Well I’ve been firing off a few more sigils, so here they are. I worked out a whole stack of runic combinations for various purposes and am now working through designing them and activating them. As this post is pretty much a report on recent activities it should be classed as mostly UPG, albeit UPG informed by knowledge of historical sources.
The first I sent using the drumming approach again, in particular letting cross rhythms and the drone of my de-tuned drum carry me into strange new worlds to lay the seed of the sigil.
It seems to me that the designs I am making bear the influence of Jan Fries’ Neolithic magical focus, working them up feels a bit like doing cave art. I guess there is a really primitive aspect to rune magic, the crude act of inscribing images. It cuts through endless layers of surface rubbish. We use words now for so many purposes and it feels good to use letters (runes) as ambiguous symbols rather than very finite fragments of meaning.
There is also an honesty to using runes as symbols for magical purposes – it seems to me like the direct opposite of the way that politicians, corporations and so forth abuse language to distort perception and avoid responsibility.
The magic to release this sigil into the world got a bit crazy.
I started by calling on ancestors, gods and goddesses as a way of opening the magical space. The response to my call was rather abrupt – “we are always with you, idiot!” came the words from my mouth. They told me to abandon the drum this time around, got me to lie down.
Next thing their collective voice says “be like the dead” and I find myself covering my eyes. Then “be like the living” and I am covering my ears. There is some humour in these postures. Then the idea occurs that I could use my ear plugs (a metal musician’s best friends). I cover my eyes and become neither dead nor alive.
Ear plugs change your experience of sound, in particular any sound you make, because you hear less of your actual vocal utterance and feel more of the vibrations in your body from speaking. Being in a magical context this very promptly put me in quite an isolated state. When we clear a magical space to do work this usually involves visualisation of some sort and calling on whatever beings seems appropriate. The idea of making everything beyond the immediate situation inaudible is pretty alien to this, but I like it!
Next thing I am communicating with the Celtic goddess Brigit, who for some reason has had a connection to me for a very long time despite my general lack of interest in Celtic mythology. I tend to neglect her because I do not know how to fit her into my generally Germanic spiritual interests/practice. She has been getting progressively more grumpy about this for a while, demanding among other things that I publicly acknowledge her before other heathens. Well, here she is folks!
She soon had me falling through worlds, having basically taken over the show. I found myself by the well of Wyrd, conversing with the Norns. I have often journeyed there before and they have some memory of me, though this time their world seemed altogether more dark and ambiguous. Its hard to hold onto their words but the main theme was related to where Annalise and I live at the moment, an area with a very odd spiritual lay of the land. Spirits around here don’t like humans much (with good reason), and the built environment has had little of the emotional investment and artistic flourish that brings forth the magic of dwellings.
The Norns advised me to perform a kind of reverse Nidstang. Rather than turning spirits again their human neighbours, as Egil used the nidstang in Egil’s Saga, they described a kind of pole magic to invite and make peace with the local spirits, to change my personal relationship to them. They gave me some runes to carve on a staff and suggested that I raise the staff at a particularly loaded bit of land near the ocean.
They advised me that if I do not do this then we should move to a different locality because its not good to have local land spirits that just don’t want to know about you. I’ve known that this is how things have been here for a long time so its good to have some sense of a possible way to bring about some change or improvement.
After that journey I was still in quite a state. I could feel a pressure at the back of my head, a sensation that usually goes with riding states. I have not had a really strong co-mingling experience in a long time and it was quite a joy to feel it coming on. I’m a bit out of practice with letting it happen, but Brigit came through finally. She pulled out the earplugs and the world seemed to open up into sound.
I am pretty vague about what happened after that. It wasn’t the strongest horsing I’ve ever done but it opened up the channel which has been somewhat closed recently. There’s going to be more of this in future I hope! She has quite a sense of humour. Often in this situation the riding god/dess likes to make good-natured jokes at my expense to others, cutting me down. I think its good for me to get the perspective of a consciousness unfettered by general human limitations – to them my hang-ups and ego armouring seem completely absurd. Annalise was quite happy to hang out with her fortunately so things went smoothly.
I’m certainly going to start employing sensory deprivation more for these purposes in future. Its pretty much pure UPG, but I feel it was directly shown to me and it certainly proved effective. That’s about all I have to offer for now.
Hail Brigit!
