that were revealed through this interaction. Again, this is something I’ve written about before, but much of what we commonly call “reality” is more accurately described as consensus. We take in far more information through our ordinary senses per second than we can even be conscious of, let alone store in our memories. Moreover, studies have shown that we’re more likely to become conscious of/retain the information that aligns with our existing beliefs and biases.

This is impossible to separate from consensus. I believe that consensus, in a sense, both delineates and limits the boundaries of possibility.

From this perspective, the more people that experience and/or interact with the strange and Otherworldly, the more the consensus that THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN IN “REALITY” is challenged. And over time if enough people start to have these experiences, the consensus of a culture shifts to include them in the realm of possibility. This in turn, creates a kind of feedback loop in which that consensus is progressively widened. (A process that is not so different from what you find in a propaganda campaign.)

This is theory, but I would argue we have historical proof of the reverse: the binding effects of consensus.

I’ve written about this before, but we can see this in how concepts of dreaming change in Northwestern Europe after the advent of Christianity. People went from considering dreams a place where they could encounter the dead and otherworldly in a concrete way, to a state of consciousness in which people only experience nonsensical or anxiety-driven scenarios.

(Again, another way of driving out the otherworldly, I might add.)

This is all very exciting to think about, but I think we need to also be cautious here too.

The Other Side of the Coin

Within the Pagan and Witch communities, I think there is a tendency to assume that we are the only ones out there working magic. We forget that Christians also have their magic, and that a more forgiving consensus is also going to benefit them as well.

Unfortunately for us, they tend to be very much against our kind of magic, and they still largely label the Other as “demonic.” They also have an established tradition of weaponized “prayer” in the form of “prayer warriors,” who often work together in groups and are capable of a level of faith and zeal very few Pagans and Witches can muster.

Another area of concern is that I suspect a lot of the more “fringe” Christians are feeling the same uptick in activity as we are. I’m far from an expert on this subject, but I keep an eye on some of these groups as part of my omen-taking, and this is something I’ve noticed. There seems to have been an uptick in videos of “demonic possession” over the past few years. And talk of spiritual warfare against demons and witches seems to have become more common. (Here’s a recent example.) There have also been large events such as the Jericho March earlier this year. Participants of the march blew shofarim and marched around the Capitol building seven times while praying- a clear imitation of the Israelite siege of the city of Jericho. The next day was 1/6, in case you were wondering about their intentions.

If there’s anything we can learn from history when it comes to religious fundamentalists of a certain kind, it’s that this usually doesn’t go well for us. The more people believe in the possibilities of magic in general, the more they tend to blame magic (and practitioners) when things go wrong. So, the Otherworldly may be more present, and “currents of magic” may be rising and growing in strength, but they’re not without a brewing backlash.

I just hope we don’t wind up in a place where humans meet the same fate as books.

The Places We Go In Dream

It’s been a while since I last posted about dreams in a general way. But after the dream I had on Sunday night, I find myself inspired to revisit the topic.

If you’re a long time reader of this blog then you probably already know that dreams are important to me, that they’re something I work with. I keep a dream journal that lives in an app on my phone with a secondary residence in the cloud. Other people have dedicated paper and pen journals that they keep in a handy-to-reach place for when they wake up.

It doesn’t really matter what you use to record your dreams though. It just has to work for you, and more importantly you have to actually use it. Which means developing the discipline to write down everything you remember as soon as you wake up. (As opposed to clicking on social media and letting it all get washed away.)

What’s in a Dream?

Dreams aren’t just random brain junk for me. Many of them contain lessons and interactions. Sometimes I find myself in what might be called the Otherworld, and occasionally there’s a good bit of prophecy in there too. But all of this only really becomes clear when you start recording your dreams. A clear record can make the various patterns and themes in your dreams clear, which can in turn, help you understand what those dreams could mean for your waking life.

Moreover, if you also are the kind of person who encounters otherworldly beings in dreams, then it’s just smart to keep a record of those interactions full stop. As humans we’re largely at a disadvantage in dream, and lucidity can be hit or miss (depending on how practiced you are). You may receive requests, be given tasks to do, or even pressured into making oaths with some of these beings. At the very least you need to create a record. An agreement made in dream is still an agreement to the Othercrowd (and as with all agreements they expect you to keep it).

Oh the Places You’ll Go (in Dream)!

Before waking up on Monday morning, I’d been at a bus interchange. I knew the place – had been there six months earlier. (Thank you for the reminder, dream journal!) And I also knew what had happened in my life after having that dream. (Hello, pattern!)

In short, it got me thinking about the places we find ourselves over and over again in dream, what they mean, and the role/s they can play in waking life (if you let them).

For the sake of simplicity I’ve divided these different types of spaces into two categories: the ‘Regular Spaces’ (ie spaces you visit on a reasonably regular basis that seem ‘fixed’), and ‘Intermediary Spaces’ (or spaces which either indicate transition or may be transited through to the Otherworld).

These are some of the spaces I encounter. (I’d love to hear about yours!)

Regular Spaces

The Otherworldly School

This is a space I find myself in quite often. I’m never alone there but in classes full of what I suspect may be other sleeping witches. The environment is extremely strict – it would make a Victorian school room look lax. And there’s an underlying sense of danger should you mess up. But as with all schools, there are lessons here too (and not only in etiquette). I’ve received some of my most interesting magical lessons from this school, and yes, they often assign homework too.

The Old House with a Hearth

Another interesting space I often find myself in is an old house somewhere in Germany. Well I say “somewhere”, but that’s not quite right either. It’s like an amalgamation of the town where I used to live in Germany and several others. The house is situated along a winding street of old houses that date back to the 16th century and has a flagstone floor and huge hearth upon which various symbols are carved. The back of the house is somewhat lighter thanks to the great windows that open out into the hof. It’s a familiar place to me despite never having lived there. And every time I am there I am working magic in what appears to be an earlier period of history.

The Creepy Ruined Church

Until last year, the Creepy Ruined Church was my least favorite place to find

See this ruin? Yeah, it’s way nicer than where I go.

myself in dream. There has always been something malevolent about the place. It feels twisted. Unhæl. And I’ve always wanted to leave. But last year I realized that the Creepy Ruined Church was a training ground of sorts – a kind of magical troubleshooting simulator, if you will. And the more I’ve worked with it in this way, the more it’s become somewhere I don’t really mind anymore. It even looks better now.

Out with the possessed pigs and in with the chill dead people, I guess.

The Kindergarten

You know, it’s kind of “funny” really that an ex-Kindergarten teacher winds up in a dream kindergarten helping to teach non-human children. But it is what it is.

The Facsimile of Iceland

Ever since I went to Iceland in 2018, I feel like a part of myself sort of dug in there like some kind of anchor for when I die. There was a sense of home to Iceland, and so it’s probably not surprising that I end up there quite often in my dreams. Out of all the recurring places, Iceland, and especially northern Iceland, probably features the most. And these dreams almost always come with a message or involve elves in some way.

Intermediary Spaces

The Train Station

When I encounter the train station, it’s usually as a transitory space in and of itself that symbolizes an upcoming period of transition in life (surprise!). But it can also be something that I call to me in dream or trance to escape a space that’s either uncomfortable or just plain dangerous.

(There’s a whole backstory there about lessons from dead relatives who reside in Fairy but I’ll have to save that for a different post).

The Bus Interchange

The bus interchange is not so different from the first function of the train station. The only major difference that I’ve found is that the clothes I wear while at the bus interchange seem to be indicative of the type of change that I’ll be facing in waking life.

So for example, wearing armor at the bus interchange would be a bad sign (it was).

The Unrealistic Supermarket

What if I were to tell you that one of my most common entrances into the Otherworld (and lucidity) in dream, was through a massive supermarket?

When we think about the Otherworld, I think there’s a tendency to imagine it as some old-fashioned, almost Renn-Faire-looking kind of deal. And don’t get me wrong – in my experience, those places do exist. But I’ve also found that there are a lot of modern-looking places associated with the Otherworld as well.

The Unrealistic Supermarket is one such place for me.

Imagine a supermarket, but even more random than your local Walmart Supercenter. Maybe there is an entire row of functioning shower cubicles along one row with people using them? Or maybe there’s an aisle full of preserved, ornate human hands? Perhaps next to those there are hammers and Oreos?

See what I mean? Random and unrealistic.

When I find myself in the Unrealistic Supermarket, I usually start at the front of the store and move toward the back. And as I’m walking to the back of the store, I encounter a series of bearded men who stare at me as I pass.

It’s pretty weird and uncomfortable. But it also snaps me into lucidity right before I enter whatever section of the Otherworld proper I wind up in that time. (And for that I’m grateful.)

Housekeeping

So did you all know I have a book coming out next month? I do! It’s called Elves, Witches and Gods: Spinning Old Heathen Magic in Modern Day. If a somewhat atypical look at Heathen worldview and magic with an emphasis on experimentation and practice interests you, then it may be right up your alley. Available for preorder here.

I’m also running my class ‘Against the Evil that Roams the Land: Practices of Protection and Purification from the OE and ON/Icelandic Sources’ again on 2/27/21. This is for those of you who missed it last year, but also contains new material that I’ve been working with since the last time I ran this class. Interested? Sign up here.

Witch Wars: Survival Tips

In the previous two posts of this series, I discussed what you can do to minimize the likelihood of getting seriously attacked, and how to diagnose a curse or attack. In this post, I’m going to take a look at the less-discussed aspects of dealing with and surviving magical attack.

First of all though, I’d just like to clarify something here. The kind of magical attack I’m talking about here is the more serious kind, the kind that goes beyond a simple case of the evil eye. Now I realize that a lot of people don’t believe in this more serious kind of curse and generally look to psychology for explanations. Thankfully, relatively few practitioners from WEIRD cultures have experienced the kind of magical attacks that can truly destroy your life. And for those of you who have never experienced this, I truly hope you never do. I’m not going to argue about the existence of this, you can either take this seriously or not.

But if you have experienced this kind of thing, or simply take magic seriously enough to recognize its potential for completely fucking up your shit up to and including taking your life, then read on.

There’s been a lot written in various places about how to respond to curses in terms of getting it off you, uncrossing, protection, amulets, and magical counter response. However, there’s a lot of stuff I haven’t seen discussed about magical attack -stuff I consider important to management and survival -so that is what I’m going to discuss here.

The Fear Response

For most people who find out that they’ve been cursed, or are the subject of a magical attack of some kind, the most common response is fear. This is completely normal. For someone who hasn’t experienced this kind of thing witch wars - fearbefore, it can be one hell of a wake-up call to realize what others can do to you, your loved ones, and your life with magic. And for those of us who’ve been through the mill a few times, it can be triggering because you remember how fucking awful it was all those other times.

However, the hard truth of it, is that you cannot give in to that fear. Because it’s too easy to make stupid moves, and at a time when you really cannot afford to do so.

So the first step to keeping your shit together when you’re on the receiving end of some magical whammy, is to recognize the fear. Take some time to sit with it (but not too long), lean into it and find out where its roots lie.

Then put that shit aside for later. You haven’t got time for that right now.

Attacks Are Often Multilayered

In the majority of cases, ‘curses’ are generally more rightly thought of as “multilayered campaigns”. You see, people who want to take you out tend to not stop with simply fucking up your luck and your health, or messing with your dreams, or whatever.

They will attack you on multiple fronts (if they can), and some of those attacks will fall more into the “curse” category, while others will fall into the “psychic attack” category. They may even bind spirits and send them after you, and you need to also realize that they will probably come after your family too.

Fucking horrible, right?

But if someone has decided that you are sufficient enough of a threat to their ego, then nothing in their capacity is ‘off the table’. I mean, let’s get this straight: there is no such thing as honor here, it’s down and dirty shit-flinging. And even if you have cleared or gotten free of the main attack, you will probably find other minor fronts coming to light months down the line.

So recognize that this is likely not going to be a ‘one working and done’ kind of deal. If they have launched a campaign, then you are fighting a campaign, and you need to plan accordingly.

You May Need Help (And There’s No Shame In That!)

Unfortunately, being able to set aside the fear and recognize the breadth of the campaign being waged against you, is no guarantee that you’ll actually be able to fight it. Remember all those things I mentioned in my last post? Well a witch wars - helplot of them like that feeling of helplessness, sapped energy, and decline in mental (and physical health) can all affect your ability to respond. Depending on what has been done to you, you may not even be able to do anything at all!

To make matters worse, a lot of witches tend to take pride in being able to handle things alone. But don’t fall into that here – this isn’t the time for more ego. If you find yourself in this situation you need to reach out and get help. And the chances are that if you’re involved in your local community enough to cop an attack, you already know someone in your community that you suspect could and would help you.

Just be aware that you may have some difficulties getting to meet or communicate with your potential help. The spirits involved in curses will often take measures to prevent the subject of their nastiness from escaping. If you find yourself in this situation, it’s the ideal time to dig out any older amulets you have lying around. Depending on what you have, they may not help with the wider attack, but they may help with the simple issue of getting to your help.

Destroy Connections

One of the least discussed parts of being attacked that I’ve noticed is the matter of connections. Now on one level, when I talk about connections here, I’m talking about connections created by gifting. But on another level, you may have more subtle connections to a person that were either created through working together, or that were planted on you in order to influence, spy, or witch wars - chainsdrain you.
The physical connections are clearly the easiest to sever. Seek out anything they gave you that still feels connected to them (again, you may need help here) and either destroy it or put in some kind of containment for leverage down the line. If it can tie them to you and used by them to affect you, it can tie you to them for the same thing.

As for the subtle connections – this is another area where you will need help. Even if you can deal with the rest of the attack alone, you will need help to get rid of these.

Freeing the Mind

For a bunch of people who basically work to change reality with our minds, breath, bodies, incantations, and wills, we often forget our minds in our training, our work, and in surviving magical attack.

If you are subject to magical attack and the person wants to let you know it without directly saying it, they will work to keep themselves front and center in your consciousness. This is incredibly empowering for them, because on one level it helps to build upon the fear and feelings of helplessness their previous witch wars - onionwork has created. However, on another, it’s still giving them access to your mind.

This is something you need to resist; but how?

After all, it’s not like you can pretend they don’t exist or what are you fighting against? The key to this is figuring out the right level of access. Sounds confusing, right?

Try imagining your mind like an onion of many layers. Now think about where certain people in your life are in the onion -see your nearest and dearest in the central layers as clearly as you can before moving outwards from the center and mapping where different people fall in the layers. One of those layers should be some kind of defense that is impermeable from the outside, and it’s in the layers beyond that where any enemies should sit in your mind. If you find your enemies within that barrier, or yourself without a barrier, then you need to do some evicting.

Your goal is to be able to talk about them and think of them with no more weight to their names and faces than you would give turd you scraped off your shoe.

Tu Quoque

Finally, you need to realize that if you send things back to them, then you are sending them exactly the same as they originally meant for you, and you need to be ok with that. You need to really walk through the ethical and moral implications of it and figure out if you’re good with it or not. The morals of witchcraft are the morals that each individual witch carries. So work deliberately. Because it doesn’t matter that they started it, you are choosing to take the same action and will be just as responsible for the ensuing consequences.

Which all sounds easy to live with when you’re angry. But could you really live with something that (for example) was targeting your kids, targeting other children?

See what I mean?

Just…be aware of the scope of what you choose as a response before you do it, and recognize that you will have to live with whatever rolls out from that course of action.

Dream Initiation

Dream - skull

Dream Initiation – Preface

When I wrote this, I did so to get it out of my head. To write, for me, is to reify and process, and I very much felt the need to do this. Long time readers of this blog will know that I have been encountering the dead since I was a child, and that it is something that I have often struggled with over the years. In many ways, last year marked a watershed of sorts for me in that I formally committed to working with the dead. I began a lot of deep ancestor work within my own lineages, and found my life and practices changing quite dramatically.

The experience that I write about here, I believe to have been one of the initiations of that work. That it took place in dream is still strange to me despite my deeply held beliefs on the importance of dream and its scope for interaction with the dead and Other. However, I find myself very much changed by the experience, and am finding myself doing things now that I could not do before. There will probably be quite a few blogs about my work with the battlefield dead. It is the work of my heart, and I have only just begun.

An Account of Dream Initiation

I enter the room nervously. I had been told nothing of what was to come except for that I would undergo an initiation of sorts. The room is hazy with incense – a pungent scent I struggle to identify – and candles flow as a wave over every available surface. A young man I think I recognize leads me to the center of the room, and the priest begins her invocations. On the floor, I notice a large black sheet.

For a moment I panic, and hope that I do not misspeak. I pray to my gods that any errors be forgiven, and mentally prepare myself for any invocations that I must also give.

But there are none.

There is only the black sheet on the floor, and the young man beckoning me to lie down upon its surface.

I soon notice that half the sheet is gathered at the bottom, and when I lie down, it is pulled up to cover me; it covers all parts of me.

“You need to journey now. You need to let it take you where you must go.”dream - path

And I am confused, for I am already in dream. But I school myself quickly, and begin my usual processes for entering trance.

For what seems like the longest time, nothing happens. But then, I realize I’m moving; a gentle rocking motion carries me forth. Soon I regain my eyes and notice a roughly woven cloth upon my face. I can see through the holes to the sky above, this is not the cloth from the ritual room floor. Above me, trees curve over the path to form an archway, and I try to move but cannot. I am bound but not by ropes, conveyed forth by unseen hands.

The thought soon comes to me that I’m dead, and travel a corpse path, and for the longest time I abide in this knowledge. What am I to learn here? How long will this go on for? What about the room and the ritual?

The Inevitable Path

I have so many questions, and little patience. I work to exit trance, and find myself rolling out from under the sheet in the ritual room. The priest is now gone and only the candles and the young man remain. I stagger around without sense and understand that unless I finish what was begun, that I would not return whole. So I reenter the now-red-sheet and hunker down once more, returning to the endless plod of the corpse-road.

At some point I decide that I’m thinking too hard, that I’m too agitated for one

dream - mound
My local mound where I grew up.

who is already dead, and so I let go, and that’s when I find myself within the mound.

I sit up to find myself surrounded by the dead; dead of many different ages, some appearing bigger, and others appearing smaller. The shroud loosens and I sit with corpse-pale arms and hear their words.

They have much to tell me about how they wish to be worshipped, and the kinds of things they wish me to do. They also gift me something too. I can feel it within me, intangible and indescribable. Like something returned, it feels familiar and right. Then they release me from the mound, the door opening to bright sunlight.

As the sun touches my skin, it lives again. I live again. I step out into light that’s far too bright for my eyes, and into the path of the one I know as Gwyn. We walk back together along the corpse way, and he talks to me of owls and pathways down. The road does not seem so long on the way back, but it was never really about time or distance in the first place. I know that now.

I return to my dream once more, to the ritual room where the young man waits. He’d been waiting the whole time, he says. I’d been gone longer than was normal, and he wanted to make sure I was alright. Three and a half hours was quite a while, and it was kind of his job. I stand up and this time I’m clear. There’s no staggering and I feel whole. I leave the room and find myself at a party for a while, watching people as they perform for the dead they have lost. Their songs are their offerings, their dances are prayers, and it makes their hearts shine.

The heart is the key to this kind of work.

Eventually it’s time to go. My husband and child await, and I’m suddenly aware that I have new clothes that I must pick up. They’re green, and were also once lost but now returned. I put them on and wake up with a scream.

A Rough Awakening

My body hurts now, my trance had been deep. My shoulder is dislocated, and it takes me three days to fully put it back in. I should probably feel angry or upset dream - manassasabout that but I don’t.

If anything, I just thole. It’s a small matter next to the monumental change that took place within. I cannot yet name what was given that night in the mound. Yet weeks later, when I step out onto one of the battlefields of Manassas and walk towards the Dead with my equally touched companions, I feel it as keenly as I feel my limbs.

The Dead surround me here too, but this time, it’s myself and my companions who guide the way along the corpse path for now.

Maran, Night-Walkers, and Elves, Oh My! Part One

Within the past two days, I’ve had two friends tell me of sleep disturbances that had a certain quality of otherness about them. One person had the experience while we were camping in the Black Hills of Maryland, and the other in her own home. In the case of the first person, she’d felt physically touched by whatever it was through the wall of her tent – a touch that she felt was a very deliberate poke which had been kind of ‘introduced’ in her dream before it happened. In the case of the second person, it was more of a classic ‘Old Hag’ experience that they had had to fight off.

 

To Me Came A Dream

In both cases, each individual felt very strongly as though what had happened wasn’t just a simple nightmare, and that some kind of interaction with the Other had taken place. It’s very easy for modern people to discredit dream and what happens in the altered states of consciousness between sleeping and awake.

However, as I have discussed previously in this blog, this attitude towards dream seems to have been the result of a concerted effort by Christian authorities to dismantle the power of dream among their flocks in order to censor dream, for to censor dream is to censor one form of access to the Otherworld. In Germanic tradition, dreams were thought of as coming from outside the sleeper – a concept that is reflected linguistically in both Old Norse and Old English in phrases such as dreymdi mik draumr (“a dream came to me”) and mec gemætte (“to me came a dream”) (Pollington 490). The ON term draumstolinn suggests that the ability to dream was one that could be stolen, and in The Saga of the Jómsborg Vikings a man is refused marriage if he does not dream (LeCouteux 28).

However, the sleeper was not entirely passive, and as we shall see, could sometimes also enact their own visitations in dream.

So dream was important. It wasn’t just some whimsical and harmless thing to the Pagan/Heathen mind, but a way in which the sleeper could interact with both the Otherworld, and other sleepers. And it was consideration of my friends’ dreams that got me thinking about the bad side of dream: maran, night-walkers, and elves.

 

”Wið eallum f?ondes costungum”

When it comes to discussing maran, night-walkers, and elves, it can be hard to give solid definitions. Mare (from which we derive the word “nightmare”) could refer to either a human woman – usually but not always intentionally a witch – that attacked sleepers, or a supernatural being that did the same (Jolley 86, Hall 125). The term night-walkers seems self-explanatory, though Hall still expresses uncertainty as to what they could have been in more precise terms (Hall 124). And the problems of defining what an elf was considered to be (not to mention their relationship to magic and witches) are perennial.

What we can say with some certainty though, is that certain effects were considered to be common to these beings, and that they were connected/overlapped in terms of function. In some charms, we may see this uncertainty as to who/what was doing what to the patient, reflected in the more general terms f?ondes costunga (“tribulations of the enemy”), and/or Ælfs?den (“elf-seiðr” – a form of magic) used.

On the symptoms of attack and forms of treatment however, the OE magico-medical sources are remarkably consistent on the matter of nightmares, and it is upon these consistencies that I shall now focus.

 

 

Symptoms of Attack

For those of you who have experienced the terror of “sleep paralysis” (or as it’s sometimes called, “Old Hag”), this is all going to sound very familiar. While the explanation for this sleep disturbance has changed in modern times (no maran - nightmareelves or night-goers need apply!), modern descriptions of this experience would have been familiar to our ancestors. In some accounts, such as that of the Swedish king Vanlandi of the Ynglinga saga, the victim was even “trod on” or “pressed down on” until dead. It is worth mentioning here that the attacking force was the witch/mara Drifa (Hall 125, 135). Interestingly, while the Ynglinga saga was composed post-conversion, a segment of the 9th century Ynglingatal referencing the death of king Vanlandi as a result of the witch (referred to in the Ynglingatal segment as mara) attests to the potential Heathen origins of this concept.

Rather disturbingly, there was also potentially considered to be a sexual or lustful element to these nocturnal attacks too. As Hall points out, mære was glossed with incuba in the 7th century (Hall 125). This connection is repeated in the 13th century South English Legendary which not only juxtaposes maren with eluene (or “elves”), but describes these attacks in sexual terms (Hall 140-142). This sexual aspect is also alluded to by Karen Jolly in Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context” (Jolly 149).

Other symptoms of attack by maran, night-walkers, or elves that can potentially be discerned from the sources are those of fever and delusion (Hall 121-125). Though it bears pointing out here that fevers often come with delusion, it is also worth noting that there is an entire category of elf-related illnesses in the OE magico-medical texts (Hall 96-108). In any case, whether (more specifically in this case) the elves are considered to cause the sickness or the more delusional symptoms associated with fever, Hall seems to imply that the sick are potentially more of a target by virtue of being sick:


Ælfs?den is also associated with nihtgengan and with the riding of the sick by maran.”

(Hall 130)

Lastly, before finishing this current section, I would like to point out the parallels between the ON and OE lore regarding maran/night-walkers, and that of the Hmong being, the Dab Tsog.

In the late 70s to mid 80s, Hmong refugees became something of a curiosity to US medical professionals and researchers for one reason and one reason only: their men were dying in their sleep. There was no explanation that could be found, and the term SUNDS (or Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome) was coined by the FCDC.

However, the cause of death was no mystery to the Hmong themselves – it was the Dab Tsog who brought the chest crushing death of the Tsog Tsaum. Incredibly there are survivors of SUNDS, who when interviewed, related horrifying dream-experiences in which they were attacked by a kind of creature that tried to kill them by sitting on their chests and forcing the air out. These survivors also experienced paralysis and remembered being able to clearly hear the sounds of their houses around them.

Sound familiar?

The Hmong are not the only people to report these kind of beings either, the Dab Tsog mirrors cases attributed to the Filipino Batibat.

But now we have faced the terrors, how do we keep the terrors far from our own beds and dreams?

 
 
 

Sources

Alaric Hall – Elves in Anglo-Saxon England: Matters of Belief, Health, Gender
and Identity
Karen Jolly – Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context
Claude LeCouteux – Witches, Werewolves, and Fairies: Shapeshifters and Astral
Doubles in the Middle Ages
Stephen Pollington – Leechcraft: Early English Charms, Plant-Lore and Healing

Unweaving a War of Walls

walls - fantasy

Recognizing the War

We live in a time of walls. We always have of course, but there are periods of history in which those walls become more restrictive and in which newer walls are far too easily built. In an attempt to disprove the existence of these walls, the skeptic would point to the promise of the Constitution. “See, it’s all right here. There’s nothing to worry about.” Except there is, because often the most effective walls are those that aren’t enshrined by law but in culture instead.

That is a war that the less conservative among us have been failing at badly. Let’s face it, most non-conservativeswalls - sunrise outside of minority groups didn’t even realize there was a war until relatively recently, even though more socially conservative groups have been fighting it for years.

The election was the dawning of a new era, because not only was it the beginning of what is looking to be a drastic change in direction for the United States, but because a good many people finally woke up to the war and saw the strength of the opposition.

Walls That Protect, Walls That Imprison

So we now find ourselves in a time of walls, but more accurately, in a time of walls that are beginning to encroach on the meagre areas we’d previously kept while believing ourselves to be free – ironic when one considers that our president-elect included a promise to build a wall in his election campaign promises.

But this post isn’t about those physical walls that are built, immigration law, or the election. There are plenty of places that are discussing all of the above ad nauseum and only adding more noise to the cacophonous furor that is social media. Besides, what would be the point of that on a magic blog?

This post is about walls from a magical perspective, the kinds of walls, their origins, and what we can do to tear them down in our own lives and practices.

Most walls are erected against the unknown dangers that lurk beyond the safety of the hearth. Since the beginning of human history, mankind has created enclosures around his dwellings in order to delineate ‘inner’ as opposed to ‘outer’, and more importantly ‘safe’ from ‘potentially unsafe’. From this view, not all walls are bad. However, a wall can just as easily be employed for constraint as for protection, and that is the kind of wall I’m writing about here.

How A Foundation Was Built

walls - lilith
‘Lilith’, by John Collier

In the beginning, after some clarting about, the Bible tells us that the Jewish god created a man by the name of ‘Adam’, and a woman by the name of ‘Eve’. The Alphabet of Ben Sira places Eve as Adam’s second wife, a kind of replacement for Lilith who, made of dirt as Adam was, refused to obey and become subservient to him. After all, why should she if they were made of the same materia magica? Lilith then left and refused all attempts to compel her to return to a life of drudgery with Adam.

To circumvent this with woman 2.0, Eve was created from a piece of Adam so that she would have no claim to equality. It would be her lot in life to obey. This would form the foundations of one of the first walls. However, that was not the only foundation found in the myth of utopian Eden. Eve, or indeed every woman she represents, would play a far more damaging role in the mythological history of humankind.

The Garden of Eden is described as a paradise in which its inhabitants neither wanted for anything, nor knew the kind of trouble that disturbs the mind. It is the perfect place created by a loving father god for his children, but with one significant catch: eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was forbidden.

When you pare down this myth, when you remove the language of paradise and lack of want, what you are left with is an enclosure of sorts that is inhabited by people who are kept naked, ignorant, and obedient. From this perspective, the Fall of Man looks more like a jailbreak from an unethical science experiment than the disastrous curse upon humanity that it is often presented as.

What of the serpent, though? It seems impossible to extricate the serpent from Eve herself, the name ‘Eve’, or its Hebrew form ‘Hawwah’ being possibly related to the Hebrew word for ‘serpent’. Watch out for the snakes, it’s all walls - eve snakeabout the snakes. Were it not for the serpent’s temptation, Eve would have never eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, nor would Adam, and mankind would still apparently be living it up in the garden of Eden.

Just ignorant and naked, with no right to one’s body or mind.

Since the Fall, women have been held to be the disobedient and destructive sex, our wombs and vaginas passageways to filth and depravity, and our only salvation to be found in obeying men. In other words, our salvation is to be found in becoming the property of and putting ourselves firmly under the control of men.

“In pain shall you bring forth children, woman, and you shall turn to your husband and he shall rule over you. And do you not know that you are Eve? God’s sentence hangs still over all your sex and His punishment weighs down upon you. You are the devil’s gateway; you are she who first violated the forbidden tree and broke the law of God. It was you who coaxed your way around him whom the devil had not the force to attack. With what ease you shattered that image of God: Man! Because of the death you merited, even the Son of God had to die… Woman, you are the gate to hell. -Tertullian, On the Apparel of Women, chapter 1

This is the foundation of one of the walls in our society, and a wall that for all of our advances in women’s rights, remains one of the strongest to this day. If anything, this wall is being rebuilt in the places where it was torn down, fortified, and new construction sites opened up. We see this in everything from the rise of MRAs, the increased attacks on reproductive freedoms, to the renewed popularity of the insult ‘cuck’ (a word deriving from ‘cuckold’ meaning ‘husband of an adulteress’, in other words, a man who was not able to control his woman – his property – well enough to prevent her from disobeying). On more subtle levels, we may even see the maintenance of and reinforcement of this wall in the censure of opinionated women in communities that might otherwise extol their own perceived egalitarian nature.

This is not the only wall either, I’m sure we could all think of more walls in our lives. Walls that affect how we see and deal with people of color, walls that affect how people of color must move in the world in order to do so with less harassment, walls that mandate that only one kind of sexual relationship is valid, walls that enforce gender binaries that harm people who simply just don’t fit in those boxes…well, you get the idea.

And all the while, we’re told that without those walls there would be chaos, anarchy, the destruction of order. The people of color will want revenge will come and get you without that thin blue line. Men won’t be able to control women and will end up in some 70s B-movie scenario in which men are enclosed in the same walls women are now. The gays will gay up your kids and people will invent new genders. People will marry outside their own cultures, no one will be able to say “Merry Christmas”, and it will probably also rain. We need the wall, the katechon, that which holds back all of those things they’ve taught you to fear.

Look at the media today, how much of it is focused on emphasizing the things that must be held back? How much of it justifies all those barrier construction projects? We need to do better than we are at recognizing it all, at taking a deep breath and deciding what to listen to and what to ignore. How many of our friends are complicit in this on social media? How many have swallowed the propaganda hook, line, and sinker? The first step for all of us is recognizing where the lines are drawn in our outer lives.

But this would not be a magic blog were I only to speak of the outer and political. Here is a place to discuss the inner too.

Or more specifically, once more the realm of dream.

The War on Dream

“Dream, I will argue, is made. The metaphor that first needs to be grasped is one that bears repeating, that of a war on dreaming. The decisive action here is the one embarked upon by John of Patmos, another exile bound to a far flung isle. His was a deliberate action which set out to not merely loose chimeras in the garden of the mind, but to bar the gates of dream itself. So this is where we decant our vitriol and dissolve the locks that John applied, which State and church imposed. This is by no means the end of the process, but the point at which we choose to begin.” – Apocalyptic Witchcraft, Peter Grey

walls - berlin facesDream is a special state of being, one we tend to think of as a place of infinite possibilities in which we may do or experience any number of things that we cannot during waking life. However, from the work of scholars like Lisa Bitel and Jacques LeGoff, we know that our inner dreamscapes are in all likelihood artificially limited. That there are walls there. These are not walls that we can necessarily see from within dream for ourselves – after all, how can we know about the walls if they were set there long before we ourselves even had a chance to dream? However, there is a paper trail that can be followed that shows how clerics attempted to control dreamers and restrict the dreams themselves.

If that very idea doesn’t make you angry, I don’t know that anything can be done for you.

It wasn’t enough to control the waking world, they had to try and find ways to control and restrict the dreaming world too. Dreams came to be labelled as ‘devilish illusion’, and true dreams the sole domain of an elite of saints and Christian kings. Oneiric diversity withered, and the dreams of the common man evaporated from record like the dream that flees upon waking. Nowadays, a medium through which one might have previously entered into the Otherworld of one’s cultural and physical landscape stands weakened by ridicule, pop-psychology, and petty dream dictionaries that tell you nothing.

But we need to be able to dream, and we need to be able to dream fully, because it is through dream that we have some of our most effective communications with the Other. Without that, we will never fully pull down the walls of Christian worldview in our minds, or have those better ideas for new ways of doing things that our world so desperately needs.

The Fight

When I first started to perform the Stele of Jeu ritual from the Greek Magical Papyri (PGM), it was, like for many others who begin this work, initially for the purpose of attaining the knowledge and conversation of a ‘holy guardian angel’ (in my case, more a daimon in the Greek sense). However, the more I performed it, the more I noticed that it was far more important than that. The Stele of Jeu is a freeing ritual, a ritual of unbinding and empowerment. It’s a ritual that tears down walls.

“Holy Headless One, deliver me from all restraining daimons and misfortune”

In Chaos Protocols, Gordon White observes that “One thing I will say with every confidence is that your dreams will certainly get a lot more interesting” as a result of performing the ritual, and I’ve found this to absolutely be the case. My dreams are now far deeper and coherent. They feel far less random and more like I am dealing with other intelligences and indeed, another world.

Yet it does not seem to be an effect that lasts perpetually. There is a drop-off in dreaming quality if I do not perform the rite on a regular basis. My dreams become shallow once more, punctuated only by the rare shining gem of a dream that happens to break through the morass of whatever unseen effects are at work in dream. The wall is resurrected once more and must be torn down anew in order to continue.

A Hidden Front In Plain Sight

We are very mistaken if we think there isn’t some kind of metaphysical war aspect to all of this too. How many of you have ever heard of Christian ‘prayer warriors’? Have you ever read their prayers, or what should more accurately be called spells? Just because they are addressed to the Judeo-Christian god or Jesus does not mean that they aren’t spells; the Grimoires are full of spells with similar language. What of the pope’s decree that Catholics only now store the ashes of their dead in special church-approved places? The dead are mighty, and such a place might be viewed as a source of power for a church that historically hasn’t been exactly shy about using its own magic. And what of the power of meme? We don’t often think of meme as being a potentially magical thing, but when you think about the ways in which memes are similar to sigils in Chaos magic, then they take on another aspect.

“Does not matter, need not be.”

How many of us see a meme, invest emotion into it (usually anger or amusement), and then either scroll on or engage with the discussion around the meme before scrolling on? At least sigil magic is done with intent. See, it is really that nefarious.

There is much to be unwoven here, a lot of unnecessary things that need to be pared away, and walls to be torn downwalls - berliner mauer both in our outer and inner lives. Becoming aware of those walls, and how they are built is only the first step. The next step is working consciously to bring them down through deliberate action, but we can only do that if we first free ourselves, and most importantly our inner worlds. Lastly, we need to counter the magic that enslaves dream and mind, finding ways to appeal to the hearts and minds of others – the Berlin wall was not torn down by the hands of a few, but by many. If there is anything this past election should have taught us, it’s that haughty cold logic and the mere presentation of that which holds back all that is bad is not enough. We need symbols and messages that appeal to not only minds, but hearts and souls too.

There’s a war on, and it’s about time we fought back.

Watch Out for the Snakes, It’s All About the Snakes

A long time ago in a land far away, a land of colour and mystery and things that went BUMP in the night, there lived a girl. Like many others, she had arrived with her backpack heavy with clothes and her mind heavy with dreams. She’d always wanted to travel in the east, ever since she’d read her first library book about China and learned how to snakes - green pythonwrite three simple phrases in Chinese.

“Big man”
“Big man sits down”
“Man too big”

Not that was any use really in Korea, but still.

She even found herself liking the look of the Korean script better than Chinese, its characters reminded her of the fish she used to go catch with her dad as a child; sitting on the banks of the canal and pulling up trout, gudgeon, and the odd tench.

Her first night in Korea was punctuated by a bad case of ‘Dehli Belly’, and waking up to what she thought were three bloodied women at the bottom of her bed, talking at her emphatically with words she didn’t understand. Unsure if she was hallucinating from the dehydration and sickness, she vaguely remembered that civil war and starvation were still within living memory for many in the country and went back to sleep.

The next day she felt better after drinking a little bottle of tonic a co-worker gave her. She didn’t even notice the weird tone her co-worker’s questions took.

“Is your apartment ok?”

“Are you sure?”

Not even when she told her that everything worked as it should and it was quite comfortable.

“Ahhh” *nod* ” But is your apartment…ok?”

These are the things you don’t necessarily pick up or think about until later on when things become apparent that maybe your apartment is a little weird.

It started with the noise of what sounded like a wet body trying to get out of a bathtub coming from the bathroom. From 11pm every night, she would hear and ignore that. At first she investigated it, stood there in the bathroom looking at the tub as the noises emanated from it. It wasn’t the neighbours – those impossible people who managed to be ever so quiet in spite of five kids and plastic walls.

A couple of weeks after that, the toilet exploded. She fixed it, moved on, and ignored the weird vibe in the apartment. She was being watched, and it wasn’t necessarily nice. Deciding to create a ‘safe room’, she worked protections on her bedroom – it’s at least good to get some sleep, right? So what if she could hear the wet body noises every night for two hours? She was good at ignoring things like that.

She met a boy, they hit it off, and thank goodness he was there the night her plastic bathroom ceiling set on fire. Even though the electrician ‘fixed it’ and declared it ‘safe’ with one layer of tape, it was still the end of the bathroom light.

Things moved on their own, from the empty candy tub that sailed ten feet across the room while she was on the phone with her mother, to the toaster oven door that would open and shut on its own. She made sure to always put the chairs under the table before going to bed because part of her was sure she would see figures sitting in them during a late night bathroom trip.

As she gained her feet in the new land, she gained ways of dealing with it. She set up a shrine to appease the spirits with coins. A spirit showed up one evening, “My men call me the General, General Yi”, and she felt a little safer. The next day at work while leafing through books, she found a picture of the man that had leaned over her the night before – General Yi Soon Shin, a native of the area where she was living, made Admiral posthumously. So the General found a place on her shrine too.

Periodically she’d bury the coin pile of offerings that built up and start again, and something resembling an easy peace was kept. When she forgot though, that’s when the scratches would start.

“OMG you have a ghost!”

That had been her boss’s response when she’d seen the scratches – along with her heavily bitten fingernails, nails her boss had gently chided her over before.

Then there were the dreams in Korea, dreams that blurred reality, dreams that bordered on trance and made her feel exhausted come daylight.

Once such dream scared the daylights out of her. It felt significant, a dream of life and death, of witchcraft, underworld beings, and women – goddesses undulating with snakes around their bodies, “watch out for the snakes, it’s all about the snakes.”

It had been so unsettling, she’d awoke, relieved to see her then boyfriend sleeping beside her – until he spoke in his sleep.

Those words.

Again.

“Watch out for the snakes, it’s all about the snakes.”

Where UPG (or Dream) and Research Meet

The thing about dreams and visions is that they don’t always make a whole lot of sense at the time, and it doesn’t mean anything. These things only gain meaning when you figure out their context. Until that point, it’s best to simply file them away for future reference, and keep the to the ‘personal’ aspect of ‘UPG’.

Sometimes they sit there until you forget them, or just put it down to a brain fart. Other times though, you find that context and the meaning hits you like a ten tonne truck.

Sometimes you find that context in a conversation or a place. Other times you find it in a book or indeed many books. No matter where you find it though, the effect is still the same.

It’s like a door unlocks and you’re plunged into potential and new avenues for exploration.

The Hittites used snakes in divinatory practices related to the ancestors, snakes and wells. Snakes and water – routes to the underworld, where a serpent called ‘MUŠ’

‘ sat upon wool being ever bound and unbound. Some IE cultures kept some of these pieces of worldview, some held only the barest echoes. Context found.

“Watch out for the snakes, it’s all about the snakes.”

Slither on down and down.