Tag: seidr

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Narrative DESTROYS Facts And Logic! Authenticity FLEES!

If you’re anything like me, you probably hated that title. Hell, I hated typing it! But this is a post about ersatz, and as algorithms are some of its main purveyors, it seemed fitting to start with some clickbait.

The last time we met in this space, I talked about the growing thirst for authenticity I perceive in the overculture. Whether that perception is accurate remains to be seen, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter. Houston, we have a problem either way.

If you haven’t already read that post, I recommend that you do so before continuing. Then, my focus was on the science of perception, processing, and bias. Or to quickly summarize: No human perceives reality as it actually is. Instead, we navigate this existence via a working model created and constantly modified by the brain in response to sensory input. This was what I meant by the “unrealness” of reality—a term of my own creation. As someone for whom words are containers for meaning, I often find myself crafting containers for the families of meaning that don’t fit my mother tongue’s current forms.

Simply put, my “unrealness” container is a stand-in for “perception” that also implicitly acknowledges that we humans all experience reality by proxy. If we let it, it can serve as a reminder that the “real” is often not nearly as important as the stories we tell to give it shape.

In my previous post, I mostly stuck to the most common scientific “maps” of this particular territory. However, as the saying goes, “the map is not the territory.” And in my opinion, those scientific maps are missing some layers. They show the equivalent of roads, landmarks, and businesses, but say nothing of the topography, ecosystems, and local culture of a place.

Here begins the process of filling in some of the missing layers that are not so easily labeled or explained. The souls-filled and magical. The inspired and Unseen.

Well, would you know yet more?

Ersatz Like Cobwebs

First though, a story of a dream (so really, a story within a story).

How delightfully meta!

The year was 2022, and my family and I were visiting my parents back in Lancashire, England during the winter break. It was my first trip back in over a decade, and my daughter’s first trip to where her mother grew up.

One night while there, I had a dream. I was rushing along country lanes, long and winding like snakes, the land around me smothered by layers of cobwebs. Now, these weren’t some Otherworldly roads, mind you. That’s just how a lot of the lanes there are—winding serpents of pitch and gravel through tunnels of trees. All snakes I’d set my boots to countless times in waking life.

After a while, I came to a stop and turned to the hedgerow lining the lane. Somehow, I knew I’d reached my destination for the night—that that was where I was supposed to enter. By this point, I was fully lucid in my dreaming. I could have easily turned back the way I came. But Necessity was loud in my souls, so I pushed through the shadows and thorns until the hedge opened up, and I found myself in what appeared to be a council chamber.

Looking around, I saw that numerous peoples had gathered there for a meeting—everybeing from the plant, tree, and animal peoples to the Unseen and Otherworldly. As the only human there, it wasn’t long before I attracted some attention, though perhaps not in the way you might think. Apparently, we humans had always had a place at the meeting. It had just been a good long while since any of our kind had last filled those seats.

The reason, I was told, was the cobwebs. According to my hosts, what I’d perceived as webs were really the layers of stories woven over the human population by those who’d remain in control. The only reason that I finally made the meeting (or could even see those webs to begin with) was because my time away had first loosened, then shaken their hold. Nowadays, I wholly believe those “webs” are what people are referring to when they speak of “the veil.”

Toward A Definition of Ersatz

No matter its name, that barrier or binding is largely what I mean by “ersatz.” My container this time is obviously a borrowing altered from its original form. But “container” struggles seem par for the course when it comes to discussing this subject. The writer James Joyce, for example, named his container “false art” or “improper art,” which J.F. Martel summarizes in the following way:

’Proper art stills us, evoking an emotional state in which “the mind is arrested and raised above desiring and loathing.” Improper art does the opposite, aiming to make the percipient act, think, or feel in a certain prescribed manner.’ (Martel, Reclaiming Art In The Age of Artifice. 26-27).

You may wish to put a pin in that part about “desiring and loathing.” I’ll be returning to it toward the end.

Much like that “false” or “improper” art, my borrowed “ersatz” is any story that binds and keeps us closed off to inspiration, and/or controls and makes us another’s tool or weapon. Ersatz is the stories that trick us into believing ourselves separate from, maybe even better than, other humans due to inborn qualities. It’s the stories that have us reaching into our pockets for money we don’t have for some product to fix everything (usually while also convincing us that we’re brands too).

Tired of Capitalism 1.0? Try Capitalism 2.0 instead! Think you know REAL Capitalism? Think again! 100% guaranteed to make you rich!

(Terms and conditions most definitely apply.)

Ersatz is propaganda and marketing and nationalist myths of blood, soil, and divine destiny. It’s the various “programs” or ideologies by which our societies run. To quote Martel again (who’s clearly also in the container business), ”Proper art moves us, while artifice tries to make us move.”

And unfortunately, that artifice or ersatz is more prevalent than ever before.

According to Samuel Spitale in the introduction of How To Win The War On Truth, the average American is subjected to anywhere between 4,000 to 10,000 media messages a day (up from around 1,600 fifty years ago).

No wonder so many of us struggle to find the space for Authenticity’s seeds.

Weaponized Ersatz: A Two-Headed Beast

So, we have our ersatz, already monstrous but still growing. Worse still, this beast is polycephalus. For the purposes of this post, I’ve set a two-head limit for this word-woven creature. After all, nuance often gives way to endless rabbit holes without proper boundaries. And well…this post is already a warren.

With that said, let’s meet our fiend!

A loud roar suddenly shatters the silence as the beast rises. Its feet make dust of hard rock. Terrified, you begin to retreat, your heartbeat a war drum in your chest. The land shakes as it takes a step, and, unable to look away, you stumble and lose your footing. Palms aching, you take to shuffling backward on your butt—anything to escape. But then the land shakes again as it takes another step, and realization sinks in as hard as the stone making raw meat of your skin. Your desperate shuffle could never match a monster’s stride. Blood like ice, you freeze. Instead, you stare at the two heads swaying like snakes, their mighty maws open wide, and prepare for the end.

Dear Gods, please let it be quick…

One head lowers, and you find yourself choking on its breath. “WHEN YOU’RE HERE, YOU’RE FAMILY!!” it bellows, the words so loud they rattle your bones.

A half-second later, its twin lets out a second booming slogan. “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

The laughter slips out before you realize it.

“Fuck me, Marketing and Propaganda?” you manage between cackles. You sound insane, and maybe you are, but this beast makes crazy people of us all anyway. The two heads cock to one side, and you laugh even louder. “I’d rather a fucking demogorgon!” you snort.

(Me too, fictional scenario person. Me too. At least demogorgons aren’t the bestial equivalent of glitter.)

A Natural History Of Glitter

When I first began looking into the history of this beast, I’d assumed it would be easy. There are, after all, entire courses on these subjects. However, I quickly found that most of the relevant sources treated marketing and propaganda as completely different entities rather than parts of the same beast.

In my opinion, this is a flaw at best. Not only does it obscure the commonalities between the two heads, it also shrouds the extent of its reach in our lives. Worse still, I would argue that, much like Pavlov’s salivating dogs, the marketing we consume as benign actually primes us for propaganda as well.

But more on that shortly.

Whenever I research a subject, I first seek out the root—the “origin story,” so to speak. Without those “first layers” or “prologue,” I find it hard to fully anchor a subject in my mind.

Unfortunately for me, this glittery beast has no clear parentage. That tendency to see two different beasts instead of a singular fiend obscures its origin story as well. So, a person working within the “two-beast” model with a focus on marketing, for example, might cite Adam Smith as the father, as he is considered the originator of the concept. However, a second person with a focus on propaganda might cite Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, as the father of “public relations” (itself a rebranding of propaganda) instead.

Faulty modeling aside, however, we are dealing with the same beast. In his 1928 book Propaganda, Bernays writes about propaganda and public relations for commercial and political ends without differentiation. Where nowadays we might say that marketing sells products and propaganda ideas, it was all the same toolkit to Bernays.

Interestingly, he also makes it clear that a group he refers to as the invisible government—shadowy figures who understand the mechanism and motivations of the public mind—uses that same toolkit to rule over the people as well (Bernays. 9-10).

”The minority has discovered a powerful help in influencing majorities.” (Bernays. 19).

Given that the “powerful help” is our beast, it’s little wonder the mist between the two heads is so damn thick!

The last time I darkened this digital domain, I talked about some of the recent research into perception, emotion, and bias. Now obviously, Bernays had none of those modern discoveries to pull on, but he was very familiar with his uncle’s work (as well as that of some of his contemporaries). Where his predecessors, the “old propagandists,” relied on “the psychological method of approach” (in other words, arguments based on facts and logic), Bernays focused on influencing the “mental pictures” in the public mind (Bernays, 106-107).

”Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring policy of creating or shaping events to influence the relationship of the public to a given enterprise.

This practice of creating circumstances and of creating pictures in the minds of millions of persons is very common. Virtually no important undertaking is now carried on without it, whether that enterprise be building a cathedral, endowing a university, marketing a moving picture, floating a large bond issue, or electing a president.” (Bernays, 25)

Over the years, Bernays worked on both commercial and political campaigns alike, influencing American life in surprising ways. In the 1920s, for example, a time when smoking was not so common among women, Bernays ran a campaign for Lucky Strike that equated smoking with women’s rights and presented cigarettes as “torches of freedom” (Spitale. 14-16). It’s also thanks to Bernays that hairnets became ubiquitous in food service. As shorter styles became more fashionable among women, hairnet sales sank. To remedy this, Bernays convinced health officials to make them a requirement for food service workers (Ibid. 16). He is also why people came to consider disposable cups cleaner than reusable options, and why men now also wear wristwatches and no longer consider them women’s jewelry (Ibid.)

Most infamously, however, Bernays produced propaganda for the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) against the democratically elected government of Guatemala, labeling them “communists.” This helped to enable a CIA-backed coup that led to decades of dictatorship and civil war for the poor people of Guatemala (Ibid. 16).

(This was also the origin of the term “banana republic,” by the way.)

So yeah…absolutely abhorrent.

As significant a parent as Bernays was though, he’s clearly not the only “daddy” in the mix for our beast. Unsurprisingly, this being is more homunculus than anybeing naturally spawned. (Gods, what a collection of words!) Moreover, there may also be some earlier, magical parentage as well.

Marketing, Propaganda, And The Magic Of Desire

This next part begins with the work of Ioan Petru Culianu. In life, Culianu was a Romanian-American historian known for his books on certain niche aspects of renaissance thought. A practicing magician who sadly met his end in 1991 in his bathroom courtesy of a bullet to the head.

A murder that remains unsolved to this day.

Well anyway, one of Culianu’s main academic foci was the writings of Giordano Bruno, a friar-turned-magician who was burned for heresy in the year 1600.

In his book Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Culianu uses Bruno’s essay On Bindings In General as a framework to examine the possible connections between renaissance magic and mass-media marketing. For Bruno, the key to magic was eros (desire).  Along similar lines, modern advertising manipulates consciousness via images that spark desire. Sex sells either way.

Nowadays, we don’t typically think of marketing and propaganda as magical arts. However, Culianu considered this desire-based manipulation the very foundation of political power in modern industrial nations (referred to by Culianu as “magician states”) (Greer. The King In Orange. 19-21).

A Souls-Familiar Layer?

Emotions have long been understood to be magically potent. In Heathenry, the furious god is also the “Father of Galdr” or verbal charm magic. A form of magic that not only marries narrative (and sometimes also poetic meter) with intense emotion and modes of performance. Speak a galdor while utterly enraged, and you’ll probably get some spectacular (not to mention quick) results.

However, fury isn’t the only emotion that appears in connection with magic in the Norse sources. The other main emotion was familiar to both Bruno and Bernays.

Desire.

In the Old Norse sources, both fury and desire are stirrings of the same soul. This is the Hugr, the most “occult” of a person’s souls, you might say. Although better attested in Norse sources, cognate forms appear in all the older Germanic tongues, all of which rooted other words. Among the early English, Hugr was known as Hyge, while a speaker of Old Saxon would have referred to their Hugi instead. In Old High German, the word was Hugu, and in Gothic, it was Hugs.

Broadly speaking, Hugr is “mind,” “heart,” “desire,” and “longing,” though I should also note that these cognates do differ slightly in meaning. For example, the Old English Hyge could be “thought,” “mind,” “courage,” “intention,” “heart,” “disposition,” and “pride.” The Gothic Hugs, however, primarily carried meanings of “thought,” “intelligence” and “understanding” with none of the heart.

Overall, the best summary of Hugr as I understand and experience this soul comes from Snorri Sturluson in Skáldskaparmál chapter 86:

“Thought (Hugr) is called mind and tenderness, love, affection, desire, pleasure…Thought is also called disposition, attitude, energy, fortitude, liking, memory, wit, temper, character, troth. A thought can also be called anger, enmity, hostility, ferocity, evil, grief, sorrow, bad temper, wrath, duplicity, insincerity, inconstancy, frivolity, brashness, impulsiveness, impetuousness. (Faulkes trans. 154.)

As I said earlier, they are the most “occult” of our souls. At times in the sources, they give counsel, while at other times they appear to be a ward. A protector. They are also a wanderer, capable of independent movement from the human whole.

Most important of all though, Hugr has force. They are the fury in the galdor and the lust in the seiðr, they are the difference between empty words and gestures, and tangible result. Hugr is what makes Wish real in the world.

All of which makes Hugr the main prey of our two-headed beast.

Where marketing works to ensnare Hugr with bait made of carefully crafted wishes, propaganda ensnares by stirring up rage and offering nightmarish possible futures to appeal to Hugr-as-ward. If we’re not careful, this beast can make monsters of our Hugr over time as well.

And that, Hel-friends, is a recipe for disaster that lasts long after the screen has gone dead.

Final Words

I was planning to follow up with another post on this topic directly after this. However, the thing about exploring such huge subjects is that, sooner or later, I begin to feel trapped. Suddenly, I find all kinds of other things to talk (ahem, rant) about and find myself getting annoyed. Eventually, I lose interest and cease writing full stop.

So, this time I’m trying something different.

I’m going to post that stuff anyway instead of trying to stick to one series at a time. Expect the unexpected, I guess!

That said, I’m not nearly done with this subject. So far I’ve focused on the effects on individual humans, but I’m yet to touch on mass effects. What happens when significant numbers of Hugr-twisted humans obsess over a practitioner of New Thought who markets themself as a brand? How about when big tech takes a huge dump in the information space? More importantly, why even take that dump in the first place after warning of its dangers less than a decade ago?

The technology might well be new, but the playbook really is not.

Until that next time though, I really encourage you to check out Winifred Rose’s work on Hugr. One of the very best things I’ve ever done for myself both as a human and Wicce is to get to know mine. Nowadays, my Hugr and I are more intentional in our collaboration. Better still, we’re both learning to spot that beast’s bait.

An important practice in our increasingly brain-cooked world full of people with out-of-control and twisted Hugr-souls!

So, until then, be well, Hel-friends and stay safe.
<3

Sources

Bernays, Edward. Propaganda (Original Classic 1928 Edition): The Definitive and Complete Masterwork on Public Relations. 2025.

Greer, John M. The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021.

Martel, J.F. Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2015.

Spitale, Samuel C. How To Win The War On Truth. 2022.

Sturluson, Snorri. Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning. Translated by Anthony Faulkes. Oxford: Oxford University Press (UK), 1982.

 

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What is a Witch?

Which Witch is Witch

What is a witch, and who gets to call themselves one? If ever there were two more controversial or ire-provoking questions than these, I am yet to find them. Nowadays, those of us who live in the post-Industrial nations of the world treat the word “witch” as a title to claim and squabble over. Which is ironic really, when you consider that for many centuries, the witch was a person to fear, a bane on cattle and crops; and for those who were accused of being one, a path to prosecution and possibly either the gallows or pyre.
I’ve already blogged about the origins of the word “witch,” or more specifically, the first attestations of its Old English ancestor: wicce (f)/wicca (m)/wiccan (pl). As I argued then, given the contexts in which those attestations appear and their clear parallels in Old Norse narratives of Heathen magic and magical practitioners, the first Witches were most likely a kind of Heathen ritual or magical specialist.

Now, that’s all well and good. But what about practitioners today? After all, not everyone claiming or squabbling over the title of “witch” is a Heathen. If anything, most seem to consider Heathenry and Witchcraft two completely separate paths—paths that are, for the most part, largely in opposition to each other. Additionally, for many within the Traditional or Folkloric Witchcraft communities, the “real” witches were Christians, and it’s the Pagans and Heathens who are the latecomers to the Craft. (Another irony given those aforementioned origins!)

Perception and Meanings

So, with all that said, where do we go as modern practitioners? Because believe it or not, this isn’t about telling everyone they have to be Heathen or GTFO of the Craft!

The thing about words is that their meanings change over time. People have literally spent centuries altering the definition of witchcraft to fit their social, political, and religious agendas. “Witch” and “witchcraft,” simply put, were labels of exclusion used to delineate and enforce the boundaries of society while identifying those people, practices, and beliefs perceived to be harmful to that order to eradicate them (see Kieckhefer cha. 8 for further discussion). Given the central role of perception here—which is itself incredibly malleable and largely shaped by belief—it’s little wonder those definitions have shifted so much over the centuries. That perception of harm is why it was entirely possible for the same person to be considered a “cunning person” or “charmer” by some, and a “witch” by others. To quote Kirsteen Macpherson Bardell in her paper, Beyond Pendle: the ‘lost’ Lancashire Witches:

“Again, the evidence indicates that healers had a widespread reputation in the community but that this ambiguous connection with magic could turn into suspicion of something more malevolent.”

“Pendle, old Pendle, thou standest alone.”

The witch who could heal could also hex, and all that. A precarious position for any practitioner.

Moreover (and to further complicate matters), “witch” has become the go-to gloss for any word used to describe ritual specialists in other cultures as well, its application largely dependent on how those practitioners were perceived by cultural outsiders. This not only expanded the definitions of “witch” even further, it also obscured, shifted, or even outright erased the original understandings those cultures had of those practitioners. (An accusation we can also lay at the feet of the appropriated version of the term “shamanism” as well, if we’re being honest.)

Either way, it’s little wonder we have so much to argue over now.

Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that outside of its original cultural and religious context, the word “Witch” doesn’t really have a fixed meaning. Both now and in the past, it’s been used as a box of sorts. For some, that box was a place to toss the people and things they wanted to get rid of, while for others, that box holds something treasured to be gatekept. In one box, lives one kind of person’s nightmares, whereas the other box holds another kind of person’s ideals and dreams.

Again and again, it’s perception that shapes those walls.

The Familiar Thread

Nebulous though the meanings of “witch” can be, however, there is something more solid to be found in that cloud. A way to sort through the mist, if you will. As unlikely as it may seem, there is a core there that exists regardless of religious belief, socio-political goals, or mystical aspirations. We see this core in a theme that is repeated over and over from the eleventh century writings of the early English homilist Ælfric (and likely earlier) to the early modern English and Scottish trial accounts.

This surprised you, didn’t it? Come on, admit it!

It’s the presence of “devils” or familiar spirits, be those familiar spirits Otherworldly or Dead. A thread that predates the development of the continental witchcraft narrative by centuries.

“Now some deceiver will state that witches (wiccan) often say truly how things will turn out. Now we will say truly that the invisible devil who flies around the world and sees many things makes known to the witch what she may say to men so that those who seek out that wizardry may be destroyed.”

From De Auguriis by Ælfric of Eynsham

In my blog talking about those earliest attestations of wicce/wicca/wiccan, I discussed the strong parallel between King Alfred’s 9th century renegotiation of Exodus 22:18 and the image of the Old Norse seeress or völva in the Poetic Edda poem Völuspá. To summarize for those of you who are yet to read that post, both the wiccan of Alfred and the völva of the Edda were portrayed traveling between homes, exchanging magic and seership for the hospitality of their (predominantly female) hosts—a theme we see repeated a number of times in the Old Norse sources.

Given the common root of the early English and Norse cultures and their history of exchange and interaction, shared themes or patterns can hardly be surprising. Yet despite this long relationship, even the suggestion that early English witches might have been analogous to the Norse völur in some ways is still somewhat controversial.

Perhaps it hits too many of the same buttons indiscriminately smashed by Margaret Murray for comfort? Or maybe anti-Wiccan sentiment among modern Heathens is to blame? I suspect both may be a part of it. However, it’s also important to point out here that the völva (much like the shaman) isn’t nearly so tarnished by those centuries of negative PR. This is especially the case among Anglophones, but it likely extends into other cultures too given the outsized influence of Anglophone media on the rest of the world. In short, völva has a certain cachet that “witch” simply doesn’t have and perhaps offers a way to be “witchy” without inviting the same degree of hostility from others. Any comparison between the two then must feel like a sullying of something dearly held.

You see, even as Pagans and Heathens we are shaped by those Christian perceptions; some of us still borrow our prejudices instead of setting them aside.

Devils? Nah. Let’s Talk Elves and Witches!

However, to return to my point, that partnership between witches and so-called “devils” also appears in Old Norse sources. Over and over, we find female magical practitioners in league with other-than-human people.

For example, in Ynglinga saga, Freyja (a goddess associated with magic referred to as seiðr) is described as a blótgyðja or “sacrificial priestess” and appears to lead the cult centered around her brother’s burial mound. Her brother, of course, is Freyr, a god described as the ruler of Álfheimr or “Elf Home” (cognate to the Scots word Elfhame) in the poem Grímnismál. Another place we see this partnership between a “witch-coded” priestess and elf-coded male is in chapter 28 of Örvar-odds saga, where we find a king by the name of Álfr (literally “elf”) and his wife Gyðja (“priestess”), who appears connected to Freyr. Gyðja is also depicted shooting magical projectiles from her fingernails, an ability we also see demonstrated in Jómsvíkinga saga by the goddess Þorgerðr Hölgabrúðr, who Hilda Ellis Davidson identifies with Freyja (Davidson, Roles of the Northern Goddess pp. 177-178).

And while we’re on the subject of magical projectiles (also known as “elfshot”), allow me to mention a couple more sources that feature this theme as additional illustrations of this partnership. The first source I want to mention is the 10th century metrical charm Wið Færstice (“Against a Stitch”), which features a narrative set at a burial mound that likely describes witches shooting projectiles made by elven smiths. The second source I want to mention is the confession of the 17th century witch, Isobel Gowdie, in which she claimed to obtain her magical projectiles from elves (and the Devil), who made their houses in mounds (Alaric Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England pp. 112-115).

Despite the centuries between them, the narrative of Wið Færstice and themes of Isobel Gowdie’s confession align in that both involve witches shooting elf-made magical projectiles and mounds. Quite remarkable when you think about it! Clearly, those things go together like PB&J!

(Can confirm.)

I could go on (no really, I could; this is my special interest). I’ll spare you all for now, though. We’ll be here all day otherwise.

Moving Forward

The partnership between witch and familiar is perhaps one of the oldest and most consistent threads of the witchcraft story regardless of era, at least as it has played out among English and Scots-speaking groups in mainland Britain, or in other words: those groups who once would have likely used the words wicce/wicca/wiccan in their daily speech. While this pattern can also be seen in other cultural groups within the British and Irish Isles as well as continental witchcraft narratives, those are beyond the scope of this post.

Now does that mean that everyone has to have a familiar spirit in order to be a “real” witch?

Not necessarily. What I will say, however, is that one does have to be somewhat other. Some of us come by that otherness via ancestry i.e. someone way back when made some connections that subtly changed them and those who came after them, while some of us become other through encounters with the Dead and/or Otherworldly, eventually founding relationships. It may not be popular to say this, but that’s the thread.

Some Personal Theorizing

My personal theory is that the witch originally began as an analog of the Old Norse gyðja, who, as Terry Gunnell points out in his paper Blótgyðjur, Goðar, Mimi, Incest, and Wagons: Oral Memories of the Religion(s) of the Vanir, was mostly associated with the cult of Freyr in the sources. This interpretation would accord well with the etymology put forth by the linguist Guus Kroonen, which traces the word’s derivation from the same linguistic roots as the Proto-Germanic *wiha-1 and *wiha-2 (“holy” and “sanctuary”). A second etymology that also accords well with this interpretation considering the centrality of burial mounds in some of these narratives is that given by the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, which traces wicce/wicca to the Germanic *wikkjaz or “necromancer.” An association that also appears in the later Aldhelm glosses as well.

“This is my church. This is where I heal my hurts.
For tonight, god is an (elf) DJ.”

Final Words

Still, that thread doesn’t erase those centuries of loose meanings and adaptations. If the word “witch” inspires you, then I encourage you to respectfully take on that mantle. I am not here to police or gatekeep you or your practice. That’s just tiring and pointless. As I’ve said before (many times), the Craft protects itself. Just know that the witch-mantle is weighty and can get you into trouble. Be mindful of its history, both the good and the bad, and remember on whose side you stand.

And whatever you do, never, ever forget the possibility that it all began with devotion and service.

Now, wear that mantle accordingly.

Sources

Davidson, Hilda E., and Hilda R. Davidson. Roles of the Northern Goddess. London: Psychology Press, 1998.

Hall, Alaric. Elves in Anglo-Saxon England: Matters of Belief, Health, Gender and Identity. 2007.

HarperCollins Publishers. “Appendix I – Indo-European Roots.” American Heritage Dictionary – Search. Accessed May 9, 2025. https://ahdictionary.com/word/indoeurop.html.

Kieckhefer, Richard. Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

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

Poole, Robert, and Kirsteen Macpherson Bardell. “Beyond Pendle: the ‘lost’ Lancashire Witches.” In The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.

Seven Viking Romances. London: Penguin UK, 2005.

Sturluson, Snorri. Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010.

Terry Gunnell. “Blótgyðjur, Goðar, Mimi, Incest, and Wagons: Oral Memories of the Religion(s) of the Vanir.” The Center for Hellenic Studies. Last modified March 30, 2021. https://chs.harvard.edu/chapter/part-ii-local-and-neighboring-traditionsterry-gunnell-blotgydjur-godar-mimi-incest-and-wagons-oral-memories-of-the-religions-of-the-vanir/.

“Örvar-Odds Saga.” Snerpa.is / Heim. Accessed May 9, 2025. https://www.snerpa.is/net/forn/orvar.htm

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Reconstruction and Gnosis: Building Experiments II

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

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

My Working Theory (Take One)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reconstruction And Magical Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All The Ritual Space Is A Stage…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reconstructing The “Stage”: The Physical Elements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or in other words: no wild construction projects needed.

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

Reconstructing the Grid and Posts

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

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

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

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

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

And here is where my second fuck-up happened.

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

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

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

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

Classy, right?

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

Reconstructing the “Stage”: The Action Elements

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

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

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

Okay, that was going a little too far.

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

Circumambulation And Directionality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reconstructing the “Stage”: The Power of Speech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Source: Me bitching about ON fate words.)

Speech To Create, Speech to Manipulate

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

We would be wise to reacquaint ourselves with this power.

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

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

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

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

The salt marsh really doesn’t matter.

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

Speaking Into Being

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

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

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

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

Speaking Into Being: Prose and Function

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prose And Function: A Handy-Dandy Example

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good times.

Putting It All Together

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

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

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

The Order Of Business (Take One)

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

Remaining Concerns

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

Offerings

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

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

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

Location

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

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

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

“WEST VIRGINIIAAAAAA, MOUNTAIN MAMAAAAA…”

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

Be well.

Sources

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

 

 

 

 

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Reconstruction and Gnosis: Researching the Grid

Encountering the Götavi Grid

“Come climb inside my hole, friend!”

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

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

A Quick Note on Threads, Gnosis, and the Process

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

But here is where things can get precarious.

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

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

So what do you do?

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

So, let me tell you about this grid!

Describing the Götavi Grid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Performing Ritual and Cosmology in Land

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

The story they were referring to was eschatology.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evidence For An Eschatological Story

Islands and Mounds

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

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

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

Sounds like an island of the dead to me!

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

The Number Nine

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

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

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

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

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

(By the way, don’t try that at home!)

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

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

SW Orientation

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

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

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

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

Posts?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fat and Blood

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

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

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

Færeyinga Saga: A Potential Match?

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

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

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

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

What does that sound like? Could it be this?

What Might This Tell Us?

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

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

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

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

Final Words

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

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

Be well.

Find The Other Posts In This Series

Part 1
Part 2

Sources Used

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

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Heathen Magical Perspectives: Creation

To a Creation, Clothes

In my last post, we began with a story of creation on a windswept beach. But today, we’ll begin by following in the footsteps of a wandering god to a field.

The god in question is the same as the giver of önd in our first story. He is Óðinn, a god of many names, the one who I call  “Old Man”. This time though, it’s not trees he encounters, but two “tree-men”. And there is no giving of önd, óðr, or lá and litr here. This time, the Old Man simply gives them clothes (Hávamál 49).

This always reminds me of a story written by the twelfth century poet, Marie de France. In one of her lais, Bisclavret, a man-turned-werewolf is prevented from returning to his shape of birth by an unfaithful lover hiding his clothes. You see, when it comes to masking and its sibling, shapeshifting, there always seems to be an element of dressing for the “job” you want. The person who wishes to become a wolf must do as Sigmund and Sinfjotli did in the Saga of the Volsungs and don the skin of a wolf. And perhaps the tree that is to become a person, must wear a person’s clothes.

So, we have two sets of trees being made people when encountering a certain One-Eyed God. One might call that an M.O.

But what does that have to do with us and the magic we might create?

Mythological Fix Points and Magic

Some of you may have already heard of Mircea Eliade, the Romanian historian of religion who openly supported the Romanian fascist organization, The Iron Guard. He is a problematic figure, for sure.  But when it comes to working with historical forms of magic, I have found some of his work to be quite useful. You see, for Eliade, every significant human activity (as well as acts of creation and foundation) had a mythological “fix point”. They are rooted in myth and we are acting in pale imitation of what the gods are depicted as doing in mythological time.

Eliade can’t really take the credit for this concept though. The idea that humans imitate the gods is quite ancient. There are texts in the Yajurveda (a veda which concerns ritual practice), that specifically mention this concept. In the Satapatha Brahmana, the reader (presumably a budding ritualist) is instructed to ”do what the Gods did in the beginning” (VII, 2, 1, 4). And the Taittiriya Brahmana further underlines the importance of this idea with the following statement: “Thus the Gods did; thus men do” (I, 5, 9, 4).

Woden Worhte Weos: Animation as Woden’s Magic

So we have a god with an MO of making people out of trees. Some would even say that this is a kind of magic specific to that god (Richard North, I’m looking at you).

There’s a curious passage in the Old English Maxims that is worth a look here.

”Woden worhte weos, wuldor alwalda,
rume roderas: þæt is rice god
sylf soðcyning, sawla nergend”
(Maxims I, II, 132 – 34)

(Woden made idols, the almighty [made] glory,
the roomy heavens; this is a powerful god
himself the true king, healer of souls.)

As scholars have pointed out, this passage is clearly modeled on a line from Jerome’s Psalter iuxta Hebraeos. Maxims I isn’t the only place we find echoes of this line either. And curiously, in some of those other texts that contain reflections of this line, the “idols” are described as “demons”, suggesting that the idols themselves are more than carved wood. This idea of ‘living’ idols is made clearer in Saxo’s Gesta Danorum. In the Gesta, Óðinn (here, Othinus) is shown restoring a desecrated statue of himself, and ”by amazing craftsmanship made it respond with a voice to human touch” (Richard North, Heathen Gods in Old English Literature, pp 88 – 90).

There’s a lot to unpack here – the idea of ‘living’ idols is probably quite a bombshell for a lot of modern Heathens. But that’s not the focus of this post – creation is. And once again, we see the Old Man associated with the act of creation.

But if the sentiment found in the the Yajurveda and advanced as a theory by Eliade is true, then we should expect to find some human imitation of this form of magic, right?

Tree-Men

In the Hávamál passage mentioned earlier, Óðinn encounters two tree-men (‘trémönnom’ in ON). But this is not the only example of trémaðr (the singular form of ‘trémönnom’) in the ON corpus.

There are a number of mentions of tree-men, but two in particular stand out for the details they provide. In the Flateyjarbok, a group of men put ashore on the island of Sámsey. There they encounter a ‘tree-man’ who speaks to them of his purpose and origin. He was the product of sacrifice, and had been made to bring about the deaths of men in the southern part of Sámsey. But over the years, he’d become overgrown and his clothes and flesh rotted away.

(Those of you who are well read in the ON corpus will probably recognize Sámsey as the island where Loki claimed that Óðinn worked seiðr.)

The second example is in Þorleifs þáttr Jarlsskálds.  In this story,  Hákon Jarl creates a trémaðr to kill Þorleif Jarlsskáld after Þorleif cursed him with ‘itching sickness’.

Despite the connection between Óðinn and tree-men though, it was to the sisters, Þorgerðr Hörgi’s bride and her sister Irpa – a somewhat mysterious duo of goddesses that feature in a few sagas – that Hákon Jarl made his sacrifices. The process is outlined quite well for us here. First, Hákon Jarl makes the sacrifices until he receives a favorable oracle when he has a piece of driftwood brought in and fashioned into the shape of a wooden man. Then with “the monstrous witchcraft and python’s breath” of those two sisters, as well as the heart of a man sacrificed for the purpose and the proper attire for a man, they sent their tree-man, now named Þorgarðr, into the world to kill Þorleif (North 93 – 95).

But Óðinn’s hands are perhaps not entirely absent from this story. Because after Þorgarðr kills Þorleif (disappearing into the ground once his mission is complete), Þorleif’s dying words mention one of Óðinn’s kennings, Gautr in relation to the tree-man (North 95-96).

Creation: The Bare Ingredients

The parallels between Askr and Embla, and Þorgarðr are quite clear. And more importantly, provide us with a bridge between the mythological and the sagaic. Or in other words: the realm of gods and realm of men.

In both stories of creation, the creator begins with driftwood and imbues the creation with breath, color and vital blood/warmth, and mind/purpose. In the mythological story these are attributes that are magically given. But in the sagaic, the önd remains the domain of deities (at least for Hákon); the blood and heart from the sacrificed man provide the lá and litr; and the incantations/empowerment, the óðr.

Adaptation

So now we have the bare ingredients for creation. Now I’m not suggesting that people begin creating tree-men (assuming that’s even magically possible at this time given the current dominant paradigm). But in my experience, this process of creation is useful for everything from the creation of magical tools, to poppets and magical cures.

This process does require some adaptation though. I most certainly do not advise that any of us engage in human sacrifice as it’s illegal and wrong. Moreover, we’re not trying to animate whole men, so in terms of scale, it’s

From Mal Corvus Witchcraft & Folklore artefact private collection owned by Malcolm Lidbury (aka Pink Pasty) Witchcraft Tools

probably not even necessary either.

When I create magically, I follow the order of creation in the myth of Askr and Embla, and begin with my breath. For those of you who engage in possessory work, sessions in which you are carrying the Old Man would be the perfect time to engage in magical creation (with his agreement, of course). For those of you who don’t, you can take a leaf out of the migration period warlord’s playbook and simply ritually assume the role of Óðinn while you work. Remember that dressing for the job you want is a thing – yes, even with this.

Then comes the lá and litr. For me, this heat/blood can be either my own blood, or water and passing over a candle flame. Color can come from sigils, markings, or simply a coat of paint. Depending on what you’re doing, you may or may not wish to use your own blood (and if you do, be safe and sterile about it).

The final step is incantation, which I take to be the giving of óðr to your creation. This is often tied in with the giving of breath/önd in more practical terms. And in my opinion, this was probably the case historically too – at least when it came to herbal infusions and salves. The Old English magico-medical manuscripts give the instruction to “let the breath go wholly in” while chanting galdor. I do not think this to be coincidental.

Depending on what you are creating, you may wish to also give your creation a name. There is a long tradition of named objects in the North, as well as objects with a sense of agency and ‘fate’.

But whatever you create, you must always create carefully. Because this kind of magical creation isn’t just some arts and crafts project to use in a LARP. You are creating, and you will always have some degree of responsibility for (and to) what you create. You may wish to also bear this in mind when you’re writing your wills.

In the next post, I’m going to be talking about how I approach the elements in my magical practice. But until then, be well.

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Heathen Magical Perspectives: Breath

Breath is sacred to me. And not just because I rely on it to stay alive.

As a Heathen, breath was the first life-bringing gift given to humans in the poem Völuspá. These first humans (at least according to this mythological account) began their existence as “trees”. In Gylfaginning, these “trees” are found on a windswept beach, I imagine them as logs possibly washed up by the sea.

So three gods happen upon these dendrous layabouts, and decide to give them life. And this is where Óðinn steps up and breathes önd into them.

Just imagine for a moment – the cold and unyielding wood somehow coming to breathe. I have to imagine those first breaths to be creaking and harsh, possibly even painful.

But then comes Loðurr with what might have been heat and color. (I say ‘might’ here because there’s some discussion about the ‘heat’ part.) I now imagine the harshness of creaking wood softening to flesh, and those harsh gasps becoming sighs of relief.

It’s probably a kindness that Hœnir’s gift came last really. Because he gave them óðr or mind, and presumably only then, an awareness of self.

There’s a lot to be said about these gifts and their relevance to magic. Today though, I’m going mostly to focus on Óðinn’s gift of önd.

Breath and ‘Soul’

You may have already inferred from the retelling above that önd is breath, and it is. But önd wasn’t just speaking to the breath that oxygenates the body. In both the Zoega and Cleasby-Vigfusson dictionaries, it is also translated as ‘soul’ too.

For me though, önd is also the steed upon which inspiration, or óðr rides. A fitting gift from the god of Skalds.

The Nature of Inspiration

But before we follow that thread any further, we first need to take a look at what inspiration may have originally been.

Unfortunately, the Norse and Germanic corpus isn’t particularly forthcoming on the nature of inspiration. We know that there are poetic meters associated with magic and necromancy. And we can infer that Skaldic craft was itself considered magical. We can also look at the story of Egill Skallagrimson covering his head with his cloak in order to compose poetry in Egill’s saga, and possibly infer certain practices related to the getting of inspiration (as Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson theorizes in <em> Going Under the Cloak</em>).

However, in my opinion, our best clues come from the Welsh sources.
Like the Norse, the Welsh had an advanced culture of poetry (as too did the Irish). To be a poet, was to be capable of magic, and poets possessed of awen had the ability to influence kings.

The Welsh word awen, or ‘poetic genius’ carried supernatural and magical connotations, and was associated with spiritual enlightenment and wisdom. This was not “inspiration” as we know it today. This was inspiration associated with ideas of ‘spiritual wind’ and ‘divine breath’. The words ‘awen’ and awel (a Welsh word meaning ‘wind’ or ‘breeze’) are both derived from the Indo-European *uel, or ‘breath’. (You can find out more about awen in this video by Welsh scholar, Dr Gwilym Morus-Baird here.)

But it’s when we get to the purported origin of awen that things become interesting. Because in the Welsh sources, awen comes from the Welsh Otherworld, or Annwfn, the ‘Very Deep World’, rising up as a ‘spiritual wind’ or ‘divine breath’ to fill the poet, bringing vision and other spiritual gifts.

As one might expect of the ‘Very Deep World’, Annwfn is often depicted as a chthonic realm in the medieval Welsh texts – an underworld, if you will. It is a realm connected with spirits, both Otherworldly and dead alike. An idyllic realm, a perfected realm. And it’s here with this idea of inspiration that comes from spirits and is breathed in (inspired) where we come crashing back into the Norse sources.

The topic of spirits entering a person for prophecy or other purposes can be quite controversial in modern Heathenism – taboo in some circles even. But as Eldar Heide demonstrates in Spirits Through Respiratory Passages , there is ample evidence of spirits entering a person through the breath. The evidence presented by Heide in the paper is primarily concerned with hostile attacking spirits who enter by forcing a yawn in their victims and enter on the in-breath. But an example given from Hrólfs saga kraka, shows that ingress by spirits may have also been a part of seiðr. In the account given in Hrólfs saga kraka, a seiðkona is depicted yawning before giving (or attempting to give) prophetic answers. Moreover, it was not uncommon This occurs multiple times in the account. Could this be a potential parallel to the awen-filled speech of the Welsh poets?

Working with Breath

In the magico-religious practices that I’ve developed over the years, breath is one of the key ways through which I connect with Óðinn. For many people who work with this god, he is called Allfather because of his role in enlivening Askr and Embla. However, for me, he is the Allfather because as the giver of breath, he is the giver of the one gift that all humans share regardless of ethnicity. We all breathe from the same air when we take our first breaths as newborn infants, and our final breaths will leave us to mingle once more with the winds. This is one of the main ways in which we are all connected, and it is with that understanding that I explore the breath in my work.

Meditation

There are many ways in which you can work with breath in Heathen magic and magic in general. But today I’m going to begin with meditation.

Many types of meditation work with the breath. Usually, it is used as a vehicle for changing one’s mental state and/or as a focus or support for meditation. But breath can also be used as a medium for exploring that sense of interconnectedness I mentioned above.

The first time I experienced this, I was stood at the side of Goðafoss waterfall in Northern Iceland. I’d just been under the cloak and was thinking about the stories surrounding the falls when I found myself wondering about Óðinn in Iceland. Suddenly, my attention was drawn to the sound of heavy wing beats that somehow sounded louder than the roar of the waterfall. Two ravens were flying across the width of the falls and their wings were all I could hear. Time became weighty and the world more ‘real’. I became intensely aware of my breath, and suddenly I was not just myself anymore but engaging in a communion of sorts with the winds, the world around, and a certain one-eyed god. I was a part of the whole rather than a singular being. The ravens turned and flew towards me until they drew level and veered away, taking the moment with them.

It is this experience I try to replicate when I meditate in this way. I begin with offerings and a prayer before taking a few moments to calm myself and fall into a light trance state. Then I focus on my breath as a connecting medium. Each time I breathe in, I do so with the awareness that I am breathing in a substance of winds, spirits and inspiration shared by everybeing else that breathes as I do. Then I release it back into the wholeness of the world completing the circle once more. Each breath is a micro-reenactment of life from birth to death. On good days, I focus so completely on the breath and what it carries that I no longer feel the separation between myself and the whole, and that is when the real magic happens.

In my experience, this exercise is the most satisfying when performed in a high place where the winds blow free, but you do not need to be on a mountaintop to do this. Your backyard or sitting indoors near an open window will work just as well.

A Story in Parts

In this post, we’ve covered a lot of ground. We began in mythological time, with three gods on a windswept beach giving life to the first humans, and followed the breath to its connections with spirit-gotten inspiration in the Welsh tradition before returning to the North and the theme of spirits through respiratory passages. Those of you who are more familiar with the ON material will have probably noticed that the more typical word for both ‘inspiration’ and possibly also ‘possession’ too. There is no doubt that there is some overlap here, but we’ll be getting into that further in the next post.
Speaking of the next post, we’re going to be taking a look at the other gifts of life, some of their most important uses in magic, and the possible connections between those gifts and the most common elements found in Old Norse magic. Well, at least as I see them.

Until we meet again, friends!

Be well.

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Witch Wars: Survival Tips

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

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

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

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

The Fear Response

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

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

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

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

Attacks Are Often Multilayered

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

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

Fucking horrible, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Destroy Connections

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

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

Freeing the Mind

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

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

This is something you need to resist; but how?

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

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

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

Tu Quoque

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

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

See what I mean?

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

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Witch Wars: Diagnosis

witch wars - magnifying glass

Finding the Right Balance

Belief in being cursed or being subject to magical attack, can become a curse in of itself – especially when you’re already encountering a run of bad luck. So it’s important to have the proper perspective when it comes to the subject of witch wars - balancemagical attack. Because if you place too much belief in the possibility of being cursed or attacked, then it’s all too easy to see malefic magic and psychic attack at every turn and become paranoid. There’s also a lot to be said for self-fulfilling prophecy here – especially with the more magically-minded. But if you refuse to even consider the possibility, then you run the risk of missing some of the earlier warnings and allowing things to become far worse.

I’ve been that person in the second category, and I’m coming to you from the future to warn you about that very thing.

I messed up a lot in my early 20s with this, and a whole lot more. So trust me when I say that if you write everything off as being “just a run of bad luck”, then things can get really bad and in really unbelievable ways too.

So how do you find the right balance with this?

In truth, unless you have physical evidence that someone is working against you, you need to be looking at multiple factors. But what are they?

Luck

The most obvious thing that is going make you suspect attack is a run of bad luck that just doesn’t seem to end. But sometimes shit just happens! So how do you figure out if it’s regular old run-of-the-mill shit, or magical shit?

witch wars - horseshoeThis is where it gets pretty tricky, and also why you shouldn’t just rely on one thing when assessing whether or not you’ve been cursed. However, a good starting question to ask yourself is if what is happening is logical given the surrounding causes and conditions. For example, if you happen to lose your job and your house is foreclosed on during a time of economic downturn, it’s easy to see the circumstances at the root of your situation.

However, if (for example) you find yourself applying for a college hardship fund and being rejected for being “too poor” after a run of being told you’re overqualified for student jobs you’ve applied for as a student, then something is probably going on. (It was. Those were some “fun” times.)

See what I meant when I said “unbelievable”?

Dreams

For a lot of people, dreams are just randomness bundled up with a combination of wish-fulfilment and stress. However, for magical practitioners dreams are a hell of a lot more. That’s not to say that we don’t also get the stress dreams about being late for French Literature class at college (or…you know…). But for us, dream can often also turn out to be a place of entrance into the Otherworld, or a common ground upon which we may interact with Otherworldly beings.

And other practitioners…

See the problem?

So if you’re not keeping an eye on your dreams, especially around the 15th lunar day, you’re missing out on one of the biggest canary warnings you could possibly have. Dreams on this day that include arrows, snakes, or any form of attack really, can be indicative that someone is working against you. Moreover, it’s often possible to divine the person (when a human is doing the cursing, but that’s another story) attacking you, and what their beef is (beyond simple ego).

For example, you may find that the attacks in your dreams are conditional on you avoiding or carrying out a certain behavior. For example, if someone wants to keep you in what they see as ‘your place’, then the attacks in the dream may only happen when you disobey instructions to not cross a boundary.

So pay attention to your dreams!

Feelings and Foreign Thoughts

Strange emotions and thoughts can come from any number of sources, especially if you’re empathic in any way (and if you are, you might want to check out this post for some handy tools). Moreover, our brains can be pretty weird places just in general. Which can make it quite difficult to figure out if a new crop of negative emotions and strange thoughts are from you, picked up witch wars - fallenby accident from others, or the result of a curse directed at you.

But what do I mean when I say “negative feelings” here? Generally speaking, the kind of negative feelings that come with an attack are an impending sense of doom and dread, and a nose dive in self-esteem. Depression is also common, as is a feeling of helplessness.

And I know, I know. Who hasn’t felt those things? I mean, for goodness sake, we live in the monstrous shitshow that is 2019!

However, when you take the time to examine why you normally have those feelings, you can usually point to concrete reasons why. Maybe it’s all the plastic in the sea? The climate crisis that is going largely ignored? The internment of asylum seekers and attendant human rights abuses? Or maybe it’s just down to the simple yet highly stressful economic insecurity that most of us experience on the regular?

The point though, is that when you get down to it, when you take the time to examine these feelings, you generally find causes that are usually highly logical (and not the result of outrageously abnormal examples of bad luck).

This is part of why meditation is important – because it gives you the tools to carry out that kind of introspective examination.

But most importantly, meditation helps you get to know your own mind. This is incredibly important when you’re subject to this kind of attack. After all, how else will you recognize which thoughts are truly yours, and which belong to a hostile party? However, for all the danger of implanted thoughts (especially the kind that ensnare the mind and have you picking out a death day on autopilot), this is also often the area where a lot of attackers ‘overplay’ their hands and give themselves away.

As the old adage says, “know thyself”.

Health

In the Old English sources, the concepts of ‘health’ and ‘luck’ (as well as wholeness and holiness) are expressed by the same word – ‘hælu’. This collocation of concepts into a singular term tends to make great sense to anyone who has worked extensively with either the paranormal, Good Folk, curses, or all of the above. Because it’s never just luck that tanks, but personal health too. For some of the more metaphysical (and scholarly) reasons for this, you can check out this essay here.

However, for the TL;DR version, let me just say that both curses and interference from the Other have very similar effects on the body, and especially the torso. So keep an eye out for gastric and other torso-related issues that are accompanied by a loss of physical energy – especially if medical investigation leads nowhere.

Dying Plants and Eggs

Finally, a lot of witches look to their plants. If a lot of your plants suddenly start witch wars - eggsdying off, then there’s a chance that someone is working against you. This is especially the case when this happens in conjunction with any of the other factors mentioned here. Some folks also keep an egg on their altar as a kind of hex alarm and watch for it breaking. Of course, you may go through quite a few eggs, and will need to remember to change them out if you opt to do this.

Being Off-Balance

Find yourself taking more trips and falls recently? Perhaps you’re experiencing the kind of clumsiness that you only normally get before your period (if you have those), but at the wrong time?

It’s not uncommon for people to experience more falls and injuries when subjected to psychic attack – part of this is down to that luck thing.

But in my opinion, there’s also a wider theme of keeping you off balance here too. This is something you may also see reflected in your thoughts. You may find yourself fixating on something or someone completely random and illogical – just out of the blue, to the point where it’s taking over everything to a really unhealthy degree. And it’s smart too – part of keeping you otherwise occupied so you can’t do the things you need to to fight back.

Now I’m not saying that every weird crush or obsession with a thing or person is the result of magical attack (especially if you’re already predisposed to obsessive behaviors). But it’s another factor to take into account along with everything else.

Next Steps

So what do you do if you suspect that you have been hexed by another practitioner (or even the Other)?

Your first next step is to perform divination and find out if your suspicions are reflected in a reading. Depending on what’s been done to you though, you may find yourself unable to read for yourself (assuming you could do it before), and in these cases you will need to get a reading done by someone else. Honestly though, regardless of whether or not you can read for yourself, it’s advisable to get a reading done by a trustworthy person anyway. In my experience, the role of divination in the diagnosis and management of malefic attacks is one that iswitch wars - tarot often forgotten. And I get it, it’s easy to lose your head when you suspect that magic is being thrown around – especially if you’re already a little battle-scarred before figuring out what’s going on. However, if someone is working against you and you give into that fear, you help them in their cause.

Divination can provide a chance to catch your breath and at least run your thoughts by another human. This is important for two reasons: firstly, running it by another person can provide a valuable “checksum” that you’re not experiencing some kind of mental breakdown; and these kind of experiences tend to be pretty isolating (which is never good when you’re vulnerable). Most importantly (?) though, divination can help you take stock of the situation, and may sometimes even give you information on how best you can defend yourself or otherwise end the attack. In other words, it’s a critical first step on the path to resolution and healing.

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A Magical Go-Bag Tour

magical go-bag - hag stone

In my last blog I talked about the process of putting together a magical go-bag, and some of the reasons why a witch might want to. In this post, I’m going to give you all a tour around my main magical go-bag to give you an idea of some of the options that are out there when putting these bags together.

My Magical Go-Bag: A Backstory

Call me paranoid, but I’ve always carried some kind of magical supplies on me. I’ve just had that kind of life. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been the proverbial poop pile to the supernatural flies, and so always having some supplies on hand just makes sense. However, the impetus to create a dedicated bag for going out on the battlefield (or whatever else I’m up to) only came last year. Before then, my bags were all repurposed, or small bags that I’d just shoved into other, bigger bags. Last year though, things changed

To cut a long story short, working more intensely with the dead led to other spirits showing up. One of those spirits was a crane-dancing woman who told me to create a what was essentially a magical go-bag. Jokingly, I called it a “crane bag” (because it was a crane-dancing woman who told me to make it). However, the connection between the crane bag of Irish lore, and the Irish analog of the Welsh god who has played a pivotal role in my battlefield work also did not go unnoticed.

So off to the internet I went to scroll through endless pictures of “crane bags”. But none of them worked for me, and soon became clear that the best option was to make my own. So I did.

I knew from the outset that it had to be grey and hardwearing. The inner fabric – which could be softer – was a chance find that I chose for the deer in the pattern (an animal that’s long held significance for me). I came across the giant crane-patch by chance while searching for fabric, and well, the idea of a “crane bag” with a giant crane on it gave me a chuckle, so naturally I slapped the ‘purchase’ button.

Making the Bag

I’ve never been a good (or even competent seamstress). I don’t know what happens but I can start off with a perfectly good sewing machine, and then it all goes wrong. The tension decides to do its own thing, then the thingie in the bottom is also like “fuck you”, and in the end, it’s raining, the earth is falling in, and I’m about ready to pitch the machine out of a window. So the prospect of creating a go-bag was daunting to say the least.

I used this tutorial at the recommendation of my mum (thanks mum!), and although it didn’t quite work out (because: me), I came away with a serviceable bag with the custom pockets that you can see here.

magical go-bag - crane bag

magical go-bag - pockets
Custom knife pockets ftw.

Once made, I consecrated it in a small ritual to Manannán Mac Lir as it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.  And in the end, I think it was the right decision as it triggered the dream experience that you can read about here.

So that’s how, and the why of creating my go-bag.

My Essential Items

Now here is where I finally get to the things I consider essential for how I work, But as I mentioned in my last blog on this topic, your mileage may vary.

Hag Stone

Function: Apotropaic and tool.

First on the list (but not necessarily in order of importance) is the hag stone or holey stone. These are stones that have naturally occurring holes through the magical go-bag - hag stonemiddle of them, and although I haven’t really found good scholarship on them, my experience has been that these are both effective tools and apotropaics. They’re protective against the Unseen, and allow you – again, in my experience – to see through glamours and things that are normally unseen if you look through them.

You can sometimes find them along rivers, but they are also readily available to purchase online. I would advise caution when purchasing these online though as some unscrupulous vendors try to pass off drilled stones as genuine hag stones.

Black Salt

Function: Hardcore apotropaic.

Next up is black salt. Salt is a great addition to any magical go-bag in magical go-bag - black saltgeneral because it has so many uses. You can use it to salt boundaries, protect, and banish. But black salt is just taking regular old salt and leveling it the fuck up! The addition of iron, ash, and (in my case) ground wolf bone, makes black salt an excellent addition to a go-bag. It’s like an apotropaic powerhouse!

Even better, if you make your own black salt, you can build in extra layers of apotropaic magic into the creation process! Why just scrape some iron from your pan when you can use your pan to burn prayers asking for divine favor with some protective herbs, then add that to your fire ash before scraping the pan for iron? I have a dutch oven that I use specifically for ritual work so that I don’t have to wreck my cast iron cookware; it was $10 from a thrift store – bargain!

Spindle and Fiber

Function: Tool and offering.

I use a lot of spinning in my magic, and especially when it comes to working with spirits. Spinning in a space can trap both dead and leftover remnants of magical go-bag - mini spindleenergy that might “grow up” to get its own ideas and start its own trouble. Spun fiber can provide a bridge, delineate space, and serve as an offering in its own right. I have two spindles that I typically use in ritual work: one is a collapsible spindle that fits in my bag; and the other, magical go-bag - large spindlemy large one, was a gift to thank me for help given. I adore my large one because it feels weighty and authoritative – like a wand. It’s something I’ve wielded in ritual before now when opening portals and working my will. The collapsible one lives in my purse (yes, it’s that small) along with the sheep knuckle I use for yes/no divination.

Railroad Spike

Function: Apotropaic and tool.

This is something I tend to swap out with my black-handled knife. There’s a magical go-bag - spikeresonance to this item that just works. I’ve engraved it with words of power (which I won’t show here), and it’s one of my favorite spirit weapons for subduing, setting up some hardcore protective space, or for when things go bad. I don’t know whether it’s wholly iron or steel (which is mostly iron anyway), but it’s kickass anyway.

Red Yarn

Function: Apotropaic, tool, McGyver goodness.

magical go-bag - red yarnThis is one of my more McGyver-type items. Red thread can be used to bind and protect, or create new items (like a crossroads effigy or protective rowan cross). It can also be used for knot spells, marking off space, and much more. The yarn I use is hand spun with intent and then ritually consecrated.

Offerings of some kind

Function: Offerings, because being a magical murderhobo is bad.

And finally, because being the magical equivalent of a D&D murderhobo is not something that any of us should aspire to, I carry offerings. So many situations can be avoided or calmed by just communicating and making propitiatory offerings. Easy offerings to carry on the regular are cornmeal, tobacco, water, cedar, and small sealed butter or cream packets. Just please, take any trash home with you so you don’t ruin any of your good work by doing anyone the disrespect of leaving trash in their space.

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Authority and Hierarchies IV: Or “Why Your Pet Isn’t Your Fucking Familiar”

familiar - Boye Dog

Returning to Familiar Ground

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been on an epic journey. We’ve taken a look at the evidence for hierarchies among grimoire spirits and fairies alike, and discussed agency, anthropocentrism, and to a small degree, colonialism too. We’ve also examined the different kinds of reciprocal relationships, spiritual authority, the role of piety, and finally took a brief tour through the history of magic wands.

This week, I’m coming back to a topic that should be a lot more familiar to everyone (pun intended): the witch’s familiar.

Introducing the Early Modern Witch’s Familiar

The witch’s familiar is an ancient phenomenon, though the most commonly held ideas surrounding them seem to owe more to Early Modern Britain. Simply put, a familiar was a form of spirit helper with which the witch or cunning person held a certain kind of relationship. The kinds of familiars possessed by both cunning folk and witches differed too, with the familiars associated with “Cunning Folk” being more of fairy, and those associated with witches being

Familiar - Hopkins
Prize prick Matthew Hopkins with some witches identifying their familiars.

more demonic. It is the latter form that is the most recognizable today (Wilby 2005).

For witch or cunning person, the acquisition of a familiar was for the most part by chance. Accounts of encounters recorded during the witch trials, paint these encounters as happening spontaneously, as the witch or cunning person went about their business (Wilby 2005). Often the witch or cunning person would also be impoverished, or recently subjected to some kind of further hardship or tragedy. There is an undeniably folkloric feel to these encounters, and not unlike the kind of deal made by the girl forced to spin straw in Rumpelstiltskin (for example).

Unlike period descriptions of encounters with the dead, the fairy or demon familiars are described in stunningly naturalistic terms – they’re as real-looking as you or I. They were of vivid color, and animation and sound. But that’s not to say that they were “really” just the pets of people who looked a little “witchy”; it’s one thing to assume the shape of a thing, and quite another to actually be that thing. Familiar - BoyeHaving said that though, there were cases in which the pets of people suspected of witchcraft also shared the fates of their owners. But witch crazes are nothing if not illogical, let’s not mistake misplaced bloodlust for authenticity.

However, while the majority of accounts depict a person coming across the spirit that would become their familiar in a spontaneous way, there were ways in which familiar spirits could also be acquired. For example, one might petition a condemned person to return and serve as your familiar as in the case of Mary Parish’s familiar, a one George Whitmore (Cummins 2017 “The Rain Will Make a Door III”). In other cases, one could gain a familiar by somehow encountering fairy royalty and showing them the proper respect thus acquiring a familiar as a gift. Alternatively, you might acquire a familiar as a gift from another witch – most commonly a family member (Wilby 2005). And lastly, if none of those methods were available to you, you could always try petitioning a demon such as the Verum demon Sustugriel who was reputed to ”give good familiars” (Stratton-Kent 2010).

(About that fairy and devil/demon crossover? You might want to read this piece by Fairy in a Human Suit, Morgan Daimler.)

Tracing an Older Pattern

As I said above though, the Early Modern familiar is simply just the most well-known form of spirit helper. The fact of the matter is that magical practitioners have been finding helping spirits and making pacts with them for a very, very long time. And like wands, familiars traverse a wide range of different cultures (albeit under different names – obviously).

The earliest account of what might be recognized as a familiar is the ob (pronounced “ov”) of the biblical Witch of Endor. The ob was both a spirit “of the dead or minor underworld deity that “speaks from the earth in whispering voices”, and an object of worship whose spirit can enter into a human and reside within them (Barrabbas 2017). In other words, to have a familiar is to be possessed by a familiar (something which I will speak of more towards the end of this post).

Among the Greeks, we find the parhedros who fulfills a similar function to that of the ob and the familiar. Given that the Greek Magical Papyri begins with ways in which to acquire a parhedros, we have to assume that they were considered an integral part of performing magic (Skinner 2014). Moreover, like their Hebrew counterparts, there is also the aspect of worshiping objects associated with the paredros. For those of you who are interested in the idea of performing one of these paredros rituals, it bears mentioning that those early methods of acquisition require blood sacrifice. Far less bloody to summon a demon in this case!

Moving over to Heathen period Northern Europe now, we find evidence that witches partnered with elves in order to perform their magic. Alaric Hall argues that rather than being the result of attacks by elves, the phenomenon of elfshot was more likely curses thrown by elf-empowered witches (Hall 2001). This is where we find our way back to familiar - burial moundWilby’s period of study. Hall traces a pattern of witches working with mound-connected elves from the tenth century Old English magico-medical charm Wið Færstice and term ælfs?den (literally “elf-Seiðr”, or “elf-magic”); to Martin Luther’s account of being “shot” by a neighborhood witch; and finally to Isobel Gowdie’s accounts of encountering the Queen of Elfhame in a mound and seeing elves fashioning the shot. I personally take it somewhat further and point to the portrayal of Frey and Freyja in the Ynglingasaga. Freyja as the sacrificial priestess (and as we know, goddess associated with the form of magic known as “Seiðr”) ends up overseeing the cult to her brother, Freyr (who is associated with elves), even as he lies in the burial mound. The people bring offerings to the mound for peace and good seasons, and so even in death, he possesses a power that his sister does not.

Equally, elves were also associated with possessory divinatory trances that may have resembled or been confused with epileptic fits (Hall 2001), and so here too we find the possessory aspect of the ob.

Familiars and Hierarchy

The themes of hierarchy and spiritual authority also play their respective roles here. You may have already noticed that outside of the spontaneously acquired familiars, a higher power must be approached. This is an important distinction to make: the familiar gifted by fairy royalty will obey you if their royals command it. For those who inherit their familiars from others, one has to assume that the same terms and conditions of whatever pact was agreed upon transfer to the new witch.

Mary Parish’s familiar George is the obvious exception to this. Unlike most other familiars in the accounts, he was a dead human whose service was contracted by means of an oath before dying. This allowed Mary the authority she needed in order to work with him postmortem. However, his story is not completely devoid of involvement by a higher (fairy) power.

At some point, a minor aristocrat by the name of Goodwin Wharton became covetous of George (who he had become aware of through his love affair with Mary), and endeavored to have Mary gift him her familiar. However, a fairy queen referred to as the Queen of the Lowlanders steps in. From Wharton’s journal:

familiar - fairy queen” The transfer of George was further complicated by the queen of the Lowlanders, who demanded that Goodwin stop attempting to have George as his own personal spirit. At first Goodwin was a little resistant, but the queen insisted that if he would not willingly show her this preference, he should never see any of the Lowlanders. She wanted to be his number-one contact with the spirit world. Goodwin had little choice but to agree to her terms. As a consolation, George agreed to answer any questions directed at him as long as Goodwin turned his back and did not look directly where George stood. However, Goodwin could not understand the spirit very clearly, as he spoke in a low, soft voice close to Mary’s ear. So throughout their relationship, Goodwin relied on Mary to communicate with George.”
(Cummins 2017 “The Rain Will Make a Door III”)

It would seem that even when it comes to contracting the familiar services of the dead, the fairies will still have their say.

Pets as Familiars

Now to come to something a little polemic, but that I find weirdly irritating all the same.

I’ve noticed a tendency among some in the Pagan/Witch/Heathen communities to refer to their pets as their “familiars”. At first, I thought it was just a joke being made (and for most people, it does seem to be). However, I seem to be coming across more people who actually think their pets are their familiars.

Now hopefully this blog has illustrated all the ways in which that is just fucking stupid. And I think one of the reasons why I get so angry about this is that after having worked with a familiar for a number of years, the collocation of “pet” with “familiar” is just yet more disrespect and treating the Other like some fun and twee little thing that’s just here for our edification, or worse – our entertainment. I feel like I’m quickly running out of ways to say that it’s not all about us humans.

Let’s just stop this, please. We’re better than this. And your dog/cat/bird/whatever may be cool, but he isn’t your familiar. Moreover, if you actually kept your dog as animal familiars were most commonly kept (in a wool basket, being fed milk, blood, or whatever), you’d be in trouble for animal cruelty.

So let’s just not; okay?

Sources

Barrabbas, Frater (2017) Spirit Conjuring For Witches
Cummins, Al (2017)The Rain Will Make a Door III: Faerie and the Dead
Hall, Alaric (2009) Elves in Anglo-Saxon England: Matters of Health, Belief, Gender, and Identity
Skinner, Stephen (2014) Techniques of Graeco-Egyptian Magic

Stratton-Kent, Jake (2010) The True Grimoire
Wilby, Emma (2005) Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic