Tag: Heathen

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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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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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Algorithms

Algorithms.

They’ve just become an accepted part of life, right?

Yet another thing putting adverts in front of our eyes trying to get us to buy more. That unseen force that compels us to add a photo to social media posts as “tax,” so more people see what we have to say.

They even often shape what and how we say what we say.

Take this post, for example. Like the vast majority of blog posts, I’ve tried to write it to make the algorithms happy. I’ve kept my sentences short and have used as much active speech as possible – anything to keep Yoast happy, right?

Twenty words or less per sentence, that’s the standard.

When you really think about it, it’s messed up, but it’s become our norm all the same.

Billions of voices all writing in lockstep with algorithms, all producing a product called content.

You know—that thing I’m doing right here with this post.

Algorithms as Demons

A while ago, I listened to an episode of a podcast called Team Human that discussed algorithms. It was an interesting conversation because it was taking a look at algorithms through the framework of demonology.

No one is saying algorithms are actually demons, of course. Just that, as Mark Pesce argues, algorithms share certain characteristics with demons, or at least a certain view of demons.

To quote the Medium essay I’m using to refresh my memory:

”What might you call a creature that feeds on your energy, knows your weaknesses, and can tamper with your emotional state in ways that compel you to act beyond your best interest? Centuries ago we might call this a demon. As algorithms are programmed to exploit humans in order to do their bidding, perhaps it’s time to interrogate the Faustian bargains we make each time we sign up, log in, and click thru.”


In an age of online occult influencers, this has become a helpful framework for me when navigating matters of authenticity and content. What do we lose when we tailor our content to appease the algorithms enough to be rewarded with virulence? When we aid the algorithms in their exploitation?

A Faustian bargain indeed!

Algorithms and Authenticity

Unfortunately, this bargain is a tough one to break. We live in an economy where the production of such content is often tied to the economic survival of the creator. And herein lies the biggest problem with the commodification of creativity: products are created for customers. Appease the algorithms and your work gets in front of more people. Appease the people, and hopefully that translates to dollars.

Those all-important dollars that keep a roof over your head, clothes on your back, and food on your table.

Those are some pretty hefty motivations, right? They’re downright existential.
But (and this is question I find myself returning to from time to time) what of authenticity?

Because here’s the thing about writing spiritual content (horrible term, but I’m going with it). It is, by its very nature, personal. It’s intimate and subtle in ways that blog posts about chimneys or recipes for cakes are not.

(Please, for the love of Sweet Baby West Virginia Jeebus, Karen, no one wants to read about your fifteen kids! Or your upholstery business. I get there are good reasons why you do this, but please, do the world a solid and add in-page links to the recipes? Sincerely, Everyone.)

Anyway, back to the topic.

For these reasons, one would always hope that content discussing spiritual matters comes from a place of authenticity within the creator. Except I don’t see how it can when survival for so many depends on increasingly getting caught in a trap of uniformity and writing to order vs giving voice to what’s actually in our souls.

But we’ve made our pacts, it’s time to make the best of it.

Walking the Balance

For me, creativity is a whole-making, inspirited thing, and the inspiration that fuels it, sacred. There’s almost an element of horror for me when I consider this issue. Because if creativity and inspiration can be spirit work (and for me, my various souls are also spirits in their own rights), then what of them in all of this? How do they dance with the algorithms?

At times, I think they dance well together. Sometimes the stories and ideas those spirits want to get out mesh well with the algorithms. Other times, that dance is hard. That line of appeasing algorithms and audiences can become a noose while remaining true to those stories and ideas.
Of course, none of that erases any of our existential needs. Bellies still need filling and bills still need paying.

The key then perhaps is being mindful of the dance and striving for balance.
According to Douglas Rushkoff, creator of Team Human, weirdness is our best weapon. So perhaps sprinkling in some authenticity by way of letting your particular brand of freak flag fly is the way to go? (But be careful to be authentic with your weirdness for that too can also be commodified. I know, I fucking hate this world for shit like this.)

Embrace your weird, talk about your fuck ups, be subversively human.
(Just remember to use the active voice and do it in twenty words per sentence or less.)

And if you can, don’t be afraid to ignore the current discourse du jour unless it’s something you actually care about.

Final Word

The purpose of this post wasn’t to make anyone feel bad. It was a call to my fellow authors and creators to think about that line where appeasement and authenticity meet in our work. There are plenty of other conversations to be had here too. Such as platforms and responsibility, social media and mental health, and honoring our comfort levels and authenticity while trying to make that cabbage. Today though, I wanted to talk about the dance we often find ourselves performing for the algorithms. It’s quickly paced and can be exciting at times, and it’s easy to get swept up—especially when people begin to copy you.

But don’t forget you have your own steps too. They also need to be danced if you want to keep yourself whole.

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Tower Time and Children

.In John Beckett’s blog last week, he tackled the question of how to prepare and explain the concept of Tower Time to Pagan children without giving them nightmares.

John was very upfront about the limitations of his advice as a non-parent, and focused more on practical matters as well as age-appropriate dissemination of knowledge. Because as John wisely said (and it bears repeating here): “Young children shouldn’t be burdened with troublesome projections about the future.”

It was a good answer, and I’m really glad he took the question on. Because if there is a conversation we need to be having in our Heathen, Pagan and Witch communities, it’s how we can support our children during a period of time many are referring to as Tower Time. (If you are new to the concept of ‘Tower Time’, I invite you to read more about it here from the originator of the term. I have also posted some of my musings of Tower Time here.)

The Brave New World of Do All The Things!

As John also wisely observed, Tower Time isn’t some far away apocalypse that we’re supposed to be prepping for – it’s already here. It’s both the background music and protagonist in the drama of our time.

When the pandemic first hit and schools closed, a lot of wonderful community-minded people set up online events for children. Parents in local groups posted overly ambitious Pinterest schedules for their families and children. People made homemade hand sanitizer, grew sourdough starters and worried about where the next rolls of toilet paper would come from.

We sewed masks, traded supplies with our neighbors, and shared any and all tip-offs we got about where to find help and supplies.

But one year in and around a half a million dead later (in the US alone), things look pretty different. People are struggling in every way imaginable, previously papered-over issues have been brought into sharp relief, and we may now actually be hitting the ominously named “third quarter”.

Science is winning though. The battle has been long, and the doctors and lab coat warriors courageous. We can at least see a light at the end of the tunnel now.

It’s just going to take a while to get there and there’ll probably be a few more bumps before we do.

Children in Tower Time

And maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if it were only the isolation of the pandemic to deal with? But a month and change ago my child got to watch me pack bug out bags for our family. (Because why not also throw an attempted coup in there as well?)

I mean, we clearly didn’t have enough shit to be getting on with before Y’all Q’aeda rolled up at the Capitol Building after weeks of planning their glorious revolution/liberal purge over on Parler.

And then there’s systemic racism, growing economic inequality, and increasing environmental challenges to deal with as well.

The big, crumbling, future-threatening towers are pretty obvious.

But what about our children in all of this?

We can teach skills in preparedness and give the best explanations in the world. Those things are helpful. But our kids are still going to struggle – they are still struggling. And is it any surprise? Hell, we adults have explanations and an entire internet full of preparedness skills to learn and how many of us are struggling?

Children don’t live in boxes – they’re often a lot more perceptive than we give them credit for and sometimes it’s what we don’t say that ends up worrying them the most.

So I guess the question here is how best to support them in this Tower Time?

I’m going to be honest with you right now: I have no answers here. I’m struggling with this too.

(Hopefully) Keeping Our Children Hale and Whole

The question of what we can do for our children in this shitty semi-apocalyptic scenario is one I think a lot of us have struggled with. And depending on where you live and the levels of infection in your community, you may not have a whole lot of choices. (This is me, I live in such a community.)

For the most part adults have gone virtual, and that’s actually turned out to be a pretty great thing for a lot of people. A whole slew of events are suddenly a lot more accessible to more people and I hope that virtual element is something event organizers retain once the world finally reopens.

But as fulfilling as many adults have found the virtual option to be, I imagine it must feel pretty weird for a category of human that ordinarily prefers to play away from the watchful eyes of parents who might tell them off for doing dumb kid stuff.

And sure, we can also focus on teaching them the skills we believe they may need in the years to come (while providing age-appropriate explanations of events). But I think a lot of people are wondering where Pagan or Heathen religious beliefs come into it as well. After all, how many of us turn to our beliefs when times are tough?

As I said before, I really don’t have any solid answers here. I do however, have a few points I’d like to throw out there for consideration should a wider conversation about children happen within our communities.

1. Religion and Resilience

Religion can be a real source of comfort for a lot of people, and has been shown to be a resilience factor in a number of studies now.

According to Dr Michael Ungar who studies resilience, religion can help children to be resilient as well. But as Dr Ungar also points out, it’s more likely the resources that are associated with religion that are the source of that resilience as opposed to the spiritual beliefs themselves. So we can’t exactly be like, “Here’s a deity, pray to them and feel better.”

Membership in a religion can confer a host of benefits for a child. It can bring relationships and community. Religion can give children a sense of identity in which to anchor themselves. Depending on the religion in question, a child may even get to make decisions within ritual and possibly also gain a feeling of control. Participation in religious groups can also give a child the opportunity to engage in acts of generosity which can make them feel good. Religious communities often meet the physical needs of children too through their charitable programs. And finally, participation in rituals and holidays can help give a child a sense of routine and prove grounding.

So with those points in mind, I think the importance of tackling this subject as a community is clear. If we are to be in-community with others then we must consider the needs of all age groups.

2.a. Storytelling and Cooperative Gaming

One of the needs I think is the hardest for us to meet for our children (again, depending on where we live), is socialization and the need for friendship.

My child has historically avoided Zoom-based hangouts with other children outside of school. The prospect has always seemed about as appealing as a fart in a spacesuit to her. But her Friday afternoon My Little Pony Zoom RPG session is becoming a firm favorite.

For those of you who have never played RPGs (Role-Playing Games), they are a form of collective storytelling in which players and the person running the game imaginatively co-create story together.

Humans have told stories since some of our earliest days and stories are probably our biggest consumable. They are the TV shows and movies we watch, the books we read, and games we play. Not all forms of story consumption are equal though, and some confer benefits that others do not. For example, people who read fiction have consistently been shown to have stronger social cognition abilities than those who don’t. When it comes to TV and movies, studies on mirror neurons suggest that the same parts of the brain that are activated when you perform a goal-oriented action are also activated when you view someone else doing it too! And RPGs have been shown to enable people to fulfill a range of social needs (such as friendship maintenance).

In short, story (depending on how you consume it),can be wonderful for everything from social cognition and friendship maintenance, to fulfilling social needs and possibly maintaining or increasing neuroplasticity by activating areas of the brain you may not otherwise ordinarily use.

Story is important, but perhaps it becomes even more so to socially isolated children?

2.b. Story and the Child

Now I’m not saying to give them a free reign over TV and Minecraft. Just that in a world of inorganic Zoom-based interactions, something like gathering to play in a well-loved fictional setting (such as My Little Pony), may be a good option for social interaction with other kids. And the cool thing about fantastical settings, is that even with parental supervision/help, the children can still feel relatively free to explore (which I think probably makes everything so much less awkward for them).

After all, no one is going to get into trouble for “teleporting the bad guy’s head off”.

Moreover, depending on the age of the child, RPGs can and often do include mythological themes (some of them particularly well researched) and can be an avenue for learning Pagan and Heathen mythologies.

Finally, RPGs can also be played within the family and provide a safe outlet for difficult emotions. Which I think we can all agree is something a lot of us struggle with from time to time.

Just a warning though, children’s storytelling can be quite twisted and bizarre (and this is apparently super normal).

3. Tower Time is The Long Game

Finally, I just want to talk about the ‘long game’ here. Because Tower Time is not going away any time soon, and nor will its mark upon us.

Pandemics, societal unrest, attempted coups and environmental disaster are all high stress situations/events. Even if we were to solve all the things in the most perfect way, the effects of this era are going to haunt us all for years to come. And when it comes to the children growing up in this time, I would guess those effects are going to be far more profound.

This is something that will affect this entire generation and I think we need to be prepared for that.

The “Little” Things

Before finishing this insanely long post though, I just want to say something that I hope brings hope to those of you out there who are looking at your kids and feeling kind of powerless and burned out by everything:

Don’t underestimate the little things.

When I look back to my own childhood growing up and the challenges my generation faced there, the things I keep coming back to are the “little” ways in which my parents consistently showed love. We were poor – very poor in fact. We were the kind of poor where we had back-up plans that involved foraging, setting snares on the local moors, and gathering wood (my dad kept the old chimney in place for reasons). I was the kid in homemade clothes with thrift store Christmas gifts bulking up the presents my parents scrimped and saved to get us all year. But although times were clearly not great for us then, my childhood isn’t some blot in my memory.

I remember the love there. The work my mum put into those clothes she knitted and stitched for us. Her hugs. I think about the way her voice still sounds like a hug even 3,500 miles away. And I think of traveling with my dad in his truck during school vacations and talking about all kinds of things. Because that’s when I got to see him the most.

I’m no expert on this. And I think what our kids are going through now is way worse than anything I experienced. But still, I think those so-called “little things” play a big role.

And we shouldn’t underestimate them. They’re not a “fix” by any stretch, but I think knowing you’re loved maybe goes a long way. And I dearly hope the conversation about how we and our communities can support children during these trying times takes root.

Until the next time.

Be well.

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Heathen Deity Relationships

The Relationship Divide

If you’ve been around the wider Heathen community for any amount of time, then you’ve probably heard this one before. It’s something that comes out whenever people start discussing their relationships and experiences with individual gods. At some point in the conversation, someone will invariably come along and tell everyone that such individual deity relationships are a modern thing. That deity worship was communal – something that was only done as a community. And that the gods are far too important to bother with relationships with lowly individual humans. So stick to your ancestors (at their gravesites) and the local spirits, guys!

But for all the appeals to historical authority in these arguments, I don’t see a lot of actual historical support for them.

A Word on ‘Relationships’

Before getting into the evidence though, I need to clarify what I mean by ‘relationship’ here. Because for most people, the connotation is of a sexual or romantic relationship. And while there are certainly modern practitioners who claim that kind of relationship with certain deities, that is not the only kind of relationship meant here. As we will see, there are a number of types of relationship possible with deities (as there are other humans). My use of the word ‘relationship’ in this post is intended in this more general sense.

Textual Evidence

Generally speaking, modern Heathens tend to be more familiar with the textual sources than archaeological evidence, so this is where we’ll start.

Roughly 1/4 of a ‘Heathen Starter Pack’ circa 1998-2000.

If you are like me, and first encountered Heathenry in the 90s, then you’re probably quite familiar with the term fulltrúi. Everyone seemed to be/have one back then (yay for horrible anglophone understandings of ON terms!). There was definitely a sense that ‘having’ a fulltrúi was part of the ‘Heathen Starter Pack’ (along with a horn, bowl, and hammer pendant).

One of the biggest problems with modern Heathenism is that we all seem to be incapable of being anything but extra AF. We do backlashes like no one else. After over twenty years in Heathenry, I feel like I can almost guarantee that if we go balls to the wall on one thing, a whole other group of us will go balls to the wall in completely the opposite direction. And this is what I suspect lay beneath a lot of the backlash to the use and abuse of fulltrúi back in the late 90s/early 2000s. (For a similar response, see the ‘UPG vs recon’ debate).

Modern fuckery aside though, there is evidence of relationships in which a

Eh…not quite.

deity was described as being the fulltrúi of a person in the primary sources. For example, in cha. 9 of Víga-Glums Saga, a man called Þorkell refers to the god Freyr as his fulltrúi. And in cha. 8 of Eiríks saga rauða , Þórhall refers to Þórr as his fulltrúann. Now it’s worth bearing in mind here that the word fulltrúi held a variety of meanings in Old Norse (as it does in modern Icelandic), and could be used to refer to deities, humans, and inanimate objects alike. Fulltrúi could be a confidant, patron, protector – someone you can fully trust. In modern Icelandic, it tends to refer to someone who is an agent or service representative. So it’s important to realize that the word ‘fulltrúi’ isn’t some specifically religious term.

But in all cases, where it is used, it is indicative of different kinds of relationship.

Other Relationships with Deities: Hrafnkel Edition

But these two examples of fulltrúi are not the only evidence of different kinds of relationships between deities and humans (or worship on an individual level). Another excellent example of a deity-human relationship is that of Hrafnkel and Freyr in Hrafnkels saga. In the second chapter of Hrafnkels saga, we’re told the following:

”Hrafnkel loved no god more than Freyr, and to Freyr had devoted a half share of all his greatest valuables.” (Translation taken from Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson A Piece of Horse Liver)

On the surface, Hrafnkels saga seems to be a story about the uselessness of such relationships with deities. Hrafnkel’s behavior as a result of his religious dedication is quite extreme at times (especially from our modern perspective), and that extremism seems to lead to his downfall. Hrafnkel is famous for having jointly kept a horse with Freyr by the name of Freyfaxi, and for swearing an oath to kill anyone who dared to ride him without permission. But as always, such an oath seems to be like that proverbial ‘big red button’ that shouldn’t be pushed, and the sanctity of Freyfaxi is inevitably violated by a herdsman who decides to take the horse for the 10th century equivalent of a ‘joy ride’.

“Hrafnkell, that herdsman asshole *rode* me! Go get him for me?”

Interestingly, the horse seems to come and inform Hrafnkel of the violation and Hrafnkel sets off to kill the herdsman (Aðalsteinsson 1998, 116-117).

Now if there’s one thing Icelanders seemed to enjoy back in the day (I’m joking here, they didn’t), it was a good, old-fashioned blood feud. And as you might imagine, the herdsman’s father did not take the death of his kid well. To cut a long story short though, this killing started a chain of events that saw Hrafnkel’s temple destroyed, Freyfaxi killed, and Hrafnkel himself in some severe legal shit.

Okay, so that wasn’t that big of a deal compared with other Icelandic feuds (I’m looking at you, Njáls saga!)

In the saga, Hrafnkel’s devotion seems one-sided on his part. Yet as scholars such as Aðalsteinsson have pointed out, it’s no coincidence that the devotee of a god of fertility then went on to experience good luck with his meager livestock, or that great shoals of fish began to appear in the lake near his home. Aðalsteinsson also makes the argument that Hrafnkel’s declaration that he would no more believe in gods is out of keeping with what we know of tenth century Icelandic religion, but that’s another matter and beyond the scope of this post (Aðalsteinsson 124-125).

Other Relationships with Deities: Wife/Priestess of Freyr Edition

It may sound simplistic to say this, but the world of the Viking Age (and before) was not our world, and if we’re being honest with ourselves, would probably be quite alien to us in a lot of respects. This is something that Neil Price acknowledges in the second edition of The Viking Way when he makes the observation that ”we seem reluctant to acknowledge that aspects of these and many other facets of their lives come to us filtered through a world-view that most of us would find incomprehensibly distant, unpalatable, even terrifying.”

Their world was not ours, and this may very well explain the sense of taboo or even mockery towards the concept of sexual and marital relationships with deities.From the perspective of modern humans born and grown in predominantly Christian societies, this is delusion at best, and blasphemous hubris at worst. But if the textual evidence found in Gunnars þáttr helmings is indicative of attitudes towards such relationships in the Heathen period, then party on, deity spouses!

The þáttr is set in around the tenth century (but written in the fourteenth century), and as the name suggests, relates the exploits of a man called Gunnarr.

Now Gunnarr was something of a character. If he were from where I grew up, we’d probably have referred to him as a “ right rum un”, and this “right rum un” was on the run from none other than King Óláfr Tryggvason of Norway. Gunnarr ends up hiding out in a sanctuary in Sweden where he encounters an idol of Freyr and his wife.

Per the þáttr ” it was the peasants’ belief that Freyr was alive, as in some ways it seemed he was, and they thought he would need to have marital relations with his wife.”

Freyr and his wife don’t just stay at the sanctuary though, and Gunnarr obtains

“Listen, if the wain is rocking, DON’T come knocking!”
-Gunnarr, maybe.

permission from Freyr’s wife to accompany them in the wagon ‘when he makes the season better for men’. So he goes on the road with Freyr’s wife and the Freyr idol, leading them from place to place until one day they find themselves stuck in a snowstorm on a mountain road. At this point, Freyr’s idol comes to life and fights Gunnarr (+1 points for living idols, yo), and Gunnarr fights back. Unfortunately the story becomes a conversion narrative at this point, because Gunnarr, while getting his ass whooped by idol-Freyr, begs the Christian god to help him in exchange for converting and eventually wins. Then, because Gunnarr was indeed a “right rum un”, he spent a bunch of time telling people he was Freyr, sleeping with Freyr’s wife, and eventually getting her pregnant (North 24-25).

The Swedes for their part didn’t seem to give a shit that the Freyr was now a human man either. They had good weather for their crops and that was the important thing there.

Now, shitty (and rather predictable) conversion narrative aside, assuming this þáttr reflects Heathen period practice with regards to Freyr’s wife, the wider community role of this woman was clear. Her position was not questioned and nor was it taboo. Even when it became somewhat farcical with Gunnarr blatantly pretending to be Freyr, the Swedes were more about the outcome than anything else. As long as the weather did its thing and the crops grew, it was all good.

Archaeological Evidence

In my opinion though, some of the best evidence for individual worship comes from archaeology. There are a number of statues that have been found that are interpreted to represent different gods.

The statues I present here date to the Viking Age. Pay attention to their size!

First we have the Rällinge statuette. As you can see, he’s a very well-endowed figure. Unsurprisingly, he’s been interpreted as a representation of Freyr. But for all of his blessings beneath the belt, this ‘God of the World’ is all of 7cm/2.75” tall. So, pocket-sized for your convenience. Just ask Ingimund from the Vatnsdæla saga about his missing Freyr amulet..

 

 

 

 

Odin from Lejre, Denmark

Next up is the one that triggers all the bro types. Yes, it’s this lovely silver and niello figure from Lejre that’s interpreted as Óðinn (but you see he’s wearing lady clothes so that’s bad apparently). Once again, he’s pocket sized for your convenience, measuring only 18mm tall (0.7”).

After that, we have the Eyarland Þórr statuette.
This guy comes in at 6.7cm/2.6” (with his hammer taking up a good deal of those centimeters/inches).

Finally, in before anyone can say “but that was Viking Age and a response to Christianity”, here’s the migration period Trollhätten “Tyr” bracteate.

The funny thing about Heathen responses to Christianization is that per Danish archaeologist Lotte Hedeager, the entire myth of Tyr losing his hand was a migration period invention created in response to Christianization (Lotte Hedeager, Iron Age Myth and Materiality, pp 207 – 211). There are literally hundreds of years of Heathen responses to Christianization before what we typically think of as the conversion period in the North.

So what can we take from these statuettes?

They simply don’t make sense for community worship, and as the Vatnsdæla saga story of Ingimund and his Freyr amulet demonstrates, people do seem to have carried personal deity representations. Why would they have done this if only communities looked to gods?

Important Lessons for Modern Relationships

There are more examples I could have included here, but this blog post is already quite long (congratulations for making it this far), so I will move on to summarizing a few of the ‘lessons’ I think we could take from these sources.
The first is despite the examples given here, it seems to have been perfectly fine to just go to community events and do your part to uphold the customs of the community. Then as now, not everyone is going to be Hrafnkell or Þorkell level of relationship. And that’s fine.

One of the coolest things about these sources for me is the way in which people largely just did their own thing and didn’t really overly-concern themselves with what other people were up to in terms of belief and ritual unless it bled out onto the community level. Unless you have good reason to believe that someone is causing harm to others (and especially to those who cannot consent), it’s fine to just let people do what they’re doing. So if someone wants to set up a hof, start a cult around the worship of a preserved horse dick, or start some peripatetic Freyr sex cult, whatever. As long as it’s informed, consensual, and not illegal, go for it! You go get your damn völsi on.

But whatever you do, I think it’s wise to remember that these relationships go both ways, that that trustworthiness isn’t just something to be expected of a deity, but also on our end too. If you consider a deity to be your fulltrúi, ask yourself, are you really a faithful friend to the deity? Because sure, you can’t do nearly as much for them as they do for us, but wise kings always value their trustworthy followers. It’s the same kind of thing here. So don’t rush into these kinds of things, and remember that relationships are not built on oaths alone.

Sources
Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson – A Piece of Horse Liver: Myth, Ritual, and Folklore in Old Icelandic Sources
Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson – Under the Cloak: A Pagan Ritual Turning Point in the Conversion of Iceland
Lotte Hedeager – Iron Age Myth and Materiality: An Archaeology of Scandinavia AD 400 – 1000
Richard North – Heathen Gods in Old English Literature
Neil Price – The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia (2nd Ed.)
The Old Norse World 
The Saga Database

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The Work of Our Time: COVID-19 Edition

The world (or at least my part of it) has changed since the last time I blogged. We now find ourselves in a global pandemic facing a tsunami of illness and death. We live in a world of ‘shelter-in-place’, ‘social-distancing’, and ‘lockdowns’, and society has been turned on its head with the “essential” 1% being shown to be far less essential than the healthcare workers, trash collectors, department of public works Work - caduceusemployees, and grocery store clerks (among others, please forgive me if I missed you).

This pandemic has been illuminating in other ways too.

Those of us with chronic illness have learned just how many of our friends and loved ones are okay with COVID-19 ‘just’ killing ‘those people’. (Psst, we are ‘those people’, and sorry bud, but it doesn’t ‘just’ kill ‘those people’ anyway.) Healthcare workers are hailed as heroes even as they’re being sent to the frontlines of this fight with insufficient PPE, and a whole host of gig workers and minimum wage staff are forced to risk their health and maybe their lives to hopefully avoid homelessness and starvation with no PPE.

And yet, the entitled Chads and Karens of this world are still bitching about the ‘injustice’ of being unable to go boating on the bay on nice days.

As the meme goes, ‘if COVID is a black lamp, America is a cum-stained hotel room’. This public health crisis has illustrated the weaknesses of the inherent iniquities in our society like nothing else.

The deaths are climbing, but this is still the calm before the storm. This is the boiling sea before the deluge that sweeps away lives and tosses them aside like broken driftwood.

The Storm and Tower Time

When I was younger, I used to wonder if people had sensed the coming of major disasters, or killing times like WWI and WWII in a way that went beyond political analysis. It just didn’t seem possible to me that there hadn’t been dreams, visions, or some kind of extrasensory ‘tip off’ about these things given the level of resulting mass trauma. Unsurprisingly, when you dig into the stories around these events, it’s not uncommon to find premonitions of impending doom.

People have been writing about ‘The Storm’ and  ‘Tower Time’ in the Pagan blogosphere for a while now, and many of us have privately confessed our intuitions to each other that ‘something is coming’, that ‘something’ is ramping up and going to happen.  The thing about prophecy and intuition though, is that timing is often quite hard to parse. How much of what we declared to be ‘Tower Time’ before was preview, and how much of it was us actually existing within that temporal space?

Moreover, where did ‘The Storm’ come into it all? Was ‘The Storm’ the preview to the Tower as we see in the card? After all, it’s a bolt of lightning that brings the top of the tower down.

Tower Time has been on the cards for a while now, but it’s always been a feeling of ‘not yet’ for me. Now though, I’m getting the ‘yes now’ ringing clearly. The die has been cast, and if my cards are to be believed, this is but one thing in a chain of fundamentally changing events.

Doing the Work

Which brings me to the work of this time.

Before now, the exhortation to ‘do the work’ has always been annoyingly vague to me, and the examples cited have often just been the things I do anyway. If anything, it felt like we were weathering the circumstances similarly to how one weathers a storm. But of late, ‘the work’, and what it entails, has come sharply into focus along with The Tower.

These are the activities I consider to be the most important parts of the Work of our time.

Offerings

The biggest work I’m seeing the need for right now is making offerings to the hale and holy powers. This is complete UPG, but there is a sense that the gods are also fighting something in my part of the ThisWorld, and that they need Work - offeringofferings.

If this is a vibe you’re also feeling, then I invite you to join me in making offerings to them on the full moon (4/7). Make them before then too – but make the full moon date special. Tell your friends. Turn it into a thing. Have Zoom rituals if you want. Just show those hale and holy powers in your life some major love, (and especially those with the ability to renew and regenerate).

In addition to this, I am also making offerings to the local spirits. Because if we have pissed them off (and possibly provoked them to inflict a virus on us as some traditional healing modalities suggest), then it’s just common sense to apologize and try to appease them. It can be as simple as a stick of incense in your backyard, or milk poured at the base of any trees or bushes you have. Please do not violate any stay at home or shelter in place orders to do this. The best way we can protect each other is to physically stay away from each other in times like these. So be considerate in how you make your offerings.

Healing Work/Supplication to Healing/Disease Subduing Deities

Work with any healing deities or deities that are known for subduing disease? Great! Make offerings to them! Do healing work in their name. Pray, pray, and pray some more for them to step in and help the folks who are sick and dying, as well as their family members and the frontline medical staff working to save them.

Pray for protection for those healthcare workers too (and harass your congress people about that PPE). If they fall, things will become immeasurably worse for all of us. And shit, but they deserve to come home safe to their families.

Singing the Dead

In my opinion, this is by far one of the most important parts of the work of our time. In a couple of weeks, we’re going to have a lot of dead people. And these are people who are going to have passed in terrifying, lonely circumstances.  I already personally know one person  with the story of only being able to say goodbye to a dying relative over FaceTime because they could not risk allowing family members to be with the dying because of the risk of infection.

That is going to make for a lot of hurt dead who aren’t necessarily going to get to where they need to go. The thought of this is absolutely heartbreaking to me, and so I’ve started praying for and singing the dead every night. At the moment, my songs are improvised. My usual psychopomp song (A Lyke Wake Dirge) seems insufficient for this purpose. But if I come upon something particularly good, I will share here.

Because I cannot go to the places where the dead are, I am relying on songs of enticement to pull the dead in and guide them home, and I advise you to make that your focus too. So please, again, stay home, find ways to work from home in your tradition, and stay the hell away from hospitals.

Loving the Living

As a few bloggers have remarked, the term ‘social distancing’ is something of a misnomer in the age of internet. What we are really talking about when we say ‘social distancing’ is physical distance. We can still support each other even at a distance.

These times are hard, and a lot of people are struggling with the enormity of the challenges we face. Many of us are also experiencing anxiety and going through some form of mourning, and that will only become keener as death closes in on us. So, part of the work needs to be checking in with each other, leading community worship/online events, and creating systems of support. These systems do not have to be solely religious in nature either. Religion should not be the only justification for gathering together (in cyberspace). What about your local community where you are? What about your neighbors? What about the folks you happen to share passions with? The more community networks we have the better.  The way our society previously worked was detrimental to communities and was isolating. There are reasons for this, shitty reasons. We don’t need to fall back into that again. We’re stronger when we’re together.

The Tower Made Stone

Three days ago, on the 28th of March, many of us were confronted with the literal image of The Tower in the city of Baltimore. Lightning struck the steeple of the Urban Bible Fellowship Church causing it to partially collapse and

Work - tower
Credit: Baltimore Sun

damage the adjacent Institute of Notre Dame. (Another year, another Notre Dame?)

As far as omens go, this one is loud.

We weathered the storm, the lightning struck, and Tower time is now. But how much will burn, how far the steeple will fall, what the wreckage will look like, and how we’ll recover is anyone’s guess. So do the work as you see it, choose as wisely as you can, and grow community like kudzu. Our survival in whatever comes next may depend on it.

May as many of us as possible live to see it.

Be well, my friends.

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Lessons from the Winds: Óðinn and Breath

I stand on a path on a rocky moor, the clouds like steel overhead. Below me the wild, deep azure of the river cuts through the valley. It’s cold here, and noisy as I walk. I hear the rush of the water and feel the wind beating against my ears.

I follow the noise to the source – a waterfall, but it isn’t just any waterfall.

Goðafoss sits like a watery giant reclining against the hard rock face of the valley to stretch out feet into the land around. There is a sense of expansiveness, but also layers of story stored in the depths.

Þorgeir and his Cloak

One of those stories is that of the godposts of Þorgeir Ljósvetningagoði Þorkelsson. Þorgeir you see, was a lawspeaker who lived around 1000 CE, a time when Christianity was putting down roots in the north. The crisis faced by the people of Iceland was one of conversion, and it had fallen to Þorgeir to decide how to proceed as he was the one person trusted by both Heathen and Christian alike.

Þorgeir’s decision was unenviable. On the one hand, there was growing pressure from Norway for the Icelanders to convert, and many Icelanders had already converted. But on the other, those who remained Heathen in Iceland wished to continue to worship the gods of their forefathers.

Now that’s a very condensed version of what was going on when Þorgeir elected to go under the cloak to see what was to be done.

Going under the cloak is one of those Heathen period magical practices that doesn’t get a whole lot of attention by modern Heathens. (There are a few Óðinn - cloakpractices like that though, if I’m being honest.)

Part of the problem is that we don’t really know a whole lot about the practice. But we can be reasonably certain that for Þorgeir, on that fateful day at Þingvellir, it was a method of seeking wisdom about a seemingly impossible situation.

And so he went under the cloak, lying as though sleeping or dead for long hours until he surfaced and made the announcement that a decision had been reached: the Icelanders were to publicly become Christians, but were able to keep their ancestral ways privately.

What’s in a Name?

It’s hard to imagine how Þorgeir must have felt after making that decision. He himself was a Heathen, and yet one of the first things he did on leaving the Allþing was to cast his godposts into the rushing depths of Goðafoss.

This is why it’s called ‘Goðafoss’; it’s the waterfall of the gods (though some say ‘goði’ as Þorgeir was a goði).

The Lone Weirdo

I’d gone to Goðafoss as part of a Land Sea Sky tour group. I was a presenter on the tour, along with the incomparable Morgan Daimler, and I’d been experimenting with a method for going under the cloak that had been yielding interesting results.
That was my plan at the waterfall of the gods, and that’s what I did.

I’m probably in the background in a bunch of tourist photos – a lone weirdo hooded and wrapped in a shawl of serpentine patterns lying down as though to take a nap.

But that’s okay, I hope they found the falls as special as I did.

Now I’m not here today to talk about the experience of going under the cloak, or how I do that. I have a description of my entire process (as well as how I came to practice in that way) in my upcoming book that’s coming out at the end of this year/early next year.

(Did I mention that yet? I don’t think I did. Btw guys, I’ve got a book coming out on Heathen magic.)

No, today I’m here to talk about what happened after I got up from the cloak and the practice I discovered from that experience. That is what I would like to share today – what I’m being nudged to share.

Óðinn Gave Breath

So I get up from the ground and dust myself off. But suddenly, I become aware of the sound of heavy wing beats even above the din of the waters. I feel them in my heart even, and search them out with my eyes.

Two ravens fly the breadth of the waterfall and come up the opposite side of the river to draw level with me.

Time slows, becomes weighty with presence and I know that I’m being shown something.

I feel my breath mingle with the wind – with Óðinn, the god who first gave breath-soul to humans. For a long moment there is a communion of sorts. But this isn’t just a connection with a god. He’s there too but it’s bigger than that. Instead it’s like my sense of self falls away, expanding to include the world and people around me, and it’s wonderful. A true place of potential.

Connecting With Óðinn Through Breath

Think about every breath you take. From the beginning of life when a baby takes that first breath before releasing a scream into the world, to the end when those borrowed breaths are finally released back to the winds, breath is our constant companion. This is life, death, interconnectedness, and the mother of spoken sounds.

Some say the Old English Rune Poem credits the Old Man as the source of all speech. I think in a sense he is.

This is how I like to check in with Óðinn, and I think some of you might like it too.

The best place to do this is outside, preferably in a high place where the winds blow wild. Those have always been the places where I’ve felt his presence the strongest.

For a Heathen, relationships are built with gifting, so bring a gift with you (wine is good). Prayers don’t hurt either. Then simply sit and focus on your breath.

This works best when you can forget about all the things that keep you separate and different from the rest of the world. Óðinn is a mutable god. He is a god of masks and becoming other people as needed. Hell, even his name refers to temporary states of being! It’s a lot easier if you try to become mutable too.

You won’t always experience his presence when you do this. But there are worse ways to spend a morning or evening than exploring the interconnectedness of breath and wind on a hill somewhere so it’s no loss.

Just be sure to dress for the weather.

And that’s it.

Happy Wednesday, all!

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The Gold in Heathenry

heart - gold

I haven’t had the chance to blog for a while. I was going to do a whole Q&A about the dead and ancestor veneration. But sometimes, a topic comes up that is just so front and center in the old noggin that you just can’t ignore it.

I’d like to talk (rant?) today about Heathenry. Or rather the bullshit that drags Heathenry down and sullies its gold.

I’ve been a Heathen for a long time. Honestly, I’ve been Heathen longer than some of you good folks have been alive. I’m married to a Heathen too, and magical adventures aside, our collective hearth cult is predominantly Heathen.

For me, Heathenry is, as my friend Andrea would say, “a heritage of gold”. The stories you find in the Old Norse and Germanic sources hold true beauty and wisdom if you have eyes to see it.

But the problem is, not everyone has eyes to see that gold, and all too often, those stories become tainted by the toxic filters we ourselves can bring to those texts.

The Eyes and Hearts We Bring to Myth

In many ways, these stories can be like a Rorschach test that reveals the inner insecurities and fears of a person. This is what is really at the root of the incessant fapping off over Vikings, and toxic ideas about tribe and ancestry. The people who fall into these traps want to feel anything but what they actually feel. They don’t want to feel all those insecurities and fears, and so they try to mask it with what they perceive as “strength”. This is the core of what is at stake for a fascist. This is why they fight so hard against anything resembling sense.

In doing this though, they only achieve the opposite. It’s no kind of strength to run or hide from one’s feelings, or to hate people who look different to you. Hate isn’t strength. The ‘separate but equal’ nonsense that’s often dressed up as ‘I just want to be with “my folk” (but don’t really hate others)’ isn’t strength either. ( Hot tip: If that’s an explanation you’re going with, you’re just in the phase where you’re still trying to find “polite” ways of saying “POC scare me and/or give me an inferiority complex”.)

Whereas my Heathenry is expansive and wondrous, theirs is reductive and cuts out anything that discomforts them. Where they only see trees in tree - goldisolation, mine sees each tree as it is: connected through roots and mycorrhizal fungi to other trees. Trees that have been found to provide mutual aid to each other regardless of tree ‘type’.

In Völuspá, the story goes that people come from trees. This isn’t scientifically true but we could learn a lot from trees all the same.

Just don’t try to give me that tired old adage about how ‘a tree without roots will fall’, and act like it somehow sensibly explains the obsession with DNA and skin color. Because the Hávámál the far right Heathens like to quote so much says nothing about tree roots and ancestors.

You know what it does talk about though? Having people who love you:

The withered fir-tree which stands on the mound,
neither bark nor needles protect it;
so it is with the man whom no one loves’
why should he live for long?
Hávámál 50, Larrington trans.

Without love, every person falls.

The Groaning Tree

Yggdrasil shudders, the tree standing upright,
the ancient tree groans, and the giant is loose.
Völuspá 47, Larrington trans.

In all honesty, I’m tired of trying to keep the gold clean, but it’s important to keep trying all the same. This is a sacred duty, and for too long we Heathens have allowed the ill to define us. Worse still, when we form communities, we often do so by defining what we are not as opposed to what we are, and in this way they shape us too. I don’t know that this is the same in other parts of the world, but this has very much been my experience in the US Heathen scene.

However in my opinion, this is entirely the wrong way to build community and/or counter the far right elements in our faith.

We need to begin by naming these people for what they are.

These are not people who are hale and whole. They’re damaged and broken on the inside. They are not inheritors of that gold, and no amount of DNA-testing, ‘pure-blood’ anything will make them so.

the ancient tree groans, and the giant is loose

giant - goldThe word Jötunn is thought to come from the Proto-Germanic *etunaz, which is in turn thought to be semantically connected to the Proto-Germanic *etanan, or ‘greedy’, ‘voracious’, ‘gluttonous’, ‘consuming’. Although the above snippet from Völuspá pertains to Ragnarök, it is also relevant here.

Fascism is inherently greedy. It always requires an ‘other’ to sacrifice, then turns on people in the in-group who are not quite “in” enough to appease that greed. It is an evil Thurs, a ravenous spirit, and those in its thrall are equally ravenous.

This is how we should be naming this evil. They are, or are possessed of greedy, greedy, spirits who will never be sated and who can only be driven out.

Jotnar.

Þursar.

‘Þurs of wound-fever, lord of the Þursar! Flee now! (You) are found. Have for
yourself three pangs, wolf! Have for yourself nine needs, wolf!
III ice (runes). These ice (runes) may grant that you be satisfied (?), wolf.
Make good use of the healing-charms!’

Runic healing charm from Sigtuna, Sweden.
‘Runic Amulets and Magical Objects’ by Mindy MacLeod and Bernard Mees

Have for yourself three pangs, wolf! Have for yourself nine needs, wolf!
These ice runes may grant that you be satisfied, wolf!

It’s not often we get usable models. We should probably take advantage of them when we do.

The Stone Turns at the Command of an Unjust King

There’s a story in the Poetic Edda that I’ve found myself thinking about quite a lot recently. It’s called ‘The Song of Grotti’, and in it a king takes two female slaves and puts them to work endlessly at a magical millstone, forcing them to grind out endless wealth with little thought for their welfare or basic needs. He is beyond all shadow of a doubt, an unjust king.

We too live in an unjust society in which workers are increasingly expected to millstone - goldproduce with little concession to human wants or needs. Productivity and profit have become king now, and people work like cattle but then struggle to survive regardless of their labor.

This is exactly the kind of environment that produces fascists. With the help of some already extant racial biases, it produced fascists in the 30s, and is producing them now.

Wealth let’s grind for Frodi, grind out happiness,
grind many possessions on the wonderful stone!
Let him sit on his wealth, let him sleep on a quilt,
let him wake to happiness! That is well ground out.

At first, the women sang their songs and ground out wealth for Frodi. But again and again he denied them pleasure, rest, and warmth. Over time, the women became angry, remembered their mighty deeds before being forced to Frodi’s hall.

Now we have come to the dwellings of the king
without mercy, and live as slaves,
mud eats away at our feet, the rest of us is chilled through,
we drag the calmer of strife; it’s dull at Frodi’s house.

But what do you think they did next?

Did one blame the other for the king’s greed and lack of compassion? This is essentially the option offered by fascism and does nothing to address the underlying issues that make people so miserable in the first place.

No. The women worked together and turned the magic millstone against Frodi, churning out woeful fate for the unjust king. (The Marxists among you will laugh at how they seized the means of production in this tale.)

Hands shall grip the hard shafts,
the bloodstained weapons, wake up, Frodi!
Wake up, Frodi, if you want to hear
our songs and ancient tales.

I see fire burning east of the city,
warfare awakened, that must be a beacon;
an army is coming here very shortly,
it will burn the settlement despite the prince.

You shan’t hold onto the throne of Lejre,
the red-gold rings, nor this magic grindstone.
Let’s seize the handle, girl, turn more swiftly!
We are not yet warmed by the blood of slaughtered men.

By the end of the tale, the king is dead and millstone destroyed. The women are now free from their endless labor

There are lessons to be learned here too, but it is the central lesson you find over and over again in these texts (along with punishments for bad or violated hospitality): stick together, work together, fight together.

And that for me is what Heathenry is about. It is a religion of relationship and relationality with human and otherworldly people alike. Of gifting and story. Of rainbow bridges made of fire, and a shared world alive around us. It’s a religion of magic too. In which people may send parts of themselves forth, speak prophecy, ensnare and bind, and break weapons with charms.

It’s a religion of beauty, the most precious of gold, and I’m asking you to help me keep that gold clean.

heart - gold