By Heimlich A. Laguz

Wyrd, Runa, and the Beauty of Ignorance

I had another really beautiful, intense and long-drawn possession experience with Woden today, this one totally unplanned and spontaneous. Sometimes I call… sometimes he just turns up.

I cannot say anything about it (because there are some things that I just can’t stick on the Internet for everyone to read). But I can talk about how I’ve reacted to it.

I feel as if the course of my life is reflected in the image of an archaeologist lovingly brushing dust from an ancient relic. When I was born I was buried in the earth. At some point I was dug up. Now the process of carefully cleaning me off begins. Next will be detailed documentation and theorising about my significance and meaning.

Right now it feels like everything that has happened in my life was meant to be according to a hidden logic and significance that I cannot comprehend. I am woven so integrally into wyrd. Of course, everything and everyone is.

I’ve been reading a bit about Leibniz’s philosophy lately, his idea that this world is exactly how it is meant to be. Voltaire might have mocked Leibniz, but I think I might be able to understand what he was saying. Not the best of all possible worlds in any obvious sense we can grasp… but definitely meant to be just how it is.

To ask it to be other than what it is means being world-denying and… well, unHeathen. Just a thought, no need to turn that into rigid doctrine (unless you feel like experimenting with dogmatism to see what it is like [some chaos magicians come up with the most brilliant little psycho-magical experiments]).

If each of us is on a unique trajectory through time then perhaps, well, I cannot complete the thought.

As a Heathen I am both a determinist and a believer in free will. The division between these two is false and built on ill-conceived ideologies; it reposes in an ultimately Christian abstraction, and even hard determinists are thoroughly determined by Christianity in their views.

So here we are, webbed in wyrd, hurtling through time simultaneously under our own power and completely involuntarily as well. Making decisions, responding to the shifting weave of the Norns as best we can. Once things have occurred it is retroactively true that they could never have been otherwise.

But before they occur – well there’s a whole lot of possibility for the oscillations of our agency to come to bear. Free choice is only determined once it is fixed through the hand of time.

We know Urd, the past (though the past constantly changes in meaning as it expands and is never truly fixed despite the illusion of its certain solidity).

We are in Verdandi, the present that stretches forth and most certainly is not fleeting or momentary. Heidegger was right on that one – he was paying attention. St Augustine, on the other hand, really had no idea.

Skuld, the future, is a debt that, sure, we’ll pay, but never just yet. We’re always going to pay or else we’ve already paid but you can never catch any of us handing over a wad of cash to the time bank. And even after the big cosmic foreclosure at Ragnarok things will keep going – you just watch!

So yeah, right now I ride the chariot of trust and calm. Everything is unfolding in just the right way. That isn’t the same as pretending that the world is perfect or that I and others don’t suffer all kinds of wounds or that struggle isn’t both necessary and worthwhile.

But right now I can affirm it all. Not, as Nietzsche demands, that I force myself to see the whole past as an act of my will (as though I could ever have even conceived of all this, let alone willed it!)

Rather, I affirm it all as the veil of Runa – of mystery – which I can never penetrate. Nor can any finite human being. I affirm the beauty of the horizon of Verdandi which escapes me no matter how fast I run towards it.

This is why I ultimately have so many grumpy things to say about the approach to magic typified by the ‘step by step’ logical, linear curriculum that groups like the Rune Gild espouse.

Reality is so much more complex and so much richer than that! Think of all the opportunities you miss out while you dally with you regular rigid practice of galdor, stadha, “rune thinking” and all the rest of it.

While you’re off “constructing” your Wode-Self as Mr Thorsson recommends you are missing out on the real Woden coming and showing you that a) it already exists and b) its way beyond anything you could have created anyway.

We aren’t creating from the force of our ego wills; we’re just brushing the mud off our golden forms so that we can shine with the light that falls upon us from the sun and the moon and the torch of human community (Kenaz, folks, Kenaz).

Yet ironically I worked through all that stuff for years when I was in the Gild and to carry my current train of thought to its conclusion, even that time spent doing “magical training” I now consider nearly worthless was crucial, just as crucial to my evolution as my beloved Jan Fries-style Seidh with all its serendipitous riches.

Sure, the latter is inspiring, beautiful, profound and actually helps you embrace magic and mystery. But for it to be the oasis that it is to me – well, I had to stumble through the desert of ego magic teachings and all that other rigid spoon-feeder magic rubbish first.

(The Gild say they’re against spoon feeding, yet the Gild curriculum is exactly that, an all-too-human crutch and distraction from the magic going on everywhere around the “aspiring Runester” … even if I must confess I profited from the rigid practice of getting my chanting in every day, meditating on the rune poems, etc, etc and owe the Gild a big debt of thanks).

So right now I know that I cannot and never will pierce the illusion, that the way things are unfolding for me is way weirder and more magical than anything I could ever have consciously constructed or conceived, and even my exposure to stodgy ego magic rubbish contributed to that (so maybe its good that such philosophies exist after all and I should be a little more circumspect when I grouch about them… aww, but grouching just feels so good).

And yet I have pierced the illusion at various times and will again. This is also true. Folks, two contradictory statements can be true at the same time; Aristotle was wrong (though, and here’s the kicker, for consistency’s sake I will also say that Aristotle was right).

Well anyway, things are unfolding and I’m in the eye of the storm and always have been and we all have because we’re all on our trajectories and maybe it will take one lifetime or maybe billions of years, I really don’t know if or how that reincarnation gig works, but right now I’m in the heart of marvelling at how ignorant I am and how beautiful the universe is and folks, this is the place to be. Or really, wherever you happen to be right now is the place. Or whatever. You get the idea (or not).

And tomorrow I’ll forget and I stumble back to my fears, frustrations, quirks, my amnesia, my all too human tendency to forget Mimir’s well in favour of disconnected distraction.

That’s ok too.

We forget the big picture so that we can have the pleasure of remembering it again and again, over and over. Endings are great because they guarantee new beginnings and beginnings are great because once something starts it has to stop.

And every time you come back to Mimir’s wisdom, well, I’d like to think you crawl a little closer to wherever.

What is the ultimate point and purpose of existence? I have no idea. I feel so strongly that my life is unfolding exactly in the way it is supposed to, but that doesn’t mean I have even a shred of a clue. “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment” said Rumi – I reckon he and Odin would have gotten on something fierce.

Socrates was the wisest of all the Greeks because he at least knew he was ignorant. Somebody remind me to toast that old gadfly next time I’m at sumbel, please?

What is the meaning of the question of Being? Asked Martin Heidegger. Being is Mystery/Runa – this is my answer. We are skating on the ever changing skin of the Well of Memory that feeds the world tree.

If Heathenism really says that there is no sin, no fallen-from-grace-ness, no world-as-bastardised-image-of-God’s-wisdom – well then we might as well start loving the vast cosmic question mark that escapes and entices our every rising breath.

Because that’s all there is, the question is the answer, or might be, or probably isn’t, or…. Well, you get the idea (or you might, or might not or… [yes this can regress infinitely, another secret there! {I just added this layer of parentheses to be a smart ass – or did I?}]).

Hail Chaos! Viva Loki! Aum Wotan!

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Seidh, Odin, Frey

I’ve not been well. I had my wisdom teeth out last week. In the last few months I’ve struggled with two flu viruses and some mind-blowing hay fever (I’ve never been physically incapacitated by allergy in anything like this kind of way before).

Not only that, my creative flow has been blocked these last few weeks. Among other things this has been impairing my ability to get my university coursework done. Not good when you have short deadlines and vast acres of work! Words have just been escaping me.

My only solace has been my improving physical fitness, though mouth surgery induced laziness for this past week has cut back into that again. Perhaps today I will clamber back on board the bodyweight bandwagon.

Recovering from wisdom teeth removal is not fun. Worst is not the pain, the inability to eat, the bleeding, or even the ridiculous swollen cheeks. It’s the abject boredom and isolation.

Until yesterday I had not been outside since I got home from the surgery last Tuesday. Almost a week indoors will send even a dedicated introvert such as myself into paroxysms. I even managed to bore myself with computer games, which once were my arch-nemesis in the realm of addiction!

Knowing that I’ve been sailing through dark corridors of ill health and misery in the last, say, three weeks especially, I resolved a few days ago to go on a journey, to fare forth, and see what I could see.

As a general comment on this aspect of seidh – for me faring forth is very different to what I more generally consider to be my style of seidh (and I will describe a lovely example of the latter later in this post). It’s more introspective, calm and hazy.

Sometimes when I’m doing it I question if I’m just having myself on if my focus is week or I am unable to detach my ego from the process. With my more natural style of seidh, well, once I get there there’s no doubting.

There are lots of sophisticated thinkers about faring forth in modern Heathenry (read the backlog of posts on the Seidh Yahoo E-List to see what I mean). I however lack such subtlety. I just do it.

I don’t have a working knowledge of the distinctions between the various old terms for this sort of magic, I haven’t built my practice out of precise reconstruction (though obviously I am informed about the limited evidence available and less obviously I don’t tend to willy-nilly mix in ideas from other traditions with my faring forth work).

Anyway, so I am lying in bed, in various degrees of pain (who knew that removing teeth at the back of your mouth could make every tooth in your jaw scream with agony?) And I guess that maked it easier to abandon the ship of my body and dive into the deep blue sea of projected consciousness.

I find myself in a valley shrouded by thick grey mist. The earth is barren; it’s like I’m in an abandoned World War I battlefield before dawn. Woden has come to guide me; I see his cloaked form flitting in and out of vision, luring me along dry riverbeds. And I follow his almost spectral form.

Until I come to a cave. When the river still lived it must have here flowed underground, but now there is only dust and frost to line its floor. I shrug and enter and a strange silver luminescence in the air creates just enough light that I can make my way through the crags and shadows.

I’ve no idea where Odin is at this point – perhaps he has seen out his role as my psychopomp for this journey. Seated on a rocky outcrop, however, is a woman. She is dressed in rotting finery and a tarnished crown rests on her brow. And she is a contradiction to behold.

One half of her face, her hair, her arm – I assume her whole body – is young, pale, the perfect frigid ice-maiden beautiful bitch archetype. The other half is rotten, shrunken, shrivelled and foul. This is Helja and I know now that I am in Niflhel.

Here comes the strange thing – I cannot recall anything detailed of my conversation with Helja. I know that she is cajoling, manipulative, abusive and arch. I recall her trying to bargain with me to cure me of my ailments and my loss of spirit.

But I also recall the deals she offers are just ridiculous. I would have to offer her more than I would gain in return. No point in that!

Why did Odin lead me here? I’m not sure, but perhaps it is to give me some perspective. Maybe it’s to show me how much I take for granted. Helja and I reach an impasse and I find myself leaving the way I came, trudging through the cold and lifeless mists. I clamber up an embankment and find myself back in my room with my pain-filled mouth.

And Frey is there with me. And he is frowning. And he says to me “you know, you’re not supposed to be pursuing me as you have. It’s not good for you. You are not made to accept my gifts. There is only one who is right for you, and he is a god of wolves, not boars”. (c.f. for example this post).

(Well he didn’t say it exactly like that, but you get the drift. Sometimes I admit I polish the words that divine beings say to me when I write these journal entries. Hey, they were off the cuff, we can’t all spontaneously speak like a character on Shakespeare’s stage! Arguably Herodotus’ History is more truthfull for its fabrications).

And then he was gone. And he was right. I’ve been trying to stretch myself between the infinitely uncertain, variable, chaotic and disastrous hedge-sitting of my patron, Woden; and the vast, bountiful, fertile, stable and overwhelming hedge-sitting of Frey. I’ve been ogling that green, green grass just over the religious fence. And it’s been costing me.

I tried to call Woden then, but it just wouldn’t happen. Just no luck for me there. I realise I’ve been messing up our relationship by trying to force a relationship with another god. I realise that I just don’t really Know or understand Frey – especially when I consider the intimacy of my relationship with Woden.

It kind of reminds me of how I felt around the time I quit the Rune Gild – it’s getting close to 10 years ago! I just felt that for all the discipline of their practices, all their philosophy, all the rest of it – well, they just weren’t helping me forge any kind of personal or emotional relationship to runes or to Odin.

How can you emulate someone who is a stranger to you? My solution then was that I had to chuck out all thr intellectualism in order to find the seething wode. Anyway, enough of that digression, the point is clear to me – I don’t have the faintest idea how to forge such a connection to Frey, whereas instinct easily showed me the way to Woden.

Ok, so these faring forth experiences made me decide to perform a ritual to Odin. I needed to mend our fences, repair the channels that run between us. So last night I did it.

I arranged to have an audience of one, because the vulnerability of an audience helps with ritual as a performance. You are forced to either go there or not at all. I prepared offerings of beer, organic butter, organic sea salt, water, fire (from the candle Volksfreund and I used on our necromantic adventure), garlic, ginger and tissues soaked with my blood.

I set the atmosphere by putting on some ambient Odinnic music of my own (which, gods willing, should eventually see release [yes gods, that’s a hint!]) I opened the ritual by singing the singular rune Ansuz, getting progressively louder and more aggressive until I was purely screeching and screaming my guts out.

I also banged a hammer and my wooden “Daoist priest” sword (see again the necromancy posts on my journal) and used these rhythms to build the intensity of the moment.

Then I called Woden in all his dark aspects, as god of bloodshed, war, hate, fear, betrayal, violence, destruction and all that fun stuff. Then called him as god of poetry, song, sex, wisdom, hospitality, healing and all of that fun stuff.

I called him by many of his old names.. and a few new ones spilled from my lips too, like Elric of Melnibone, and The Raven King, and Saint Nick, and even Satan (who Goethe describes as blue cloaked, one eyed and raven-friendly in Faust, after all!) Yes folks, warning: Chaos Heathen At Work.

While all this was happening I was involuntarily writhing, staggering, thrashing, shuddering, shaking – “real” seidh, at least as I experience it as a Jan Fries-loving seidhmadr. My body was plunging into wild paroxysms of its own, my consciousness going right on with it.

Until I calmed a little. Then I just called “Woden” quite softly over and over. A most tremendous sensation, like stable lightning bolts, spread through my scalp and from my hands up my arms. It spilled down over my brow like a helm – I wonder if this was one meaning of “Helm of Awe”.

It’s very rare for me to get such a dramatic energetic and physiological response from my possession work. Such experiences are so beyond my ego and the domain of its power and they’re so reassuring, healing and humbling. I cried a little with joy that my patron would impose himself on me so strongly that I would feel it right there in my nervous system.

And then I was his.

I won’t say to much about what happened because it’s all very vague, but he accepted the gifts and gave my audience a bit of a freak out. My cat didn’t recognise me when He was in charge and avoided us. I changed in appearance. Things were made good between us. The rift, healed.

He cast some runes for me too – funnily the first rune to come out was Ansuz, His rune! And they portended lovely things – healing, positive change, hard work rewarded, blockages destroyed.

And – well, that is all I really want to say, except that I am feeling vastly better today, though still taking it easily and carefully. None of this is at all intended as a disrespect to Frey, either – it’s just that you’ve got to go with the course of the river you are.

I was made for Woden it seems, and while his inconsistencies and chaos sometimes cause me fear or frustration – well I have to accept it. The other option is slow withering.

He said something, I vaguely recall, about an irony of my personality. Namely that I give myself an awful hard time for not being perfect (and therefore a better agent for him.) Yet my imperfections arise because Woden is himself imperfect, and thus make me closer to him in nature. I love irony.

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Baum Und Teufel

1. The Devil Is A Jerk

So if everything is one, a single manifold consciousness of pure benevolent love, a single infinitely recursive web of time, causality and spirit, well that’s pretty good, right? Sure there is death and destruction, but change is a gift: from fallow fields rise fertile crops. And, luckily, from fertile crops fall fallow fields.

It works in both microcosm and macrocosm. The totality of Being is a vast interconnected tree, water coursing up from the wells at its foot, spilling from its branches, back down again – thus time unfolds ecologically, spraying out in simultaneous yet mutually exclusive patterns of probability. Everything is and is not.

Likewise, down the scale a bit, earth’s weather patterns work like this: an endlessly referential and super-complicated web of matrices which are infinitely predictable after the fact; but utterly mysterious when viewed from the eternal crest of the present horizon.

Because of the absolutely uniqueness of every abstracted moment in the matrix we find that the whole system is simultaneously perfect/ideal and imperfect/debased. In the absolute individuality of each moment and phenomenon (which is derived from the absolute dissolving interconnecting oneness of the whole system) consciousness emerges.

Every cloud is spirit; every drop of rain a quicksilver thought in the mind of God (or whatever you choose to call Him/Her/It).

So it goes – fractal geometry replicates down and up infinitely from a set of finite premises – a kind of mathematical, cosmic perpetual motion machine. As we approach nothingness or as we approach Being the ratios contract or expand exponentially.

This is why, as Heidegger says, Being conceals itself. The closer we get to the big picture the harder it is to get close to it. This is why he teaches us to stand back and listen and shelter and think and dwell. Only in this way can we come to Being as a whole: by realising we always already start there.

If I understand correctly (which is unlikely), an analogy can be drawn to Einstein’s point about light speed – the closer we get our spaceship to light speed, the harder it will be to get there because of the geometric ratios at play. But if we could start ourselves off faster than light speed (which might possible?) – well, no problem!

Thus we find ourselves in the gorgeous voluptuousness of the oneness and difference of all things. I am every other being that exists by virtue of the fact that every other being is shaped by its relationship to me just as I am shaped by my relationship to every other being.

The preceding sentence can recurse forever, like the two serpents of a Caduceus; like DNA.

Difference and non-identicalness are real but are also the necessary conditions for the absolute non-difference and identicalness of all Being. There is no “synthesis” of these seeming contradictions that can be expressed in a linear logical way. Only poetry does the job. Thus Rumi teaches: “sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment”.

As manifest fragments of cosmic consciousness (can I really say that with a straight face?), human beings lose perspective all the time on the Big Picture. It doesn’t help that modernity tends to efface all the reminders that pre-modern cultures build into daily life, either.

For the old Germanic tribes lineage was important because one’s descent runs back all the way to the Wells at the foot of the Tree. Cut off the connection and you die. Separation is inevitably fatal, even if total dissolution all the time is a bit pointless.

We need to ride the crest of Verdandi, the present: as individual beings which are non-separate from wyrd. Otherwise? Well, otherwise we become parched vessels, cracked and crumbling in the desert of our ignorance and amnesia.

The devil is a jerk.

Why is the devil a jerk?

The devil is a jerk because he is the agent of amnesia. The devil wants you to forget that everything is One. The devil wants you to think that you alone own your existence, your actions, your will. He wants you to thumb your nose to the infinity of creation that you owe your whole existence to.

The devil tells you that you are isolate, absolute, self-created, a source of meaning which manifests ex nihilo – from nothing. The devil says that reality is fundamentally disconnected, discontinuous.

The natural state of being is not the cycle of life-death-rebirth as in the cosmic tree. No, the devil reckons that the natural state of being is kill or be killed. You can be immortal and moreover you should want it and you should want it at the expense of all other beings.

Sure, some weak-kneed apologists for the devil have proposed the notion of enlightened self-interest – namely that if I help people out they’ll help me out. That if I do my bit to make the world a better place I’ll benefit in unpredictable, rich, non-linear ways.

But implicit in this idea is the notion that the rule of Being is the oneness as well as the difference of all things and a real devil-worshipper will have no truck with this.

The devil says that your actions are your own, your ego is the only thing of value, that you can control anything and everything, that allowing things to be what they are (instead of what you will) is weak and contemptible.

Ironically many people under the devil’s sway are unequal to this dare and challenge and become depressed, lost, confused, somnambulant, pathetic, lonely, powerless, numb, etc, etc, etc.

Only by recovering their connectedness to the horizon of Verdandi, the present (which is to say: the horizon of mystery [which is to say, RUNA]) can such folk be healed.

By giving ourselves to the infinity of the unknowable grandeur of Being we are given back to ourselves as finite but unbounded, as individuated and interconnected. Whole, as the old Germanic tribes would say. Heilige. Holy.

The devil does not want this; he wants us to fight our true nature, to use force of will no matter how much it poisons us and those around us and leaves us, ultimately, empty and cauterised. The devil is a jerk.

2. The Devil is a Champ

The sum total of your domain ends at the surface of your skin; at the limit to which your voice is audible; at the limit to which your words can expand; at the limit to which you can use violence to achieve your ends; at the limit to which you can impose order on the infinite chaos of existence.

Sure, give in to chaos. You’ll be torn to utter shreds. How will you cope if you dare to gaze into the infinite reaches of Being? You won’t. Like the cosmic lamb to the cosmic wolf, you’ll be ripped to pieces, bleating like the pathetic domestic beast that you are.

The chaos doesn’t hate you (although it might) and it certainly doesn’t love you. It has no intentions toward you, no will. It is chaos. As soon as you start to talk about it in coherent language you are projecting human (all too human) characteristics onto something so fundamentally alien that you’ll never even begin to understand. Fall silent!

Ahh, but can you endure being enslaved to ignorance of the true nature of things? We flee into the cloying smell of wool and lamb shit, bleating like wimps. This is it folks – this is all the existence you’ve been given, will you squander it like a chump?

God is the Law of utter Chaos, and he lives inside you and is telling you to bow down and shut up and blunder through the meaningless Brownian motion of your existence. You think it means something? You’re ignorant and blind and stupid and even death is too good for you.

Nothing is connected, coincidence is purely random, the stars haven’t been talking to one another since the big bang and meaning is an illusion created by dumb-ass ape-like mammals that are far too convinced of their own importance. Wake up, you bleaters: we will come and go in the blink of the eye from the point of view of Chaos!

Only the brave win. Only the evil, the cruel, the self-obsessed, the masterful, the bloody, the vicious, the conniving. Only those who instinctively steal from the sheep around them, the wolves in sheep’s clothing, will ever get anywhere.

You think there is meaning? Unless you personally made it, it doesn’t exist. ME is the only important bit of the word MEaning. Well, not quite. MEAN is also pretty damn important.

This is not an easy challenge, to do battle as the isolate being you are with the endless tides of ignorance and ultimately of the contemptuous and mediocritising gravity of the Law of Chaos. The Law of Chaos wants you to be small and weak. You must fight it, you, alone against the cosmos. Alone against the cosmos, you, the true hero.

Not a hero for the people, not a saviour, not a healer or helper. But a hero for villains, liars, betrayers, murderers – all those with guts in this world of cowards. You must steal power from everything you encounter, stuff yourself with it, bloat yourself with it, create of yourself such mass that you exert a gravitational pull on the chaos, until your will orders the space around you.

Then the sheep will flock to your cause, your side, to serve, safe in the harbour of will and gravity that your iron-fisted desire has created. The more that flock to your banner, the more powerful your momentum. You are becoming a god.

The Law of Chaos – the ultimate cosmic deity – will try to stop you with misfortune, conflict, struggle. And others like you, other wolves in the land of sheep, will fear and hate you and try to steal from you to feed themselves.

But you love it, you love crushing your foes. You love crushing anything precious, powerful, beautiful, gravitational. Why? Because it feels good. Power is its own end.

The devil teaches the way. Reject the status quo (except the one you seek to forge yourself, of course). Reject the pathetic order that the Law of chaos has bequeathed you.

He leaps forth recklessly, one flickering spark against the entire ocean of chaos, to declare his will and desire and determination and fire. He smashes the illusion of interconnection, which is actually the armature of psychic bondage, which keeps the lambs bleating and stupid.

You don’t worship the devil. Why would you? Then you’d be placing something above yourself. Sure, you might pretend to worship the devil or any other being, but you don’t really.

You don’t worship the devil but you have to respect the old bastard, even if you’d happily destroy him and take his place at any moment. You copy his way of being, his mastery of fear, violence, theft and isolated arrogance. The devil is a champion of your cause, even though you’d happily knife him to get a leg up the ladder of your will.

3. The Devil Needs A Noose (The Devil Is A Noose?)

Secretly you hate mystery (that is, Being [that is, Runa]) because it refuses itself, and you seek to dominate it at every turn. In a way you love its endless new mysteries because this ensures you never run out of territory to conquer.

But the more you conquer, the more you secretly face how vast it is. Ever more desperate, caught in a vicious, inwardly tightening spiral, you lash out.

Mystery is mystery however. Mystery always wins.

Mystery always wins.

Mystery always wins.

Once, in an altered state, I declared:

RUNA, I give myself to you completely. Take me! I’m yours!

Runa responded:

But my dear boy, I already own you and always have. And you are a part of me and always have been. And so you seek to give yourself to myself, sjalf sjalfum mer as dear Yggr declared on his steed, the Tree. You give yourself to me but you always have been part of me. Give yourself to me and you give yourself also to yourself. Give your isolation to me and I will give you a lineage.

That’s what Runa said as she gently laughed at my expense and loved me all the more for it.

Mystery always wins. I have written two stories about the devil. Is the devil a champ or a jerk?

My experience tells me he is a jerk, but I love him anyway. I love his reckless hilarity, his passion and fury. His simultaneous hatred of injustice and perpetuation of injustice. What audacity to be so unevenly even-handed! What courage to tilt at the marvellous cosmic windmill!

If the devil did not make me forget the wonder of Being then I would not get to endlessly re-experience the ecstasy of remembering it again.

Therefore: thank you, Mr Devil, for my dark valleys – they are the necessary condition for my mountain tops and blessed isles, for my eagle and my serpent. If only Nietzsche had possessed the good taste to worship the natural majesty that nourished him without so much as a please or thank you!

But to those who emulate the devil, those provincial misers of spirit, those who never squander themselves as Nietzsche implores us to do, who erect crumbling towers for their empty egos – to these I say: you would settle for so little and think yourselves so rich.

Thus I declare: tie yourself a noose and break on the tree.

On the tree called by men Laerad and gods Yggrdrassil.

On the tree called by some Ash and others Yew.

On the tree that ever is destroyed and ever renewed.

Break on the tree, friends.

Break and become whole.

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Substitute Living

Something that I think is an important part of neo-Heathenism is getting back to whole foods and holistic living. Think you can be a tru Heathen and live on fast food, microwave dinners and weird chemical substitutes? Well yeah, you can, but you’d be selling yourself way short.

To me Heathenism is about holism. Recognising the way that – according to wyrd – what goes around comes around. And following on from that – you are what you eat. I would contend that a lot of modern food is a load of nothing, a falsely isolate confidence trick.

Take, for example, the humble canola margarine tub. Promulgated as part of the terror-filled flight from butterfat. Of course, if I understand correctly canola is extremely bad for you – almost certainly a lot worse than butterfat (which is itself much maligned).

A product of the industrial production line, canola oil-based margarine is literally nothing. It has no place in the natural order, at least, no place that makes sense outside of the complex abstractions of industrialised modernity.

Created to exploit our modern terror of food that has in fact served our species just fine for thousands of years, margarine and its ilk in turn seem monotonically related to the incredible rise in so-called lifestyle diseases like cancer, heart disease, diabetes and all the rest.

The latest fashion for margarine marketing here in Australia is to simply label the plastic tub “spreadable” without calling it margarine. As though we are supposed to write “spreadable” on our shopping lists where once we wrote “butter”. A product defined by its use, not its substance or properties. Literally nothing.

Now I’m no expert on nutrition, though I reckon Weston A. Price has a lot more sense than Kraft in these matters. But I do know that there is something terribly nihilistic about inventing new foods – which are terribly unhealthy – in order to ‘save’ the population from perfectly acceptable diets.

I’m talking about processed white bread, I’m talking about pesticide-soaked vegetables, I’m talking about all the nasty unfermented soy that the health conscious but ill-informed suck down happily.

These are not foods that you can grow with your own two hands. Yet nothing is more Heathen than what you can make with your own two hands.

Why did we go sour on traditional eating habits? A lot of it is to do with industrialised farming – which is of course the arch-lord of fragmentary rather than holistic life philosophy.

Apart from farming practices which strip the soil of fertility while doing nothing to restore it, industrialised farming also involves the application of all kinds of chemicals which destroy the environment and which end up in our bodies, taxing our systems an breeding disease.

In short – no consideration of the fact that what goes around comes around. Similarly, a lot of the food made with these methods is weak, vitamin-poor, tasteless, deformed. Bananas should not be able to keep fresh for a month at room temperature. Nor should they be bland, pale, seedless or as big as my foreleg.

These foods are gradually becoming embodied nothing, physical contradictions, floating in a putative non-space where we think we can pollute, destroy, and consume rubbish endlessly without consequence. The marvels of modern food are a whole philosophy of life, a philosophy of arrogance, mediocrity, greed (for those that profit) and ignorance (for the endless ‘consumers’ out there).

Heathenism has to have substance if it is going to be ever a serious proposition. In fact food and everyday holistic living is the most important legacy of the arch-Heathens. Certainly more important than gods, runes or dead languages. These folk lived with a sense of hands-on perspective. Pumping life poured through their veins.

Where does that leave us today? When you start researching alternative nutrition and realise how ubiquitous and unhealthy hydrogenated fats, canola, sugar-substitutes and high fructose corn syrup are – well, its just overwhelming.

Add to this the expense of organic grocery shopping. Why is organic food pricey? Cause you are actually buying something, not nothing. You are buying food grown the hard way, food with character, richness, luscious taste and lots of vitamins.

Why do kids hate to eat vegetables? Cause they taste gross. But feed them organic vegetables, free of GM and pesticides, and I bet you they won’t be able to resist.

I have a long way to go with rearranging my life in accordance with these principles; at the moment things are not very conducive to a lot of the changes I want to make or that in the past I have made but then was forced to relinquish.

But the way forward seems to me to be simple – once you’ve done your research you can start to gradually varying things. Just start in one area and slowly you can make the change. It’s the same with living in a more environmentally-friendly way: start small and work your way up. Even small changes can have big consequences.

Some easy changes you can make – stop eating vegetable oils (extra-virgin olive oil is much better); buy less processed bread (you get less slices but a lot more weight so it works out nicely); and pick up even the odd bit of organic produce – it is so good that you’ll soon be very motivated to either grow your own (which can be deeply satisfying) or else happy to rearrange your finances in order to go organic.

Dump on all those super-sugary foods like breakfast cereals that present themselves as health foods. Don’t read the marketing, read the ingredients list. The less of this rubbish we eat, the less of it we’ll crave. You can bet that Odin doesn’t have any fillings.

And don’t even get me started on the pasteurised milk fiasco. Back in the 1930’s they started packing cows into tiny, unsanitary living conditions. Then, to save money, they started feeding cows grain, which the poor beasts just cannot digest.

Result? Sick cows, which led to sick humans. Solution? Not to stop these bad animal husbandry practices but rather to process the milk in such a way that a vast proportion of its nutritional value is destroyed.

No Heathen culture would be so myopic, but here in modernity? This disastrous Government regulation makes it almost impossible to exercise your free choice to drink raw milk, even if grown in healthy conditions.

Well I’ve had raw milk and it’s just incredible. So powerful and rich. It makes you feel like a million dollars. I struggle to drink pasteurised milk anymore. You suddenly realise how unhealthy the stuff is, how inert and dead and foul, once you’ve had the real thing.

Well maybe postmodern industrial culture is like pasteurised milk – only satisfying if you’ve never drunk from the rich fountain of raw, living Heathen spirit.

It can take years to slough off the poison of postmodern culture (which doesn’t mean abandoning technology but rather treating it with the circumspection due to all things which seem self-evidently good). So start with just a little step, a little nibble, and be gentle on yourself.

The more you re-integrate yourself into natural living the easier it will be to keep going on down the path. You might just find yourself giving up the substitute diet of modernity and starting to eat the organic whole food of Heathenism.

The beating heart of old Heathen culture was frith – bountiful peace. Sounds better than waging war on my own immune system with poison dressed up as nourishment.

Some helpful sites to start you off (and Hex Magazine has lots of great stuff too):

http://nourishedmagazine.com.au/
http://www.westonaprice.org/

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I am Loki's Love Child

Just kidding! Hope I got your attention, though.

I can’t believe I’ve spilled so little ink (pixels?) on Loki with this little journal. If you’ve been following my writing for long you’ll know what a fool I am for the cheeky bastard. But how did I come to be a Loki lover? I mean, isn’t Loki, like, a BAD DUDE?

Well first of all we need to realise that his role in Norse mythology changes over time. For much of the myths Loki is a troublesome but sympathetic Puck, the partial outsider who initiates chaos but also fixes it in marvellously inventive ways.

Loki saves the gods from all kinds of messes (admittedly sometimes messes he created) and usually in doing so brings them all kinds of advantages. There’d be no Mjollnir, Skidbladnir, Sleipnir or Gungnir if not for Loki’s mischief and ingenuity.

Likewise, without Loki’s excruciating sense of humour the gods would have been thoroughly stomped on by Skadi (surely any myth involving goats and testicles has to be celebrated as a spiritual triumph!)

Not only that but for many adventures Loki and Thor are travel-mates and complement one another very well. The hammer god and the trickster are a perfect combination of character traits when you think about it: either on their own would have a much tougher time negotiating the dangers of Utgard.

And of course Loki and Odin are blood-brothers. Some people can’t understand this but I think they are forgetting that Odin is a lot more complex than just some boring “Our Father who art in Asgard” figure. People, Odin is not Jehovah! He’s a ragged, raging, womanising poet with a mouth filled with mead and veins filled with fire.

Of course Odin’s own ancestry is giantish anyway (like so many of the Aesir actually… this business about giants and gods being implacable foes is a myopic understanding of the mythology).

In fact if you think about it…Thor is the son of Odin and Jord – so he is himself of giant stock! Go on, someone tell me I’m wrong, I dare you!

Not familiar with these stories? Oh come on folks, I’m not going to retell these bloody myths here and now. Suffice to say, there’s plenty of hard mythic evidence to justify our celebration of Loki and his irrepressible spark. Go do some reading and drop a few blinders if you feel like it, too.

Ok, sure, so things go sour with Loki and the Aesir. Then again Ragnarok leads to rebirth and new life, and in a way even this terrible disaster makes ultimately for a brighter world.

I’m not necessarily defending Loki’s actions, but given that whole business with the gods chaining him down and dripping venom on him – well its understandable that he wasn’t a happy boy after that misadventure. Can’t have been much fun for poor Sigyn either, and she didn’t even do anything wrong!

So what about my personal relationship with Loki? You know, it was a gradual, bashful introduction. I got all curious about him, I guess because I myself have a very troublesome, cheeky streak. I like to “question authority” as Mr Leary would have it.

I might live in a glass house (don’t we all) but like Loki I still can’t resist chucking the odd stone or fifty.

That’s part of why we describe Chaos Heathenism as being internally contradictory. We rather figure that every other philosophy or approach to magic and/or Heathenism has its blind spots anyway so we might as well be up front about it. By embracing the attitude of a god of deception we actually end up being more honest. I hope.

I haven’t done it yet this year but usually around March I make an offering to Loki. Invariably he throws all sorts of trouble at me and I have to learn to laugh at my misfortune. On some occasions this has produced a string of events which – just like in the myths – have left me in a much better position for his machinations.

The thing is though – you can’t use Loki. I mean, if I did these offerings with the secret intention of getting something out of it, he’d shaft me for sure. And I wouldn’t blame him either. The motivation has to be one of reverence, respect and laughter. Loki kicks the asses of spiritual misers all day, every day.

I guess I also relate to Loki because I’ve often felt like an outsider, different, weird, strange – and in Germanic mythology he seems to occupy a similar role. At times Loki gives me courage to be myself, to stick it to the stiffs, and I really appreciate that gift.

It’s hard to be me sometimes, just because I don’t seem to play well with others in lots of contexts (though I think often that says more about them than about me). Loki has similar problem.

It isn’t malevolence – it’s just that when you can’t switch off your BS detector you can start to get a bit uppity. As I get older and braver I find it harder to silently choke on my troublesome instincts.

The danger is that this posture turns into an ego trip itself. “I am the great and mighty outsider, and all you sheep are just a bunch of worthless psychic wimps”. How many times have we all heard that little head trip? Sometimes these loonies even manage to accrue followers. Imagine – an army of perfectly uniform ‘individuals’. Classic.

Well I have no desire to be the next Heathen Osho (who seemed to have the spiritual goods even if he also developed a weakness for cult compounds, drugs and dodgy sexual manipulation).

But I still need to be careful because, as you might have noticed, I SOMETIMES FLY OFF THE HANDLE AND SAY STUPID, STUPID THINGS.

Ahh, that’s better. I hope you are getting a flavour for what Loki magic can be like. If you are a little horrified by your own antics then you are on the right track. Just don’t take it too far (except for when you really feel like it).

Loki can teach you a lot about your limitations, and about the limitations of others, if you spend a little time listening to his erratic advice. He can really help those of us who are deeply introverted to bust out and be ourselves.

The hilarious thing is that once you start acting out, you realise most people are too busy navel-gazing to notice you anyway. As Loko psychonauts Beastianity put it: “you’ll screw bars all over your windows and give thanks you don’t live in a prison”. Loki is great at shattering the mental halls of mirrors that we snare ourselves within.

Look, I am anything but an expert in the Loki way. I have so much to learn. I get so damn serious at times, so damn sincere that it hurts. I get really stuck in my little porthole into reality and I become an easy butt for jokes – but thank Loki I have friends willing to stick it to me.

It’s possible that some folks reading this article really might not know what the heck I’m on about. To these I invoke Loki – get out there and have some fun my troublesome friend!

The only way you’ll ever know is by giving Laufey’s son a go. So just call on him with honest passion and curiosity and a little love. He’ll take it from there.

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Culture, Genocide, and Whingers

One sometimes hears Heathen folk express the feeling that their culture is under attack; more than one Heathen I hold in high esteem has expressed the feeling that they are the target of cultural genocide.

I myself often resonate strongly with the sentiment expressed by Irish band Primordial:

Is this all I’ve been left?
Broken oaths and betrayals
The empty words and dead rhetoric
Of my sold and broken culture

And I said once before
That time heals nothing
I feel like a wounded animal
In the dying throws

Primordial make a particularly rich critique of monoculturalising capitalism; in footage of a live performance I have seen, their vocalist (A. A. Nemtheanga) announces to the audience between songs that “whoever you, whereever you come from, your rights are being taken from you!”

In a way this is a new face of universalisation – we are all the same in that our particularities are being assaulted and dissolved by a remarkable battery of largely commercial and technological social forces. How ironic and tragic.

And yet when straight, white men in patriarchal societies – and many of whom are financially comfortable – complain about being subject to genocide I cannot help but think they’re taking it all a bit far. Some Heathens even go so far as to be out-right whingers – you’d think such behaviour was mandated in Havamal!

The truth is that European ancestral heritage is most of all under assault from its own descendents. If we wish to preserve this heritage then it is European-descended people who need to be awoken from their post-monotheistic (or indeed monotheistic) slumber – at least for long enough that they can make a conscious decision about the course their lives might take.

On other hand, let’s take a reality check. Consider the awesome and under-acknowledged plight of the people of Tibet at the hands of Chinese imperialism.

These folk are being killed for the slightest infraction, forced at gunpoint to betray their traditions. What European can say the same? These stoic folk make the self-righteous outrage some Heathens express seem utterly fatuous, utterly childish. It’s a good thing Heathenism is so obscure or such vocal Heathen windbags would make us a laughing stock.

As part of my studies this year I had the opportunity to write a short report on the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal people in my homeland of Australia. I have presented it here so that my readers can get a clear idea of what it is actually like to be the subject of pre-meditated and systematic genocide.

Some apologists will accuse me of wallowing in ‘white guilt’ or the like, but personally I think this says more about them than about me. I don’t feel guilt at all, I just think it good taste to acknowledge cruelty and injustice even if if is inconvenient  for one’s comfortable complacency to do so. Indeed, acknowledgement is the most important step in righting wrongs.

Restitution of wrong is an ancient Germanic tradition (c.f. the practice of weregild); many of those who mourn the loss of the old ways in one breath want to deny the responsibilities these old ways impress on them in the next breath.

Such individuals therefore misuse the word ‘Heathen’ when they apply it to themselves. Hypocrite is more on the mark.

As I say, I take the views of groups like Primordial seriously and in many respects empathise and agree. But ultimately we need to recognise that even in the loss of our heritage we whiteys haven’t really had it all that bad (well, the Irish have copped much more than most European peoples and I certainly acknowledge that aspect of Primordial’s perspective).

We need to stop wallowing in negativity and paranoia and blaming everyone else and get on with building a positive culture of hope.

Part of that process might include acknowledging the problems of the world, even the problems facing us specifically – but it has to be done in a way that inspires or transforms, not mires us in hopelessness, paranoia, or xenophobia (all of which are traits we have inherited from dualist monotheism and which are alien to the Heathenries of old).

Ok, rant off. Hope you enjoy reading my little report….

What Was The Forced Removal of Aboriginal Children?

It was a systematic attempt, made by State and Federal Australian Governments, to destroy so called ‘full blood’ Aboriginals and to quench Aboriginal languages and cultures.

The idea was to remove any children of mixed ancestry and intermix them into white society until their Aboriginal heritage became dilute and dissolved over generations. The thinly-veiled hope was that “full blooded” aboriginals would die out naturally (poisonous imperialist-political appropriation of evolutionary theory).

Between 1910 and 1970 10-30% of all Aboriginal children were forcibly removed without warning from their families on the basis of their skin colour – not because of any kind of genuine welfare issue or need (Dow, 2008).

They were placed in work camps and foster homes (often with a thin veneer of Catholic or Christian charity) where the treatment often severe or arbitrary. They were often shunted from one place to another without warning, explanation or consultation. Much of the work they had to do was unpaid – that is, slave labour.

Estimates vary according to source and methodology but we can pretty safely say that at least 25% of all children removed in this fashion faced physical or sexual abuse from their supposed carers.

Importantly, rates of indigenous child removal from families are still many times the national average and it is hard to believe that racism is not still a contributing factor to this, above and beyond genuine welfare issues (Reconciliation Australia, 2009). It certainly reflects the intergenerational consequences of the forced child removal policis.

Much of this was first systematically revealed in Bringing Them Home (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission/Australian Human Rights Commission 1997), a Federal Government inquiry which received hundreds of submissions documenting untold human suffering and injustice.

The report popularised the term stolen generations in reference to the aboriginal children removed from their birth families.

Among its recommendations was advice that the Australian Government should offer an apology for its legislated acts against indigenous Australians.

Incidentally, former Prime Minister John Howard refused to apologise because he thought the current generation of Australians should not have to apologise for the actions of previous generations. Yet many Australians involved in the removals are still alive and more importantly indigenous Australians are still living out the consequences as fresh wounds – so his argument seems very weak.

Because so much is said about indigenous Australians, and so little energy has been spent listening to or acknowledging their experiences, I have attempted to use their own words to elucidate this presentation.

(All quotes taken from Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission/Australian Human Rights Commission, 1997 or Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission/Australian Human Rights Commission, 2007).

Consequences of Systematic Forced Removal

There’s still a lot of unresolved issues within me. One of the biggest ones is that I cannot really love anyone no more. I’m sick of being hurt. Every time I used to get close to anyone they were just taken away from me. The other fact is, if I did meet someone, I don’t want to have children, cos I’m frightened the welfare system would come back and take my children.
(Confidential evidence 528, New South Wales)

Relationships – we know that adoption runs best when the child is transplanted into a new environment that is secure and offers good opportunities for strong attachment development – hence the rigorous screening of potentially adoptive parents (Leon, 2002).

Forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their families involved them being shunted from place to place, abandoned to institutions or white foster parents that may have often been unfeeling or abusive. Having already lost their families, they then could not rely on having anyone else in their lives for very long – if indeed they could find any positive care-givers once they had been removed from their families.

As such they were treated in about as traumatising a way as possible for adoptees – their primary caregivers were taken from them (which is awful enough by itself) with uncertain possibility of finding a substitute securely attached care-giver. It is no surprise that there are significant negative personal and inter-personal consequences caused by these experiences.

Personal Consequences

I still to this day go through stages of depression. Not that I’ve ever taken anything for it – except alcohol. I didn’t drink for a long time. But when I drink a lot it comes back to me. I end up kind of cracking up.
(Confidential evidence 529, New South Wales)

Given the massive disruption and loss of attachment formation for these children, and the severe grief that goes with such wounds, it is not surprising that rates of mental illness and drug abuse are so high in Aboriginal groups. An individual’s abilities to form trusting relationships or have any kind of positive outlook on life would be severely impaired by these experiences.

We can imagine that these peoples’ experiences would leave them with very high baseline anxiety due to the fact that terrible things actually could and did happen at any moment. One is reminded of the concept of learned helplessness (Seligman & Maier, 1967) in this phenomenon.

Without understanding and support, and with their trust betrayed so frequently, it is no surprise that some Aboriginal people would struggle to seek help for their suffering.

And every time you come back in it doesn’t bother you because you’re used to it and you see the same faces. It’s like you never left, you know, in the end.
(Confidential evidence 204, Victoria)

Another significant pattern is that the more exposure to forced removal in personal and family histories, the more institutionalisation Aboriginal people are subsequently vulnerable to. Beaten down by abuse, loss and fear, they are thrust into a vicious downward spiral of despair and punitive control – hence the emotive and ongoing issue of the high rate of Aboriginal imprisonment and deaths/suicides in custody.

Inter-generational Consequences

When we left Port Augusta, when they took us away, we could only talk Aboriginal. We only knew one language and when we went down there, well we had to communicate somehow. Anyway, when I come back I couldn’t even speak my own language. And that really buggered my identity up. It took me 40 odd years before I became a man in my own people’s eyes, through Aboriginal law. Whereas I should’ve went through that when I was about 12 years of age.
(Confidential evidence 179, South Australia)

When it was originally commenced, the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their original families was explicitly justified in terms of destroying their entire cultures and race.

Government and religious/charitable agencies – no matter whether their intentions were good or not – systematically stamped out the stolen generations’ connections to their ancestral languages, beliefs, cultures and practices.

In terms of international law the Australian and State Governments, as well as the adjunct private agencies, were committing genocide and did so for sixty years. The consequent losses are dizzyingly incalculable on an individual level.

I have a problem with smacking kids. I won’t smack them. I won’t control them. I’m just scared of everything about myself. I just don’t know how to be a proper parent sometimes. I can never say no, because I think they’re going to hate me. I remember hating [my foster mother] so I never want the kids to hate me. I try to be perfect.
(Confidential evidence 529, New South Wales)

Having lost their true parents at a young age and being raised in institutional environments, many of those in the stolen generations had little experience of being parented. Without role-models, expectations or their own experiences of being parented to guide them they are left with unique challenges when presented with the task of raising their own children.

This in turn leaves them more vulnerable to the removal of their children for welfare reasons, which opens further layers of inter-generational disconnection, grief, loss and suffering. Even those born after the official end of forced-removal policies are forced to live out and face down the legacy of what was done to their parents and other family members.

Of course, the damage cuts both ways – the families who lost their young being wounded both personally and in terms of their social fabric.

Social Consequences

I felt like a stranger in Ernabella, a stranger in my father’s people. We had no identity with the land, no identity with a certain people. I’ve decided in the last 10, 11 years to, y’know, I went through the law. I’ve been learning culture and learning everything that goes with it because I felt, growing up, that I wasn’t really a blackfella. You hear whitefellas tell you you’re a blackfella. But blackfellas tell you you’re a whitefella. So, you’re caught in a half-caste world.
(Confidential evidence 289, South Australia)

Although the feeling of not belonging can occur in most adoption scenarios (Leon, 2002), for Aboriginal people the dilemma is particularly severe. They were put in the position of never truly being able to be accepted as white due to their skin colour, but were so dislocated from their culture of birth that they could not return.

This rootlessness and social alienation is a damaging existential wound which is difficult to quantify. Perhaps we can get some small insight into it with this thought experiment: imagine waking up every morning, looking in the mirror, and not being sure whether the person looking back at you is familiar or a total stranger. Imagine living that for the rest of your life.

I didn’t know any Aboriginal people at all – none at all. I was placed in a white family and I was just – I was white. I never knew, I never accepted myself to being a black person until – I don’t know – I don’t know if you ever really do accept yourself as being … How can you be proud of being Aboriginal after all the humiliation and the anger and the hatred you have? It’s unbelievable how much you can hold inside.
(Confidential evidence 152, Victoria)

Another significant social dimension of the removal is exposure to racism – both from white people but also internalised negative self-attitudes. Imagine being told your whole life that you must efface everything you are in order to become something that you will never quite be allowed to be!

The complexities of despair, pain, anger, hurt and guilt become written across the social context in the form of both internalised racism and of being a victim of racism.

Today many people dismiss Aboriginal peoples’ worth, judging them negatively because of the serious dysfunction in their communities. It is worth asking – with personal and cultural biographies like these would anyone cope any better? Unlikely.

Judging such folk for their perceived failings is terribly hypocritical, yet those affected by these forced removals might face such judgements every day of their lives, both from others and perhaps from themselves.

The Future?

Actually what you see in a lot of us is the shell, and I believe as an Aboriginal person that everything is inside of me to heal me if I know how to use it, if I know how to maintain it, if I know how to bring out and use it. But sometimes the past is just too hard to look at.Confidential evidence 284, South Australia).

As with any therapeutic endeavour, what ultimately matters is our willingness to have faith in those we work with regardless of how hopeless it all seems (Miller, Duncan and Hubble, 1997). This may take a lot of compassion, patience and care with the issues I have here discussed.

We have had two centuries of White Australia inflicting misery and failure on Aboriginal Australia by imposing and telling rather than consulting and listening, and this has played out dramatically in the case of the forced removal of aboriginal children. This has to change: one definition of insanity is doing the same failed action over and over and expecting it to yield different results.

References

Dow, C. (2008) ‘Sorry’: the unfinished business of the Bringing Them Home report (Australian Parliamentary Library Background Note). Retrieved 7 April 2009 from http://www.aph.gov.au/Library/pubs/BN/2007-08/BringingThemHomeReport.htm

Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission/Australian Human Rights Commission (1997) Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Retrieved online 7 April 2009 from http://www.hreoc.gov.au/social_justice/bth_report/report/index.html

Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission/Australian Human Rights Commission (2007) The Effects Across Generations. Retrieved 7 April 2009 from http://www.hreoc.gov.au/education/bth/download/effects_resource.pdf

Leon, I. G. (2002) Adoption Losses: Naturally occurring or socially constructed. Child Development, 73 (2), 652-663.

Miller, S., Duncan, B. & Hubble, M., (1997) Escape from Babel: Toward a Unifying Language for Psychotherapy Practice (Norton Professional Books). Norton: New York.

Reconciliation Australia, Sorry FAQ. Retrieved 7 April 2009 from http://www.reconcile.org.au/getsmart/pages/sorry/sorry–faq.php.

Seligman, M.E.P. and Maier, S.F. (1967). Failure to escape traumatic shock. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74, 1–9.

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Grimmnomancy

Right: news, sales spiels and housecleaning aside, its time for more on my Chaos Heathen adventures…

Grimms’ fairy tales. Clint gave me a marvellous hard bound copy of this strange treasure trove when we met up recently (thanks Clint)! I read the whole damn thing years ago but at the time – well I just didn’t get what the fuss was about.

Many of the tales are just rearrangements of the same elements, many of the characters and scenes have become hopeless clichés. Is this, I wondered, really a useful or relevant link between modern times and arch-Heathen times?

I used to think a lot of rubbish when I was younger (not that I’m exactly old or crusty as someone about to turn 29 … I hope).

I’ve come to realise that this book can be used for divination, depth psychological exploration, inspiration (and article of mine for the next issue of Hex is inspired by a Grimm tale), operant magic, and they even shed fascinating light on the more ‘authentic’ old school Heathen myths.

You can probably think of another 50 or so uses if you like. Given the magical connection I have with Clint it seemed only right to set his gift to magical purposes.

Let’s say I do a divination experiment right now with this hidden trove of collective unconscious-soaked imagery.

Here’s a question I have: a relative has recently received a potentially very dangerous medical diagnosis. When the possibility of this diagnosis was first raised I threw some runes.

They specified the precise physical location of the problem, predicted that the treatment would be a shock to my relative’s system, but that robust health was in store for the future.

Confirmatory lots indicated the importance of keeping busy and not getting lost in ‘why me’ sorts of self-pity.

Ok, so the reading so far has been very accurate – it predicted which way the diagnosis would go and where the problem would be (there were several possibilities). Its prediction on the treatment to be adopted looks also to be confirmed though we will not know until Monday.

If random assignment of ancient squiggles can ever be called a reliable basis for future prediction then this reading seems to be doing well so far and provides an adequate point of reference for our experiment in Grimm bibliomancy. Here’s how it works.

First, I dwell in my mind on the images associated with the outcome of this situation, on my relative, on the feelings of care and fear the situation evokes in me, on the medical paperwork generated thus far, on the various possibilities for what might come next. I try to dissolve myself into this pool of imagery and emotion.

Then I open my copy of the fairy tales at a random page. The King’s Son Who Feared Nothing. A story with a recurring motif of a courageous hero whose faithful allies are able to cure him of all ills with the Water of Life.

Freely associating this water that the king’s son’s lion companion draws from a magical well (Mimisbrunnr? Urdabrunnr?) I am drawn to thinking about wyrd.

My relative’s wyrd will save them. Their medical orlog – their health – is good; and they have good helpers. There may be pain or suffering but nothing that cannot be salved and healed. Indeed, they might in some fashion become stronger for the struggle.

As in the story, it seems to me the treatment will be swift and successful, though it may need several applications for full success unfortunately.

Confluent with my reading is the emphasis on a strong, positive mindset, an unwillingness to be defeated – this seems to be important.

A reading like this is difficult to do objectively of course, because the subject matter is so close to home. But the motif of overcoming sickness or injury in this story is unambiguous, even if there is some struggle involved as well.

Perhaps not the best possible future prediction with the repetition of treatment… but it could be a lot worse.

So there you have the basics of Grimm divination, if presented in a rather simplistic way. Many of the elements in this story seem to tap into elder mythology – trickster giants, arm bands that bring strength, animal familiars coming to the rescue, and an ordeal in which for three nights the hero is beaten by goblins and three times healed.

There is an apple from a magical garden (Idunna’s garden perhaps?), and the motif of a weaker man sending a stronger man as his emissary for some task necessary for the winning of his bride (consider Siegfried and Brunhilde).

There’s even a sleeping beauty variation in the story, with the princess in a dilapidated castle (it is for her that the king’ son must endure the nights of goblin violence).

Crossing to alchemical thinking for a moment, the king’s son is an important alchemical figure, the heroic deed-doer who is able to shatter stagnation but who must die his own death in order to enter dissolution and rebirth as a divine king.

Here we can dream into his captive princess as the feminine aspects of the world with which the masculine must embrace in union. She in turn is the key to a kingdom, so through their union she is healed and restored to power and he is transfigured from energetic but callow youth into wise and noble leader. Each guides the other into their destiny.

Do these metaphors mean anything? As I find myself writing I see myself, people I know, reflected in them. I find myself realising that this bit of bibliomancy is far from finished when the original question is answered. I see invitations of resolve, hope, healing, or shadow echoing out from the tale into the figures around me.

All that it takes is a little imagination, the willingness to suspend control over your mind and instead submit to its rumination. The technique is simple – whatever comes to mind, take it as significant, meaningful, not random. “One word led to another word.”

One of the great things about doing divination with Grimm’s fairy tales is that you have so much material to work with! Let’s say you are using 16 or 24 runes, or even a tarot deck. This book has two hundred and eleven stories and you could easily draw on several to weave together a reading.

The lateral connection between them might offer insights that you could not have gleaned from just one story on its own. This works with runes and tarot, right, so why not old Germanic fairy tales, loaded as they are with mythic resonance (like birches and their endless secrets).

What about psychological exploration? Well it is the same principle really! In a sense psychological exploration is a lateral, synchronistic process. Pick an element. Tug loose a thread or two, dive in.

The more grounded you are in Germanic mythology and history you are the more easily you’ll latch onto associations. This is just another reason why grounding yourself in historical and mythological lore is so helpful.

The fact is, these corpuses, these texts are so steeped in memory. We’d be daft to pass up such rich and inviting resources, we’d be daft not to gaze at our reflections in these wells.

I find that, reading these tales, a silence, as though the world had just been born or is holding its breath before bursting into being, comes over me. Sometimes when I’ve been working as a therapist and a profound shift occurred for the client there has been this sort of moment and feeling.

But maybe psychotherapy isn’t always all its cracked up to be if the same atmosphere can rise forth from a few pages of hackneyed folk tales. Well of course everything has its place. What matters is whether the wells of our spirits are open and whether we are drinking from the underworld’s dangerous but generously offered bounties.

Grimm’s tales and operant magic? You could use a story as a sigil, recite it with building passion to a fevered, seething pitch (perfect for launching an intention). You could construct a spirit servitor and bind it to the reading of a story.

You could use a story as the basis for a visualised adventure which incorporates seeding of magical intentions into wyrd. You could use fragments of the stories as magical rhymes, mantras to trip out on, themes to spring-board yourself into introspective trances.

But don’t let my limited ideas stop you from coming up with something better! I rather hope that folk will be inspired to try out a bit of Grimmnomancy and leave some comments on this post documenting their efforts. The stories are public domain so you can find them on the net easily if you don’t own a hard copy of the book.

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Fearless Honesty

fearlesshonestyimage1Before all that necromantic chaos erupted I was using this blog to explore the notion of fear in my life. And I had concluded that in addition to my patron Woden I needed some other kind of help – for example, from Frey, the Worldly God.

I’ve been doing a bit of reading, and Frey is a fascinating character. The comments made here are mostly based in historical evidence though I’ve extrapolated from the sources in some cases (and resorted to blatant speculation in others).

In some sources he is presented as the chief god; and he is the ancestor of at least one royal dynasty. One of the Vanir, he rules over fertility, peace, growth, and organic strength.

Frey is also arguably a god of the sea, being the captain of Skidbladnir, a ship which he can fold up and put into his pocket. And his boar Gullinborsti draws his chariot freely over water and sky, as well as being a potent symbol of new life and fertility in his own right.

As a god therefore of the land, the sea and the sky Frey seems to rule over the three-fold order of the becoming of aletheia in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy; he seems to be the Lord of our fundamental embeddedness within and reverence for the world.

No wonder that the arch-heathens called him the Worldly God, for his domain seems to spread over all of being and throughout all out all the infinite relationships that thread being together.

fearlesshonestyimage2Frey is also an incredibly masculine, phallic god – towards all existence he turns his giant and unquenchable cock. His is an unfettered manifestation of eros – his way is that of immense and unending lust for life. Whatever comes before him excites his erection – his thirst for union with all of being can never be slaked. Truly he is a super-abundant god.

It takes incredibly courage and fertility to adopt such an attitude to life. To embrace all that life might bring us is no easy feat – Frey is quite the Nietzschean figure in his intense desire to affirm all that comes before him, no matter how painful, repugnant or rotten. Through his lust he beautifies even the most hideous and wretched. What unspeakable power flows through his veins!

Frey is a god of peace, though it seems he’s a powerful warrior when called for. For the most part, however, his way is that of frith – the fruitful and evolving bounty of right relations between humanity, gods, spirits and the natural cycles. He represents a different kind of masculine power to the cliché of the rigid warrior; his power is deeply peaceful, organic and rich, yet not in the least to be trifled with.

He is a cyclical, seasonal god, who dies but can never really be killed (At least until Ragnarok); who fades away and bursts forth once more with blazing laughter. Who both conquers and submits to the feminine in the world, forming an ecstatic and mutually pleasurable equilibrium with his various female counterparts.

Yet Frey is not just the god of this world. He is also master of Alfheim, which was given to him as a tooth-gift. As the lord of the elves it seems Frey is comfortable as the master of many domains and faces of reality. Here is a primal god of this-worldliness who is also a primal god of other-worldliness!

(As a side point, Frey’s very nature seems to violate the notion that heathen culture can be neatly divided into innangard and utangard, insiders and outsiders).

So with Frey it seems we have a god who can do it all. He is a lover and a fighter; a master of fertility, sexuality, and lust; a ruler of both this world and others. To his eyes, ears, tongue, skin and nose the world must seem endlessly loaded with riches, with abundant wealth even where our limited human perspective sees only misery or emptiness.

In reflecting on Frey I cannot help but ponder the question of whether it is not lust and sexual fire that binds the whole universe together. Nature has a determination and power that is truly awesome: one way or another, the sap always rises. Even in this modern ecological crisis – well perhaps humanity will wipe itself out, but nature will fight on and again flourish I am sure, no matter how dreadful the damage we inflict.

But perhaps we can dream into this metaphysics of sex still further – for what do the stars shine, dark matter sing, planets explode? Perhaps space is not a vast vacuum but rather aglow with the post-coital joy of the big bang.

Given the concertina theory of universal history it seems sooner or later that post-coital bliss will turn to foreplay, cosmic sex, and another big crunch and big bang, over and over. Perhaps this unimaginably vast cosmic orgy is all part and parcel of Frey’s incredible lust for life?

I have had at least one foot in Alfheim all my life, and struggled to be here in this world. I have been calling on Frey to teach me how to embrace this world and this life. Woven through this process has been the act of getting my first tattoos.

The tattoos are cryptographic bind runes. First I took the seed words. I used the aett/rune number coding system (see E. Thorsson’s Runelore) to determine a pattern of branches and then turned them into radial designs – one built on a Hagal shape, one modelled on a Helm of Awe.

The Hagal design spells out the word Honesty; the Helm of Awe design spells out Fearless. This formula – Fearless Honesty – has two aspects, inner and outer.

Within me they are an exhortation to be honest with myself, to take the time to listen to my own emotions and thoughts, my needs and desires. To hold myself with a little reserve so that I do not entirely lose myself in the world around me but retain my grasp on my own perspective and needs.

Beyond me they are an exhortation not to think I can or should hide away; that I can and should bring my whole being to bear on the world around me. That I do not need to compromise my being for the sake of the other person’s equilibrium or what I think they want.

These tattoos have become sentient it seems. Their voices rise up my arms into the back of my head and shove me forward when I am hesitant to be true to their meaning. Or if I slip into an old habitual pattern then I cannot avoid being aware of it, remembering it so that I know to change next time.

They’re harsh task masters, not at all gentle with me, but I need this militant attitude – it is good for me. Sometimes, paradoxically, being true to Fearless Honesty means admitting my fear, worry or uncertainty; sometimes it means not saying everything I could because that is the best way to be true to my internal compass.

Having these deeply personal symbols on my arms, clearly visible, really helps make objective my subjective desire and determination. And people notice them! Since I had them done any number of strangers have been drawn to me, curious, wanting to know what they mean.

Folk see immediately that they’re symbolic, and get very intrigued. It is good magic and gives me yet another opportunity to stand in the world, redeeming my inner and outer natures into the original inter-subjective wholeness of the world (the bridge over which perhaps Frey and Woden hold sway).

Using these bind rune tattoos as magical expressions of my desire has so far proved extremely fruitful; I feel deeply proud of them and in some respects feel more myself than I have in my entire life. It is even better that they’ve gone from being sigils to being conscious beings – I call that animism in action! I have a feeling that eventually I’ll be able to project them to work magic in the world; that’d sure be useful!

Oh, and I realise I’m becoming more attuned to other people too – to their attitudes, to the meaning of their words, to the things they are thinking but not saying but which they unwittingly betray in their non-verbal communication. I’m getting faster in my ability to analyse an understand exchanges where there is subtext and ambiguity.

Of course no tattoo can completely transform you, and I have to keep strong my commitment to these principles – just getting marks put into your skin doesn’t take away the effort that transformation always involves. But that said, in some ways I can now never go back.

Fearless and Honesty have become doors and conduits for this desire of mine to fuse Woden and Frey in my being. Bring it on!

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Necromancy Part Four

necromancypartfourimage1So I’ve been watched by Odin pretty closely these last few days. Everywhere, crows, crows, crows. They follow me like they haven’t for years. Its just ridiculous. And they’re shameless too, sometimes they just sit there, cawing maniacally – then when I move on they just fly right on after me. Shameless, like I say. You’d think they thought I was dead and ready for the munching or something.

Finally on Wednesday I realised I needed to do a séance with that ouija board I received. I’d been sick pretty consistently since Volksfreund and my adventures with the ghosts – it really took it out of me. Plus I’ve been super busy and keeping on top of everything has been a real challenge.

But on Thursday I was booked in to get my first tattoos done and since they’re all about manifesting in Midgard I decided I had to clear the otherworldly or necromantic stuff first, no matter that I still felt pretty lousy on Wednesday.

I get home at about 8.30pm, having been thinking about the séance, the ouija board, all day, focussing my intention on using it. I’m home alone, which is a blessing. I did some research and a lot of people report experiences of mischievous or malignant spirits using ouija boards to harass or scare inexperienced or frivolous seekers. At first I dismissed this as childish fears, but on the other hand some folk I respect hold similar views too.

Well I’m sitting at my computer and it just wont go online. Then I hear strange noises, movement. And I know I’m not alone. There are spirits here, they’ve heard my thoughts about the ouija board.

Before I do anything about them I quickly call Volksfreund to discuss the situation. He agrees there some weird business going on, but he doesn’t think these spirits have anything to do with the Old One or the sacred site spirits. And my instincts concur. He wishes me luck and I get ready to do this thing.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Earlier I showed the board to Volksfreund. We were a bit drunk. He opened the board and bang – this dark vortex opened. I told him to close it right away and he did. So this was coming, this crazy thing. For a week or so.

So when I realise I’m not alone, and that these beings don’t seem all too friendly, something strange happens. Bolts of trembling and electrical fire course through me and I leap up, possessed to the gills by WODANAZ and let out an almighty roar.

I was listening to “River of Fire” from our (Ironwood) album :Fire:Water:Ash:, an Odinnic possession song, and hearing myself on the recording recite the lyrics from Odin’s point of view really quickened the possession. Later I think Volksfreund said the spirits might have also been attracted by the music, I’m not sure if that’s true though.

Then Wodan and I pick up this old toy sword I own and suddenly a whole bunch of threads of wyrd are revealed. This old wooden sword was made for me by my grandfather (the one who left me his pocket watch, see my article on my altar) because as a kid I was obsessed with medieval weapons (hmm, can anyone detect some patterns in my interests?)

Later my father and I painted the sword silver and gold and sharpened the blade. It’s the only toy sword I ever kept; all the others are long gone, but something made me unable to part with it and I’ve carted around from household to household for years, it looking neglected and reproachful.

Well there I am on Wednesday (Woden’s Day) night, this sword in hand, possessed by Woden, and this almost ancestral sword is just about scintillating. Then I grab my rune carver/antique screw driver (again, see my altar journal entry) and carve a Teiwaz rune on the blade.

My mind shoots to of an article I recently read about Daoist ghost hunters, who use enchanted wooden swords, and a comment Volksfreund made about Odinnic-Daoist similarities. It all fits – and as a teenager I loved Hong Kong supernatural martial arts flicks like Mr Vampire!

I know, this is sort of syncretist, but it makes so much sense for my own personal history and nature. And really, I’m not pretending to be a Daoist, it’s just a (fruitful) analogy people! That sword also has a powerful ancestral resonance – how much more Heathen can you get than that?

Well Woden is coming through me and I invoke Elhaz to open a magical space. We set up the ouija board and I use a coin as the indicating device. I’m sitting by my computer to record what comes out. So I tell the spirits (or Woden does) that I’m not to be messed with. Then I ask them their business.

I find I don’t need to spell out whole words. My hand flies to the first letter and then the whole thought of the spirits appears complete in my mind for me. So our exchange is short and sharp. Here is the transcript”:

Me/Woden: Who are you and what is your business.

Them: Don’t you dare threaten us.

Me/Woden: Why not?

Them: We don’t fear you.

Me/Woden: That makes no sense.

Them: Fuck off.

Me/Woden: Why are you here?

Them: Everyone always wants to know that. Yes we know you don’t fear us.

Me/Woden: How many are you?

Them: Four.

Me/Woden: If you have no purpose here then leave.

Them: We have a purpose.

I asked them to state it, because that last thing they said was pretty nasty in tone. They refused to state it and I got sick of being jerked around. So I hit ‘bye’ on the ouija board and invoked Odin again.

That didn’t get rid of them – these buggers were much tougher than the spirits I’m used to dealing with. Then one of them said in a very eerie, threatening tone, “I am the Prince of Lies”.

I burst into laughter at that – did they really think I would take such silliness seriously? I demanded to know what they wanted and forced them to tell me – they had come because they sensed my desire to use the board, in fact they claimed to follow the copies of the album that the board came with and harass anyone who used it. Their only interest was feeding off fear or other emotions. Parasite ghosts you might say.

I drove them back, closed the board, and grabbed the coin. I visualised a sun wheel like a shield radiating from the coin in my closed fist and was shocked to find this produced an intense kinaesthetic and energetic response in my shoulder, arm and hand. In fact I could feel the shield as though it were a part of my body.

necromancypartfourimage2I later offered the coin to a Balinese cat we have that I regard as an effigy of Freya.

Having disoriented these unwanted spirits so, I wandered the house. I felt a really strong ancestral presence, both from my sister and some other female ancestor, this one from my mother’s side I think. That was lovely. They’d come to support me in driving out these very persistent and unwanted spectral interlopers.

Then Odin took me a third time. Staring into a mirror, we had a conversation.

I told him that the next day I would be getting two tattoos, two powerful visual oaths. I asked him to help me with fulfilling my oaths and he promised to do so.

I asked him what this whole psychopomp business was about, in particular about this talk that “arrangements” would be made for me so I could do it all the time, almost like a professional. He replied that there are no arrangements, but that all will be as it must be. He asked me if I understood. I can’t explain what he meant, but I did understand and responded as such.

The ghosts were gathering their strength now and I asked if he could drive them off. He said he could, but he also said that I could defeat them too, even though so far all I’d succeeded in was holding them at bay. He told me to chant Ansuz three times. I did. Then he told me to use that to find the right song to destroy them.

I didn’t know what he meant. Then it came to me, a poem of mine called “The Noose Song”. It’s about (funnily enough) being possessed by Odin. So I recite this song, which induces a powerful ecstatic fury if you do it with aggression and vehemence.

The ghosts were somehow forced into presence – no more hiding – so they attacked! And I slashed them to pieces with my sword. The last one I threw the sword at – and it stopped in flight when it hit the ghost, hung there for a moment in the air, then dropped as though it had collided with something solid as the ghost dissolved. Very weird thing to see I must say!

I called Volksfreund back to check in and let him know how it went. Its good to have a human point of support with this sort of crazy business I am finding. Oh yes, and my computer stopped malfunctioning as soon as the ghosts were gone.

Odin has been around a lot since, in fact I had a really dramatic possession just last night, but it’s all too personal to be writing about here. Sorry folks!

One lesson from this – even if you are focussed solely on working with the Northern Traditions, there are plenty of beings in the world you might encounter who aren’t from that particular idiom. In this case I don’t know what these spirits were, but the fact they thought they could scare me with a Satanic reference tells me that they’d not dealt with Woden before.

No matter how hard a reconstructionist you are, this sort of thing is going to happen – at least potentially – and I think the lesson is not to let one’s ideology or philosophy blind one to what is right in front of one. I might generally choose to work with the northern mythological forces, but I’m not going to ignore other entities just because that isn’t their preferred framework. That’d just be stupid.

What next in this front? I don’t know. The séance was pretty boring really, though hopefully those spirits won’t bother anyone else. And I learned some handy things, too. Plus, it’s always very pleasant to be ridden by my patron. Who knows what wyrd yet holds in store…

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Necromancy Part Three

necromancypartthreeimage1After the first round of spiritual pyrotechnics we decided it was high time to have dinner. So we did.

Behind where we were sleeping for the night was a series of carved stone steps leading up a rise and off into bush. You used to be able to follow these steps to the second cemetery but that area was now completely overgrown and inaccessible. That was a shame because I felt that the Old One – the ancient being that called me here – dwelled in that second cemetery.

We had come with the intention of performing a ritual and we decided to use one of the stone steps as our altar. Hence the photos with our various ritual tools and offerings.

We spent some time discussing the purpose of the ritual. The area we were staying in is considered very haunted and normally no one is brave enough to sleep there. We noticed at least one electrical device switched on spontaneously, classic poltergeist behaviour.

I know parapsychologists say that poltergeist activity is really due to overactive psychic powers in children – but we were totally alone, and neither of us normally produces such effects.

As we discussed our plans the air became more and more oppressive. It was clear that while we had done some good there was a lot more work ahead.

The basic intention of the ritual was to invite learning and healing for both us and the spirits. I carved Mannaz and Eihwaz runes on a candle as these are to my mind classic death runes. We brought some very good red wine as our blot drink.

As we planned our magic something extremely strange happened. A rat appeared and ran under Volksfreund’s seat. It was as far as I could see a totally normal, three dimensional, living rat, seen with my eyes and optic nerves. Yet it did not come out from under his seat again!

Unnerved I asked him to get up and move the seat to look under it. Nothing. I scoured the whole area, unable to believe my eyes. It just disappeared! The floor was a totally clear and hard surface, there was nowhere for it to go.

It must have been a ghost or spirit, that’s the only explanation I have. I was seriously freaked out. This wasn’t just having another being use my imagination without my control to appear before me; this thing actually appeared 100% physical and real! I’ve never seen anything of such a degree of weirdness. It wasn’t a big, dramatic thing, but believe me, if you’d been there… well, it was extremely bizarre.

To clear the space we burned recels, dried herbs. It was raining heavily and very windy but somehow we got them going and Volksfreund smudged the area as much as the weather allowed.

I commenced the ritual by calling on Draugadrottin to come and to send us his wisdom, power and blessings, improvising a string of invocations. Satisfied that the right atmosphere was established we both offered our intentions – that our magic bring healing and learning all around (strictly speaking this had already started occurring!)

We lit the candle then and began chanting Mannaz and Eihwaz to power the spell. This went on for quite a while. Eventually the fever of the chanting quelled and I held out the candle into the rain to put it out.

Only it didn’t go out. I held it there in direct and quite heavy rain and wind. Still aflame. At first it struggled a bit, but then if anything the light got stronger. We started silently at it, in total awe, for five or ten minutes as it happily broke a number of the basic laws of physics.

necromancypartthreeimage2Eventually my arm got really tired from holding it out so I put it down on our makeshift altar. It kept burning for longer again! If you look carefully in the photo you can see the water glistening on the rock and the roses.

This we took as a dramatic and positive sign from the spirits. We raised the wine to honour the spirits and to honour Draugadrottin, making sure to give plenty back to the earth. The wild weather calmed as our work ended. It was certainly dramatic!

We saw various shadows and lights moving in the area after that. Sometimes we would see a person’s shadow moving along – but no person to shed it! Curious, no?

A really sweet and warm atmosphere spread over the whole area after our ritual. The remaining sense of malevolence dissolved completely. Indeed, we felt profoundly welcome.

We went back to the area where I served as a psychopomp for the spirits and both spontaneously went into extremely deep trances of communion with the beings there. Given that this was in the most haunted part of a place that many people fear to sleep in I think that was no small feat!

The rest of the night we felt a strong atmosphere of joy and even love. No one had given these spirits the healing or attention they desired in a long time or so it seemed. We explored the whole area again and it all seemed similarly whole and hale.

Finally at some horrible hour I went to sleep. Volksfreund stayed up and took some photos of things that might be ghosts.

The next morning thing still felt really good and we finally left at about midday. I was sad to go. One thing that didn’t happen was a meeting with the Old One. I felt that the learning it told me I would receive had occurred, but I had also hoped to have a more direct experience of it.

On our return I really wanted to have more weird experiences but none were forthcoming. And we both fell sick – in fact I’m not quite recovered.

But after a few days of feeling that I’d been invited into the most profound universe and then kicked out I got a message or clue for the next step. A new CD I had ordered arrived. I didn’t realise when I ordered it but it is concept album about communicating with the dead! And guess what – instead of a booklet it has a poster that folds out into an ouija board!

I know, that’s kinda cheesy, but I’m thinking that I have to try it at least once. It really felt like I was born to do this whole spirit expedition stuff, this psychopomping business. So now I’m just hopeful and curious about what happens next.

Hail Draugadrottin! Hail The Lord Of The Dead!

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