By Heimlich A. Laguz

Necromancy Part Two

Well we made it back in one piece. Although since our return both Volksfreund and I have been sick – well, we were running around in the rain all night! I don’t know that any more occult explanation is needed for our exhaustion.

So what happened? You ask. Plenty! First a little background.

While, as I mentioned before, I won’t name the location, I can tell you that it is located in a beautiful wilderness area. White Australians have been using the area for a long time and there are many very messed up ghosts in the place because many tragic (or monstrous) things happened in this place. As I mentioned in my last post, it used to be an Aboriginal sacred site, too, and we definitely felt that the land there has a very strong presence.

Ok – well, I’ll start from the beginning, counterintuitive though that may seem. I should add that my account omits some of Volksfreund’s experiences, partly because he stayed up later than I did. So this is not quite the whole story, but I tried to keep detailed notes.

We travelled partly over water to reach our destination and as we came near to it we were greeted with some very strange weather, in particular a sudden and very dramatic impact of wind and rain. Watching the wild ocean water I found myself imagining all kinds of watery spirits playing and fighting violently over the surface of the waves. Volksfreund had very similar visions. We felt that we were being sent a welcoming party in fact.

At the entrance to the location I was overcome with a profound sense of loss. It was first and foremost a physical reaction, very visceral. In fact, it took a lot of effort to forge onward. I could almost see spectral figures hovering about.

Different areas of the location seemed to have very different atmospheres. Specifically it was as though the air was thick and choking here, cold and flat there. The changes were immediate – not at all gradual. One minute we would feel fine, the next we needed to make a strong effort in order to move at all. It was very strange, and hard to explain, but also very palpable, like in each area the air buzzed in a different frequency.

There are two cemetery areas – or at least areas where corpses are buried – at the location. Walking down a hill past the first of these I felt a sensation like a hand pulling on the back of my neck. I fell down, completely disoriented. For a few minutes I lost my sense of identity: I sat there sorting through my thoughts, trying to remember who I was. It was as though someone had stolen my identity or reset it or something.

Volksfreund decided that this was the right time to announce us to the land spirits and ghosts of the place. He had researched the names of the Aboriginal tribes that had once used this place and his speech was very impressive! The oppressive air that had built around us softened in response, but not entirely.

Volksfreund had been there before and was known to the spirits, but I was a new quantity. I felt I needed to identify myself and state my business. It was a bit awkward, but I stood up and announced my name, my lineage, and so forth. I explained that I felt I had been called and that, while I did not know why I was here, I trusted the intentions of the spirits. I explained that I had been told my Odinnic lineage was the reason I had been called, even though I had no clear grasp of my purpose here.

Each time I finished one of the statements powerful gusts of wind blew up, as if in acknowledgement or response. The timing was unerring. Very strange.

As we made a first walk around the area we both experienced intense bursts of physical pain, difficulty breathing, and Volksfreund suffered a lot of pain in one arm, where he has previously had a lot of health problems. It was not pleasant – we felt like the memory of many people’s suffering were radiating from the rocks and ground – and into our bodies.

We climbed a hill to the area considered to be the most haunted. This is where many people died. It is also very beautiful, with sweeping views. Volksfreund saw a ghost whose presence in this area is well-documented, as well as a number of other beings. One touched his hand in a comforting way.

Then I felt a powerful urge to lie on the ground. I fell into memories of place, as images of people from the past washed over me. Looking around I felt as though hosts of people were walking around the place, as though still alive – but clearly spectral, more like imaginal memories that remained in the location.

Then a terrible grief welled up in me as I felt all the pain and fear of those that died here. I burst into wracking sobs as the choruses of voices clamoured to be heard. They wanted their fear to be witnessed, known. They feared letting go of this last vestige of their mortal lives, yet to remain trapped them in the agony of their deaths. The pain and fear was overwhelming.

I offered these beings comfort and reassurance. I have faith that returning to the heart of being, the well of memory, is no terrible thing – we only lose the trappings of physical life. To me Germanic cosmology suggests that everything gets recycled and personal experience seems to fit that too. That said, I don’t particularly understand how any of this works.

My words and thoughts somehow opened a passageway. A great imaginal column opened through my body and many of the spirits rode it away into wherever. I had a powerful feeling of elation and joy and heard many voices thanking me for acknowledging their fear and thereby giving them the choice to leave.

It was one of those remarkable experiences where, though I saw and heard all this in my imagination it felt like someone else was doing the imagining, using my brain in ways I could not use it myself. And of course my physical reaction was one hundred per cent real.

The awesome thing is that Volksfreund saw the column of spirits too and mentioned it before I did! That was a nice bit of confirmation to receive. The experience shook me up a lot, but I was really overjoyed. I could sense that great healing had come to many. In fact this experience felt like something I was born to do. My first effort as a psychopomp was thoroughly successful.

After that the various atmospheres in the area stabilised and smoothed over; furthermore we received no more phantom pains. Other ghosts told me that they chose to stay in an arrangement with the land spirits, because so long as they remain haunting the area it will not be damaged by humans. And it is such a beautiful place, they like it there.

Well that was pretty dramatic all in all…but the night was yet young. Volksfreund and I agreed that we were constantly entering into and out of trances, particularly after the psychopomp incident. But I’ll tell you more of what happened next time – including some pretty dramatic outbursts of the paranormal and at least one physically impossible event that nevertheless occurred! Oh, and we seemed to bring great calm and smoothing over of the various areas, too…

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Necromancy

I’ve just recently on this little journal been declaring how similar I am to Woden. So of course, time to put your cash where your teeth live, Henry. And events, strange events, have been afoot.

The thing with chaos magic is that when you read about in books it tends to come across that the universe is like a computer game – a serious of push-button scenarios that only get provoked by the magician’s actions. If the magician never entered the griffin’s secret cave then that griffin would just sit there, bored out of its brain for all eternity, doing its nails and reading the TV guide.

But in reality all kinds of wild stuff goes on, and while I’m off making crazy magical plans, the world it seems has plans for me.

Mr Volksfreund, who is often kind enough to lend his comments to these journal entries, is a friend in real life too (as though the internet were all just a fantasy!) He’s also a hellishly good medium and provoker of magic. I mean, when I hang around him I tend to get spontaneously possessed by Woden. Which is fun, but dangerous of course. But fun. I like fun.

So Volksfreund recently spent a few days at a famous haunted location here in New South Wales. I can’t tell you what it is called or where it is for reasons which aren’t worth explaining (due to being intensely prosaic). He recorded all kinds of evidence of ghostly activity, conversed with spirits, you name it.

On his return we had dinner – which turned into something of a bar crawl I admit – and he told me all about his otherworldly adventures. His tales are pretty damn out there, but I’ve seen and heard his recorded evidence too – very impressive. What neither of us quite expected, however, was that some of the beings he encountered could use him as a bridge to get out into the wider world! And so things began to get odd, because I copped some of these visitors.

It first started at night. I was alone in the house and my intuitive hackles got rubbed right on up. I don’t like being watched by entities that I cannot otherwise detect. I’m not conventionally psychic, but I know when there is magic going on around me. I pulled out my standard Thor magic artillery and that cleared the space… but whereas usually that settles the matter, on this night it did not. My visitors returned later.

So I’m lying in bed, sleeping happily away, and then I’m awake and a young ghostly woman is standing in front of me. She’s the one I sent packing earlier in the night, only to return. As I say, they don’t usually do that, so I’m a little intimidated. Lucky for me, all she wants is to talk.

She says her name is Abigail and she died when quite young. Her dress is very much turn of the century, and her eyes are wide and innocent. She seems to be one of those ghosts that haven’t really developed much perspective since they died. Still wrapped up in and identifying with her lost human form.

I ask her how she managed to come back after the magic I performed; similarly I ask her how she managed to use Volksfreund as a bridge to come to visit me. She doesn’t know the answers; she’s just as confused by it as I am. Reaching an impasse I ask her – well, why are you here ruining my night’s sleep?

Incidentally – why do ghosts have to do that? I mean, I’m a morning person, if they come in at 5.30 am I’ll already be up, showered, breakfasted and ready to stomach the undead. But 4 in the morning? C’mon, surely that’s still roll over and go back to sleep time.

Ok, so petty complaints aside – Abigail explains that she has been sent by someone, she is serving another being which took care of her ability to find me and weather the dismissal magic. And so she says that she’d like to see me again (which just seems a bit weird and uncool to me, can I just say), and then she’s gone.

To be replaced but what I can only describe as a presence. This thing is old. I mean, I sometimes think that in the big picture I’m pretty old (or my true nature is anyway), but this thing is all old all the time. Its voice echoes in my skull like leaden sledgehammers. I have this vague intuition of a vast inky blackness, but really, who knows. I don’t have any of that cool second sight stuff unfortunately.

Well anyway, this being explains that it has sought me out because of my Odinnic lineage. I considers me to be a psychopomp, one who guides the dead to their resting place. And it wants to educate me in this undertaking!

Volksfreund tells me that the haunted location this being followed him from on its way to me was used by the local Aboriginal groups once upon a time as a psychopomp training ground – apparently this is a matter of historical fact. Well I don’t know how I fit into all that (or not) but hearing that did make me feel a bit less nuts.

Apologies to anyone who finds it offensive that an Australian land spirit would take any notice of a white guy, but they seem to like Woden for some reason. Its not my fault! Yes, I am aware of the complex politics of spirit of place and also I’m not going to ignore some big scary spirit just to keep happy a bunch of atheist academics who don’t believe in Aboriginal spirits anyway. Or something along those line anyway. Don’t take me too seriously on this folks.

It explains that I am a psychopomp. My only true calling is to serve the dead, to guide them from blockage or ensnarement into the next part of wherever they are supposed to go when they die. Hmm. That gets me thinking. I had an uncle who was an Odinnic avatar. At his funeral I saw Odin come, cloth him in garments of blazing gold, and lead him off to Valhalla. I wonder if I saw that because of this psychopomp business?

I point out to this spirit that I’ve been following this whole psychotherapy path, and that I’m about to can that and do more psychology study, and that this work is a bit like being a psychopomp for the living at times. Isn’t that enough? No, it says. Not enough. Apparently it doesn’t think I was ever meant to work with the living – that was just the best compromise I could find in this damn atheist-on-the-surface-but-actually-terrified-of-the-unknown society I’m in.

Well then, I point out that this is no basis for putting my beloved organic vegetables on the table, or having anything better than rags to wear. “Arrangements would be made” is the response. What on earth does that mean?

I mean, let me get this straight, I’m told by an entity which may have at some point knocked about with Aboriginal sacred stuff that I am a psychopomp by virtue of my Odinnic lineage and that I’m supposed to spend my working life freeing the dead of entrapment and helping them on their way to the next stop on the grand consciousness carousel.

Does anyone else find this bloody weird?

And then this great beastie says it wants me to come visit it at the location Volksfreund was mucking about at so it can educate me some more. Well, we are going to check it out on Sunday night, so I sure hope that something happens.

A few days later I try contacting this spirit again but all I get is a brief Abigail appearance, who tells me that it I have to visit them if I want to know any more. Damn.

Does it end there? Oh no it doesn’t!

Ironwood played a gig in Canberra last weekend. While I’m watching the band on before us (a very classy act called The Veil, check them out), the big scary spirit speaks to me. It says our performance tonight is only incidentally for the living. Really, it’s for the dead. What does that even mean? Ok, I say. Whatever, at least you know what is going on!

And then a name of Odin’s comes to mind. Draugadrottin – Lord Of The Dead. Sounding a bit thematic? Sure is to me. The first song we planned to play (and indeed did play) is an Odinnic invocation. So I made sure Draugadrottin got some extra focus when we performed. I really should try to contact this aspect of One-Eye.

As we prepare to perform all these ghostly forms start entering the venue. By the time we are underway the place is bursting from the seams with ghosts. Yet when I try to focus directly on them – gone. Then when I stop trying – bang, everywhere. Luckily we performed really well (hurray for returning to a regular rehearsal schedule). So I guess we satisfied them. I mean, I didn’t get any rotten spectral tomatoes in the face after our set.

Is this what being a psychopomp is? I don’t even know. But hey, if I can make a living doing this sort of thing, well that sounds like fun. I hope it means I get to have an Indiana Jones kinda lifestyle in fact. I need one of those cool whips that psychically know when you want them to come loose and when you want them to hold on tight.

So yeah, we’re about to go and check this place out. I wonder what will happen? Well, you might read about it here… if I make it back. After all, they never said I was going to be a living psychopomp. I hope I can make sense of this. If this is somehow my path… well then I better bloody well embrace it with all my heart. See you on the other side… or not.

Hey, I just realised. Its Friday The 13th!

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My Heathen Stall

myheathenstallimage1

We know that in Heathen Europe there were various kinds of altar, stall, etc utilised. My favourites personally are the thousands of votive matron stones that German warriors, enlisted in the Roman army, left all over Europe. And of course, people have been building altar-like structures in Europe since the stone ages – real arch-Heathenism there!

I’m not sure what other Heathens put on their altars but I thought it might be a little interesting to describe some of the elements of my own. As you can see from the photo, it is very cluttered; like some species of bird I compulsively decorate and redecorate my spiritual nest.

Inside the black box are various crystals, stones, letters, a leather collar, and so forth. There is also a pocket watch my Opa left me, a potent existential reminder. And inside the red box with the moon is a sea shell into which I periodically earth excess megin. Other than those things everything on my stall is completely visible in the photograph.

I’ll just pick through the objects, some of them have some wild stories! Some of them have stories I won’t tell; some of them I don’t understand the meaning of, but my unconscious says they should be there so they are. Incidentally, that painting to the left of the stall was painted by my Oma, who’s talents just keep developing. She almost gives Monet a scare these days!

Conspicuous in their absence are any representations of the divine. No large bust of Woden; no smirking image of Loki. There is a card (which is not visible) with a painting of a crow that reminds me of Odin but that is about as close as I get. Oh yes, and those two brass chess pawns, which I regard as symbolic of my ancestors watching over me.

The cards have various stories; the one on top has a picture of a glacier in New Zealand. It was sent to me by my friend Lorien, who now lives in the US (funny, a lot of my friends have done that…) Lorien and I had a number of wild magical and spiritual experiences together.

I’ve floated on the surface of cosmic oceans with him; our old all-night conversations used to completely dismantle and rebuild the very fabric of reality. So although I haven’t seen him in years, I have kept this symbol of our friendship on my altar because I know the love will never actually die, even if it doesn’t get as much energy these days.

That leads me to the little porcelain Dutch clogs on the corner of the table top. They’re actually ash trays – thankfully I don’t smoke anymore – and my mother gave them to me as a memento (however kitsch) of my Dutch heritage. Little windmills are painted on them, as well as decorative flowers.

To me these funny little shoes are a door into thousands of years of history to which I am personally rooted. To someone else they might be tasteless bric a brac. The wonders of spiritual expression!

The rusted iron bar across the front is of course my iron spirit antenna, the getting of which is documented in this very journal. Next to to it lies a piece of wood sculpted into smooth shapes by the ocean, a reminder of the sea’s creative power. And next to that an antique screwdriver I use to carve runes – a symbol of humanity’s creative power.

The creative theme continues – on the right front corner is a portrait my Opa drew of me when I was a child. Its slightly to harsh and angular to represent me, but it captures something, a rough-hewn movement that a more finished image would likely lose. On top of it is a picture of my twin nephews; so again the ancestral theme is dominant on my stall.

Above that is my business card, the business of which I intend to revamp as a part of the project of Fearless Honesty. And above that a badge for The Greens. I detest the notion of political parties, but here in Australia at least The Greens seem to be the only party, left or right, to be free of hypocrisy and double-dealing.

They’re also the only party that take conservation seriously, an issue that I personally think all Heathens should be concerned about – again regardless of their political leanings. If we do not preserve the planet that preserves us then the luxury of debating politics will quickly be lost, along with everything else!

Up the back you can see a flyer for Hex Magazine. Yes, everyone knows that I’m fanatically in love with Hex, it being generations ahead of any other Heathen publication. Simultaneously conservative and progressive, it draws together a huge spectrum of the international Heathen community, which is so important given the endless stupid debates we Heathens get into to.

More importantly free of the brittle posturing that ruins the writing of most Heathens (even ones who in person are very genuine people). Hex restored my faith in Heathenism as a social phenomenon; I had come to hold most Heathens in such low esteem and avoided all but a few.

Yet the existence of Hex has somewhat refuted my cynicism and I’m very proud to be able to contribute to it (incidentally, I write a regular runic column for their e-newsletter, you can subscribe here).

In many respects ancestry refers to much more than just cultural or familial heritage. For example, I regard my musical, magical and philosophical influences as ancestors, for they have all nourished and shaped me. Even though Hex and I are contemporary entities, I nevertheless accord this marvellous magazine with the status of a revered ancestor.

Hex is the very first manifestation of strong, vulnerable, open and honest Heathenism with heart. I’m sure it will inspire many more such worthy manifestations.

Wedged between the thunder stone and the black box is a folded up Sufi cap, a gift to me from the Jerrahi order when I was initiated. People don’t realise it, but the secret heart of Sufism is very similar to some of the fundamental elements of Heathenry. That said, I do not practice Sufi ritual or the like any more as Woden tends to get summoned all to easily and that can leave me at risk of committing all kinds of inter-faith faux pas!

Nevertheless, the Sufis have taught me a great deal. Incidentally, the Sufi circle to which I am connected is the first spiritual or religious group I’ve ever encountered where every single person involved is of unimpeachably high calibre. Those Sufis leave us Heathens for dead on that front, I’m sad to say. Lift your game, sons and daughters of Rig!

I have to keep some mysteries to myself, but the blue ceramic Japanese cup with the flowers in the middle of the stall was a gift to me from John AKA Volksfreund. When I do practical rune magic I put the sigils in there to slowly brew and seep into the well of wyrd for me. It seems to work quite well, though as you can see at the moment I don’t have any spells active.

Oh yes, and the CD case on the right with the Berkano-Eihwaz-Berkano emblem is a copy of :Fire:Water:Ash:, my band Ironwood’s debut album, which has just come out (and which all readers of this journal should buy, just click the above link ;-) ;-)

:Fire:Water:Ash: represents victory after many, many years of struggle and I still cannot quite believe it exists. It’s an achievement I am very proud of, and as the most recent addition to my stall, and a marker of bright future possibilities, I will leave you there.

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Woden, Fear, and Frey

I am very much made after Woden’s form. I am a writer, musician and poet. I am no stranger to extremes of life, consciousness and the rest. I am an inveterate occultist; a wanderer of worlds and of this world; I tend to shroud myself in ambiguity and mystery (so I am told my reputation often seems to stand at any rate).

I don’t fit too well in consensus reality, and I don’t think Woden fit too well in the consensus reality of the old Heathens – too dark, contrary and mystical. The Outsider is a rather clichéd posture from which to live one’s life, and it certainly doesn’t define me as it once did; but its always been there, like a raven perched on a blue-cloaked shoulder.

Like Woden, I have a great deal of power at my disposal, but also a great deal of vulnerability. Woden might be the savage inciter of ecstatic fury (and this is the meaning of his name); but he is also the lonely old man on the moor, melancholy and (in my own subjective experience) suffering from wounds which have never fully healed.

Most of my life this pattern – intense power but also intense vulnerability – has made things difficult. Many times I have felt moved by awesome forces within me, yet been unable to bring them into manifestation due to a host of limitations, as well as some rather brutal depression and anxiety issues.

These latter two are now pretty much conquered, but as my personal alchemy unfolds I am beginning to come to grips with the root of my vulnerability: fear.

Let me explain what I mean. Often in my life I have held back, not brought my power, my will into action. I’ve retreated; I’ve given up without being forced to; I’ve convinced myself to bow down to resistance; I’ve deferred to others even though I know better. I am an unconventional person, yet I have somehow tried to force myself to fit within the conventional world.

This habit of not rocking the boat of those with more conventional (read: often boring and pointless) ideals, values, beliefs and habits is a bad one. I feel I should be subverting the closed borders of other peoples’ lives, not compromising on my wide-ranging spirit in order to keep those closed borders free of disturbance.

Of course in many ways, at many times, I have done just that: thrown spanners in the works of other peoples’ blinkered lives, and I’d like to think that this has had a net positive effect on both them and the world in general. I think that expanding the bounds of what might be called consensus reality is a good thing by definition.

But many other times I’ve compromised my power, passion and potential for the sake of my fear, my insecurity. And that has hurt me and sometimes others, I openly admit! It is a kind of dishonesty, a betrayal of my deepest worth – that which is given to me by Woden. And it also has caused me to harm others, whether by act or omission of act.

As far as I can tell the recently invented Innangard/Utangard distinction so popular in some modern Heathen circles is usually deployed to justify laziness of opinion and spirit. It often seems to breed stagnation and stupidity (as well as a mind-blowingly over-simplified understanding of the Heathens of old).

It seems not much better than the attitude of those people who are glued to the tube 24 hours a day. When I tell people I never watch TV – and don’t in fact own one – they incredulously ask me how I found out about the news. This response revealed the shocking impoverishment of these peoples’ horizons. The Innangard/Utangard crew aren’t much better in most cases.

(Not to mention the fact that television news has got to be far and away the most superficial, biased, sensationalised and idiotic information source you can find – other perhaps than blog websites pertaining to weird fringe Heathen mysticism of course).

I would much prefer to be confused, lost, and contradictory than mired in comfortable illusions. I would much rather walk paths of shadow and pain than slumber in slovenly, ego-bloated ignorance.

I once gave myself to Runa – to Mystery – and when I offered myself, Mystery laughed. “But I already own you, my dear, and always have” was her response. I just wish I could hold onto that with more conviction in the face of my fear.

Satisfied that I am like Woden, who violates the very ethics of the cultures he is at the heart of; who speaks with the dead and schemes with a vision that no one else can perceive; who is willing to kill himself on the world tree in order to encounter an illuminated dialogue with Runa (Mystery)? I hope some small resemblance is apparent.

I’m not saying I hold even a match to Woden’s bonfire; I am little more than a small spark that has blown off from his great conflagration, his river of fire, and I pray that I become a precursor, a way-finder, for the inferno to spread with vigour and without the crooked poison that some so-called Heathens carry in their hearts.

But that will never happen so long as I let fear dictate my actions. And over the years I have concluded that Woden alone cannot help me shatter this fetter, this Valknut.

In recent weeks I have more and more strongly confronted this blockage and wound within myself, this terrible fear-foe. And confronted too its ally, dishonesty, self-deception, a willingness to blind myself to my own thoughts and feelings for the sake of foolish beliefs or what I perceive to be the comfort of others.

I have been racking up terrible debts in the name of fear and dishonesty, debts to both myself and others. At the end of last year I started paying these debts and the result has been massive upheaval in my personal life, indeed in my life as a whole. Much pain and sorrow has emerged from this course of action, pain and sorrow I’ve been pretending I could avoid.

It is not unlike the current economic crisis, which was forged out of unscrupulous individuals’ beliefs that they could defer the consequences of their financial duplicity and rash greed forever. I do not like to compare myself to such persons, but the comparison is there to be made and I do not entertain illusions about my failings.

And yet, now I find myself for the most part facing up to these debts, and though it hurts terribly, I am glad that I am setting imbalances right and owning up to my own needs, wants and character.

I think this is a solid basis for proceeding in my life, or at least I now have the opportunity to forge such a basis, if I can be unflinching in prosecuting this transformative debt repaying.

Fear and dishonesty go together, however. To be honest with myself, and then to act on that, requires a lot of courage, or more precisely, provokes a lot of fear. You can see how as I seek to uproot my self-deceptions I thereby provoke a lot of suffering. And as I say, I do not believe that Woden is able alone to help me shatter this fetter. I need other kinds of guidance.

And a few days ago I realised, based on clues that have been offered to me over the last year, just who it is that might aid me – the great Veraldar guð or World(ly) God – Frey. But more on that is to come…

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Music and Magic

Three cheers to Between The Buried And Me for putting on an amazing show on Saturday night. I had a wildly magical time and also found the inspiration for this journal entry.

Its pretty debatable that Heathen magicians ever used music for magical purposes, with the possible exception of singing (and perhaps on exceedingly thin evidence some percussion instruments).

But in modern times we are not so impoverished! I’ve mentioned in the past the consciousness altering properties of black metal, properties which seem particularly keyed into Heathen spirituality even though this genre of music is only a few decades old.

Considering the ways in which music can move one’s emotions, and indeed transform the state of one’s nervous system, it would seem wise to find ways to apply it for magical purposes. I’ve written about chanting in the past, but here I’d like to discuss the utilisation of live performances for magical ends.

When a group of performers are on their game they very easily become transmitters, vessels for the flow of all kinds of creative and evocative forces. There’s nothing like the spill of cold energy down your spine when music opens a rich new world for you to fall into.

Admittedly there are many bands that do not bring to bear this sort of manifestation; I’m personally quite sick of mediocre metal bands who are content to merely replicate the same old tired forms without so much as a single creative spark.

But when I encounter a band that is able to convey something, to offer a transpersonal experience, I find that I can use the magic they summon in all kinds of ways. Sometimes it even uses me.

There are a few sources of power that you can tap into when you are part of an audience. Firstly, of course, a good performance will pull the audience into a very unified state. A sense of group consciousness can manifest and that can be very powerful. The sense of oneness in music that is created can be deeply ecstatic.

This group consciousness generates a lot of energy (or whatever metaphor you choose), and it’s possible to imagine that flowing through your body. As it passes through you can imagine seeds of intention dropping into the rushing megin, to be carried out into the world.

I find imagining a giant Elhaz rune channelling light and heat through my body to be very helpful in this regard; I got some dramatic results right away when I did just this recently at a gig.

Since it’s possible to quite effortlessly occupy a state of altered consciousness, riding the back of the group experience, this is a very simple way of doing magic. Note that I don’t really recommend so-called magical vampirism as I feel its just plain bad form. There’s enough magic to go round that you don’t need to steal other peoples’.

Secondly there is the magic coming through the performers, which can really establish the atmosphere of the room. A band like Between The Buried And Me is capable of taking their audience on a journey through a vast spectrum of emotions and atmospheres. Through imagination it is very easy to ride that musical topography.

This riding can allow you to fare forth if you like, to rise from your own body and travel through imaginal roads (there’s all kinds of circumstantial evidence of this sort of thing in Heathen lore). You don’t need to provide the impetus to get moving because the music can provide a strong source. All you need to do is point yourself in a direction.

You can also let the music open up your body, energise your muscles, clear your metabolism, or unblock your emotions. I can use the music to reach a very elated state, not unlike berzerkergang but without the violent focus (or sometimes with, if truth be told).

If there are places that you have been avoiding in your emotional life then you can use music to open those doors, often quite safely thanks to the cushion of life force that it provides. In short – a little creative visualisation can turn even a death metal gig into a healing experience!

Aside from some of the more esoteric responses to music that are available, great live music can put you into a position of perspective. Sometimes, if the performers are particularly masterful, I find myself given the opportunity to open into a rich assessment of my life. I can question my decisions and direction and new possibilities come to me effortlessly.

Of course, holding onto such resolution after the fact is sometimes difficult and that’s one of the reasons why documenting intense but subjective experiences is so valuable – it helps to objectify the subjective, bringing it into what might be called ‘reality’.

With magic there is a danger of spiritual rootlessness, as we hungrily aspire to one epiphany after another – while at the same time our actual daily lives stagnate. Its important to act on the lofty decisions made in the throws of music-induced ecstacy.

It seems almost too obvious to mention the place of dance in live music. Music can very easily have us involuntarily nodding our heads, tapping our feet – or wildly spinning and weaving across the room!

This combination of physical abandon and shared consciousness in turn can easily open the door for possession states. I can recall a dance party I once attended where a horde of gods and spirits used me to express and play in the physical world. I become a vessel for them, the chorus of beings hovering around me, laughing and singing, diving in and out.

That was profoundly healing for me, but it came with a price: I was hospitalised the next day! Physiologically, the doctors said, it was as though I had run a marathon or two, but having not taken care of myself as an athlete would my body went into shut down as the amount of muscle waste in my blood sky-rocketed. It was very dramatic – I just keeled over at work.

Which leads me to conclude that if you intend to explore the conscious utilisation of live music for magical purposes you had best know your limits! Music can invoke forces much stronger than what any one individual can safely express.

This ties back in with the theme of “perfecting the vessel” that I’ve discussed before, too. In order to better channel and manifest the flow of the waters of life throughout the World Tree we are well served to strengthen ourselves, to become more supple and more stable.

A good way to do this is gradually build up your exposure to powerful transpersonal experiences such as good live music! If you open the magical doors a little bit at first you can gradually expand your capacity to channel and utilise the flowing waters of life that live music can invoke.

Listening to recordings of evocative bands (Emperor come to mind) is good training, too.

Be aware that the scale of the performance is not a reliable predictor of the power it might evoke. Seeing Roger Waters and band perform the Pink Floyd back catalogue in full luxury was deeply profound to me; but Joe Dolce with an acoustic guitar in a back shed at some crappy Australian folk festival can reduce me to a puddle with a single chord.

A warning: avoid bad music, which can block you up like molasses in a straw. Here in Australia, for example, there is an endless rogues’ gallery of miserable blues and ‘roots’ bands, each replicating the same tired forms in a spirit of miserable pig-headedness. No creative spark to be seen.

I feel that such music can create magical and psychological constipation: so avoid!

In summary, then, live music provides three main doors into magical and spiritual experience (via the application of the imagination).

Firstly through the intense shared consciousness that can emerge in the synergy of audience and performers. Secondly, through the spirit channelled by the performers themselves. Thirdly, through your individual response to the performance, be it reflective (a moment of clarity) or visceral (the union of conscious and unconscious experience in dance or movement).

All of these doors are worth entering and exploring; and for all the gathered press about you, no one will even know that you are working magic into the world as the band plays on.

Note:

Some music styles are more trance inducing than others. Droning notes; repetitive beats; music with slow note changes and lots of delay/flange/phaser/reverb; music in compound time signatures – all classic tools for intense trance induction. Then again, a hip hop MC in full flight and a spiralling jazz horn soloist can have the same effect.

The key seems to be something about alternating layers of repetition or stillness (recurring rhythms, droning notes, etc) layered against unfolding variations (solos, gradual chord transmutations, etc).

The means shapes the experience of course (I’m not like to get homicidal watching Tony Eardley or lovelorn watching Aeon of Horus), but the ends are very much up your own particular creativity. Oh yeah, and check out Tool, in particular their album Lateralus. They’ll pretty much take you everywhere you could possibly need to go.

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Rogue Runa

I am drinking a cup of tea with an Othala rune printed prominently upon it. The cup wasn’t designed by some neo-Heathen runic enthusiast; indeed, the text on the cup reads “Staff & Executive Resources”. Am I surprised? Not in the slightest. Ever since my first real initiatory experience I’ve tended to see runes everywhere. Often they seem to bear significance, though I can’t always puzzle this out.

For example, I once lived in a three storey terrace in the inner west of Sydney. In the middle of the middle floor was situated the bathroom. The bathroom tiles were decorated with a motif that featured hundred of Othala runes.

It occurred to me that, insofar as Othala might possibly be considered a symbol of Midgard, it was no accident that the room with these runes would be right in the heart and centre of the dwelling. I know, that’s a little trivial, but on the other hand, someone’s aesthetic decision was unconsciously shaped by a runic instinct, and that seems less trivial.

I wanted to document some other examples of this sort of thing. These things make me smile, because there the runes are, right where they belong, sneaking through the collective unconscious without the slightest hesitation. We are more connected to the arch-Heathens than we tend to think, floating on a deep and wild ocean of history and symbolism.

To me Dagaz represents liminality – that’s my personal take on the rune of course, but consider this little poem I wrote a while back:

Dagaz [Day] is sunlight
Dappled on yew-leaves;
The hidden revealed
Cleared through and through
seen and not seen.

I often notice that over windows people erect metal grilles in the shape of Dagaz runes. Or on doors and gates. Speaking of the latter, you get many Ingwaz runes on security gates, doors, entry alcoves, and the like. Ingwaz to me has a resonance of protective enclosure that seems to correspond nicely to this sort of co-incidence. Wire mesh fences also often are composed out of thousands of little Ingwaz shapes, too.

One example of rogue runa I often encounter is the hail form Hagalaz. It crops up on air conditioner grilles, on the covers of drains and drainage grates, and seems to appear any time there is an opening designed to let some things through but stop other things. As though it were some kind of purification device – well that’s my best guess.

I guess if hail destroys the inessential, then what is left is distilled and allowed to pass through. But this is one runic correspondence that I can’t yet fully explain to my own satisfaction.

And sometimes in elevators I see Eihwaz runes – my sense is that, just as sap flows up and down the yew tree’s trunk the elevator carries us up and down the column of the building.

So while some authors have made much of the use of rune-like shapes in old school European buildings, few have noticed that these symbols still seem to pop up with monotonous regularity and thematic coherence.

Admittedly the more self-consciously modern architecture is less likely to have these sorts of little features. Then again, modern design seems often to be divorced of any archetypal or psychically resonant content. It is pure disembodied ego in character and offers little or no shelter for mystery. The utilitarian aesthetic strips buildings of their homeliness and ironically causes them to serve their utility less well.

It doesn’t happen as much these days as it used to, but I often see rune shaped objects as I wander about the place. Sometimes scratches in the pavement or walls, sometimes in the way twigs fall from trees. Graffiti artists often unintentionally leave runic inscriptions on train barriers and tunnels. The world around me seems to pulse with runic manifestations.

Jan Fries argues that to understand the runes you need to go back to the Palaeolithic, look at the very origin of the urge to scratch symbols into stone or bone. I think he is onto something, and think that the various modern examples I’ve given here also attest to his views.

While my specific interest might be the Elder Futhark, it remains that all the Futharks grew out of a more primordial human need and practice, and we are well served to ponder the ways in which these symbols are able to well up out of the imaginations of folk who do not know anything about them consciously.

I find myself pondering whether this year I should be exploring the art of rune magic and runic inscriptions more thoroughly. Since I want to develop a really strong results magic practice, and since runes are well suited as the carriers of intention in such magic, I really ought to combine the two.

Here is a prototypical bit of magic I did last year to illustrate. We were living in a ground floor unit and new neighbours moved in upstairs. This new family had three young boys who really needed a big back yard, not to be cooped up in a little balcony. And they were pretty damn badly behaved. Soon they were dropping their rubbish in our garden in fact!

This couldn’t go on. After a few neighbourly confrontations the most flagrant misbehaviour stopped, but the people upstairs were nevertheless oppressively noisy. The family as a whole seemed riddled with conflict and a lot of sniping and backstabbing. Lovely people. And every nasty word was audible downstairs. Things got pretty intolerable.

I cast two spells to deal with the situation. The first was to make a Raidho rune out of plasticine and then place it facing up at them on the top of a cupboard. The message was move on.

The second, to control the excesses of the worst child, was to draw an image of a giant wolf eating a child. In runes I wrote “I have you now”. I then attached this to the clothes line, facing up towards the obnoxious peoples’ unit.

Results? Well the child in question suddenly pulled into line very nicely. And not long after I installed the Raidho rune the people upstairs moved out – in fact, they weren’t there very long and definitely broke the terms of their lease which in New South Wales had to be for at least six months.

I don’t know what happened, but given all the arguing going on I guess they realised that they would never be able to have stability in a small unit and moved to digs that would better accommodate them and give much-needed relief to everyone. Mission accomplished.

It took a month or two for these sigils to reach their fruition. Even if they had nothing to do with the changes that occurred, I sure felt a lot better about the situation. Doing that magic returned to me my sense of control over a frustrating situation. Psychologically speaking I think that is a very important aspect of any kind of magic or ritual and not something to be overlooked.

But I like to take credit for them moving because I specifically enchanted for them to break their lease – and they well and truly did. Call me crazy – I know I do. I had a lot of emotion behind these spells, since these people were so damn annoying. I bet that helped things along too.

So there you have it – Rogue Runa, stalking through the modern world by accident or intention. Some time soon I will have to document one of my better experiments, a runic formula for money that has made me perhaps $3,000 in my own deluded thinking – the dreaded and fearfully uttered TRIPY COMES. What ever you do, DON’T think about that phrase bringing you plentiful wealth. And don’t think about it doing that for me either. Got it?

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At the Art Gallery

(Warning: I use the term “arch-Heathen” in this post. It refers to the “original Heathens” from back when Europe was a pre-modern, pre-Christian place. I don’t know who first coined this term).

I’ve found myself at a strange loose end these last few days, following the dismantling/collapse of one of the most important things in my life. Consequently I’ve been staying at the home of my band mates, and because of the time of year the world around me rather reflects the limbo I have entered.

Today more than most I knew that I needed to move, evolve, shift my consciousness. I found myself alone, in solitude, and while there was a temptation to raid my band mates’ disgustingly huge CD collections, I know myself. I had to get the blood moving through my limbs and brain.

Uncertain where to head, particularly on a glaring and disgusting Sydney summer day, I called on Woden as the Wanderer and invited him to set my feet on the correct path. He responded; my journey took me into the city, then had me roam in a seemingly accidental spiral, which tightened and tightened around the New South Wales Art Gallery.

I love the NSW Art Gallery. I love visiting the old statuary of Hindu gods, today pausing in particular to acknowledge an image of Vishnu surrounded by his many avatars. I wondered idly if Woden is not in fact an avatar of Vishnu, and I an avatar of Woden – an avatar of an avatar! I love the Hindu gods – they’re like friendly and well-known cousins to my own Indo-European spiritual forebears.

I love staring into the infinity of Aboriginal dot art. These huge canvasses seem at first to have little merit, being covered in uniform rows of white dots. The magic lies in staring at them for an extended period of time. Only machines make perfectly uniform lines, and so the slight variations in the arrangement of the dots create visual illusions and beautiful trance states.

Folk glance at these images for but a handful of seconds and then wander off, thinking Aboriginal art to be little more than primitive splotches. If they exhibited even a little depth or patience, they’d discover whole universes.

But the reason Woden led me to the Art Gallery was that, although I did not know it, the current feature exhibition was on Impressionism, with Monet in the starring role.

“All I have ever done is try to convey my experience before nature” – Claude Monet, 1912.

I love Monet. He is my favourite painter. He paints with light. His work does not represent reality; it presents for you the thing itself, the very experience and spirit of the thing or place that he has painted. Look too close and you’ll fall in. When I behold his paintings I smell the grass or the snow, feel the wind, the taste of dawn light or afternoon shadow. My understanding of the natural world was grossly incomplete before I encountered his work.

I was fortunate enough to see a major Monet exhibition a few years ago and in the final room was a massive water lily painting. It literally filled the entire room with colour and radiance and it took me some 15 minutes acclimatising before I could bring myself to even look at it, let alone really engage with it.

The waterlilies were produced in the final years of Monet’s life, and they represent the pinnacle of his work. Vast multiverses await anyone brave enough to really gaze into these images. From the pond in his own back yard Monet presented the whole fabric of Being for all to see. What artist could ever even dream of competing with that?

It doesn’t work with the prints you can buy of his work, either. Mass-production ruins the spell. Only the actual works by the actual artist can take you into the magic.

Seeing these marvellous images, being thrown into deeply altered states of consciousness by these paintings, caused me to reflect on something I read recently in an article that touched on the “folkish versus universalist” debate in Heathenry.

Regular readers will know that I consider this debate to be a barren waste of time, and will also know that I happily incorporate elements of both points of view into my own – which to me just demonstrates how vacuous the argument is.

This particular article argued that extremely strict and rigourous historical reconstruction is needed for modern Heathenry and that anything less is a deep affront and offence to the gods. The worst of the lot, the argument went, were those bloody universalists, off syncretising Heathenry with other traditions.

Of course many universalists are not in fact syncretists, so this particular person was obviously a bit of an expert at executing straw men.

And of course, there is a logical flaw in arguing that the gods would be offended if we’re not strict reconstructionists – because from what I can see that view could only be supported by Unsubstantiated Personal Gnosis, and is therefore an example of the kind of creative license this article regarded as anathema.

There is of course the passage in Havamal that asks if you know how to carve, stain, offer, sacrifice, etc. But there is no passage in that poem that runs “and if you don’t reconstruct exactly how we did these things then we’ll get pissed at you”.

There is also an emphasis on doing things the “right” way – but again I can’t see any historical basis for equating this with hard reconstructionism, though it seems likely that being familiar with history would rather be of assistance.

Given that my strange chaos magic-influenced runic experiments seem to work I can only conclude that the gods are Not in fact adverse to innovation, though I suppose keeping it in the spirit of the tradition would be good manners (whatever “the spirit of the tradition” means – another matter of arbitrary opinion I fear).

This isn’t to say we should throw out the historical record of course – on the contrary, it is a source of marvelous riches. Often when you do the research you find that the arch-Heathen’s view on a particular issue was much more interesting than the psuedo-historical stuff that folk sneak into modern Heathenism all the time.

But just because it is old and original doesn’t mean it is the best – the Heathen cultures of yore certainly didn’t agree with one another on how to do things, and in the meantime I think we can safely dispense with human sacrifice and the like.

Look at me – I started by rhapsodising about the rich experiences afforded by Monet’s work and now I am debating ideas and ideology. What a degeneration! It troubles me that so many Heathens are so eager to debate theory and ideology but so few are willing to go and directly engage with the magic of the ancestral traditions, the natural world, the runes, and so forth.

(In fact, given that the arch-Heathens seemed far too busy living life to be splitting intellectual hairs, it seems distinctly syncretistic and unHeathen to get obsessed about distinctions like folkish/universalist).

The point of my questioning the hard reconstructionist view that the only valid sources for modern Heathenry come from the original Heathens is this: what if the spiritual and cultural current of Heathenry never really went away, but has instead been happily manifesting itself in all sorts of guises since the Conversion?

My instinct is to say that this possibility could only ever be the truth. What else would guide us back into the arms of history but the latent Heathen intuition and instinct that still lives within us?

And so I turn to Monet, whose art – like the Greek temple Heidegger invokes in his landmark essay “On The Origin Of The Work Of Art” – redeems us to a reverent relationship to nature.

This reverent relationship is deeply scored in the art, mythology and physical culture that the arch-Heathens left behind. And yet I would argue that its most refined and ultimate expression does not occur until nine hundred odd years after the Conversion: on the doorstep of nihilistic modernity Monet erected the final distillation of the Heathen-animist experience.

Monet is not the only one – Nietzsche, Heidegger, Moorcock, Cave, Von Till – the list goes on, artists, thinkers, writers, musicians who, whether consciously or not, have expressed in powerful terms the threads of arch-Heathen consciousness.

We would be utterly insane not to draw upon these living, breathing (though concealed) manifestations of the life-urge which shaped arch-Heathen culture and consciousness in the first place.

In Hinduism, a useful and valid Indo-European cognate to Heathenism, there are always new developments, as great humans are elevated to godhood and as cultural mores shift. For our ancestors it was no different – we need only compare the different branch cultures of old Heathenry. Modern Heathenry will not be truly reconstructionist until it whole-heartedly embraces innovation.

Again, this is not to dismiss the reconstructionist project, which is utterly needed if we are to have a fluid connection to the Well of Memory. I am as amused and disappointed by the endless hordes of shallow and idiotic pseudo-Heathen writings and articles as anyone else. But if we dismiss the impulse that produces these well-meant attempts then the game is over, too.

Look at it another way: as soon as we reduce modern Heathenry to hard reconstructionism we are left with two choices: either continue to draw on post-Conversion Heathen manifestations such as Monet’s art and thus become hypocrites; or abandon computers, modern languages, stop eating potatoes, and countless other absurd sacrifices. The reconstructionist project might be necessary but it sure as hell is not sufficient to produce a genuinely flourishing modern Heathenism.

Me? I’ll be letting Woden guide me to the art gallery, where I’ll gorge my soul on Monet and listen to the advance reference tracks of the new Ironwood album (about to come out) on my mp3 player. And hope that one day the focus of mainstream Heathenry will be the experience, the thing itself, and not irresolvable debates about what amount to arbitrary rules.

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Heathenism with Heart

If there has been a subtle trajectory to my recent journal updates (and at least one commenting reader has laid the theme right open) it is the importance of love in Heathen spiritual practice.

Generally speaking Heathen authors have had little to say on love. Plenty to say on honour, industriousness, fidelity and so forth. Plenty to say on being staunch, walking your talk, and all the rest. But very little about love.

Thus the common style of Heathen writings is brittle and shallow, which doesn’t make a lot of sense given that we are supposedly digging down into the guts of our spiritual heritage with this stuff. And worse, I often hear (or personally see) that these loud-mouths very rarely live true to their words.

It is possible that modern Heathen writers have avoided the theme of love because of the desire to distance themselves from association with Christianity. Christianity is (at least in theory) a religion which focussed heavily on love. Modern Heathens, struggling to free themselves of Christian influence, would therefore understandably avoid this theme.

However I think this avoidance comes at the expense of an important element of Heathenry. What binds generations together? What binds the gods to one another? What drives the desire to create, survive, evolve? What is the source of the inspiration for craftsmanship, ingenuity, and creativity? What gives hope in dark winters?

If you withhold love from a baby, not touching it or attending it, it will die. Indeed, without love you might well not even bother to feed the child. Without love, we are all baby murderers. That’s an extreme example, but you can see my point.

So can modern Heathenry proceed as it has, without any acknowledgement of love? All pre-modern, low technology cultures require love to survive – you’ve got to have a powerful motivation to keep going in the face of extreme adversity.

I do not think anyone can honestly call themselves a “reconstructionist” Heathen if love is not an important part of their life and thinking. And yet many Heathens I have met have not so much as reflected on this theme. They would rather embroil themselves in clichés, dogma and one dimensional thought.

When I first read Hex Magazine I was deeply astounded because never before had I encountered a Heathen publication with the necessary vulnerability and honesty to express love. It was deeply intimidating because it forced me to recognise just how much I had divorced love from my own Heathenry and replaced it with superficial gleam.

Even though I desperately wanted to add my voice to Hex it took some 18 months to teach myself how to write with the necessary raw honesty and therefore be able to offer the magazine anything even approaching the general standard of their articles. The thing that, to me, sets Hex apart is that it is edited and presented in the spirit of Heathenism with Heart.

Despite the adolescent grand-standing of so many Heathens, vulnerability remains a truer mode of being Heathen. When we are vulnerable to the whims of our deities; when we are able to respond to those around us rather than just react; when we are able to feel the painful contradictions of being a human being and keep going. To me this is the heart of Heathenry. This is love.

If we are serious about immersing ourselves in the cosmological experience of the ancestral Heathens, which means living the interconnected matrix of seasons, nature and time, then we need to carry ourselves with the greatest gratitude and respect. None of us can survive alone; we are deeply dependent on the world around us.

The old Heathens had a worldly religion. It required deep love of the natural universe and this love – I believe – finds its root in simply remembering that our existence is entirely thanks to the generosity of the natural world that sustains us.

But of course love is more than just having an open heart to one’s community, history and natural environment. Love is also a key to deeper doors. It can carry us into deeply magical realms; it can purify or purge us and thereby render us whole/holy; it can guide us into deep creativity, determination and joy.

When I remember to listen to my heart my life begins to make sense. When I forget my heart, stagnation or chaos follows. The heart is like a compass, pointing us to True North, reading the magnetic fields of love. No amount of Heathen posturing, dressing up or one-upmanship will ever get us near to the heart of Heathenry. We need love to do that.

Arguably Woden is a deity of önd, the divine breath that brings inspiration and ecstasy. This breath flows through the heart, feeding and nourishing it. And Woden is a god of the heart – for even though his ethics are truly beyond good and evil (and indeed in his purest form his force is more prototypical than even love or hate), he moves from the heart, whether it be love of wisdom, love of women, love of chaos or love for his children.

Perhaps the deepest motivation that guides Woden is love of creation – for even his most violent fury is a manifestation of abundant force, energy and change. He is a sinister god to be sure, but let us not slander him into total shadow!

For even though I am not always convinced that he has my best interests in mind, I still trust the One Eyed God implicitly. Because I have felt his heart. I have felt his love and it is a love more intense and explosive than any human heart could hold.

This vast power, this river of fire, this ardent desire, is available to anyone willing to sink down into the subterranean streams of Woden’s being. Charged with it we can travel anywhere in the worlds. We might find ourselves blooming like a tree that had been on the edge of drought-death and then suddenly lathed by cloud-burst.

I believe that modern Heathenry needs heart more than anything. It needs love. It is impossible to build community, to build cordial relationships with gods and land spirits, without love.

Too often modern Heathenry has been content to found itself on brittle dogma or rigid arrogance. The truth is that only our love for the gods, for the old ways in this new day (to paraphrase someone very wise), and for each other, can effect the alchemy needed to turn Heathenry from a quack fringe faith into a deeply soulful and fertile cultural movement.

And though it might not be directly obvious, this post follows directly from the recent Xylem & Phloem thread. The heart is a circulatory organ, and generosity – the power of exchange, energy circulation (Gebo) – was a fundamental element of old Heathen society. Without heart and love we can never be anything more than self-deceiving late modern nihilists.

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Xylem and Phloem Part Four: Attracting the Flow of the Waters

I’ve focussed a lot on the process of improving one’s fitness for containing or channelling the flow of waters; and on the delicate balance between ego and dissolution that this seems to imply.

Now I’d like to turn to the other end of the continuum (though I reiterate that the continuum is circular, not linear) and consider ways to increase our ability to attract flows of water from the well.

As with the other posts in this theme, I cannot claim to be an expert in this area. If anything I am drawing on prototypical past experiences and speculatively developing a sketch for possible themes to develop. The comments made here are neither exhaustive nor absolute.

As previously discussed, the art of attracting the flow of the waters requires a certain kind of receptivity; if we act from our conscious will power we’ll get nowhere. However this receptivity needs to be distinguished from simple stagnation or passivity, too. We have to present ourselves to wyrd in opportune ways in order to garner its favours.

In this sense I draw a certain amount of parallel between heathen cosmology and Taoism. In Taoism the trick seems to be the art of being able to place yourself in positions sensitive to the Tao. While it takes a fit vessel to get to that sweet spot, once there the individual’s actions become free, easy, and powerfully amplified by the tide of the Tao.

I am not a surfer, but surfing makes a great analogy. When a surfer catches a wave their ability to move through the water is increased massively, and that power comes from the wave, not from the surfer.

Yet in order to catch that wave the surfer needs to be a strong enough swimmer; needs to know how to judge the waves as they come in; and needs a little luck too. Similarly, once on the wave it is the surfer’s individual skill at managing the flow of tidal force so that they are not dumped by the crashing waves.

In catching the wave, which is analogous to attracting the flow of waters, the surfer has to be receptive in the sense of putting themselves into a position where the wave will come at the right point in its development and let that wave collect them. However this receptivity requires strength and action – if they just floated inactive in the water surfers would get very bored.

Broadly speaking there seem to be two approaches to attracting the flow of waters. The first is broadly psychological; the second is more physical.

This first approach amounts to doing things that sharpen one’s imagination, perception and desire to act. I have found, for example, that rune readings and other forms of divination have often been catalysts for all kinds of change and new developments in my life. Somehow simply reading the patterns can better situate us within the sweet spots of the unfolding weave.

This might be analogous (though not identical) with the quantum physics discovery that by observing a process we change it – that is, observer and observed are interconnected and affect one another.

I say analogous but not identical because I do not want to indulge in the pseudo-scientific silliness that spiritual people get into sometimes when they confuse science as a source of inspiration with their own (usually much cruder) notions. There are similarities in the quantum physics portrait of reality and the heathen one, but let’s not make foolish claims about either.

Perhaps another aspect of why divination can help us get into a good position for attracting the flow of the waters is that it puts before us the horizon of time’s uncertainty; and similarly it thrusts us potentially into the possibility of the new.

Of course there are many ways to achieve encounters with uncertainty and possibility. A trivial example: I recently subscribed to National Geographic magazine for just this purpose.

Because it documents a wide range of subjects from all over the world I think that this subscription will help me keep perspective on the immediate bounds of my life and also give me some inspiration – because it’s a marvellous world out there!

Reading in general can serve this purpose – when I think about how much more energetic and empowered I became after reading Seidways I want to laugh! Brilliant works like that can permanently open you up to more flow. In fact, that’s another book I need to reread.

Nietzsche has the same effect on me; so did Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, which got to me so thoroughly that I read it in one sitting (no mean feat, it is some 800 pages).

Related, but more physical, methods for attracting the flow include meeting new people, entering new social circles, and adopting the old chaos magic technique of transgressing against one’s characteristic patterns (that Crowley quote from my last post gives a good example of this technique).

We might feel some fear and resistance to expanding our horizons, yet usually once we’ve taken the risk we never look back.

Something about the thrill of the new can draw in plenty of watery nourishment and dissolve blockages. However I should mention that this is not enough on its own – if we are constantly dependent on novelty then we are unlikely to commit to anything long enough to bring it to fruition.

Hence there is the gamut of more stable spiritual practices – performing ritual; chanting; using music as a mood-altering device; communicating in various ways with ideas, archetypes, gods, ancestors and spirits. Even just getting out of the house more!

I find that when I acknowledge divine beings on a regular basis my life starts to build momentum. If I fall off that bandwagon then things tend to get more confused, lost and bewildered. There are plenty of powerful entities out there that are more than happy to lend you their support in exchange for a bit of love and attention, but you’ve got to make the effort.

Which leads to a general principle – related to the rune Gebo – that seems to govern the art of attracting the flow of the waters. Namely that this is a receptivity in which you need to get the flow started yourself by giving something – perhaps something of your ego attachments, or it might be time, or money, or support to friends or family, or anything really.

Nothing comes from nothing. This might be part of why ancestral heathens emphasised the importance of generosity so much: a leader who spreads the wealth around encourages a richer, healthier, more vibrant community and perhaps attracts more positive megin (power) and flows from the wells. It might be that the return on the investment far outweighs the initial cost.

Similarly, I have decided recently in my practice that I need to find a better space to work from. Where I am just isn’t up to scratch, and it demoralises me sufficiently that I almost don’t want to do any work at all!

I chose it because it was cheap, but that has actually ended up costing me time, motivation, money and optimism. I need to expend a bit of energy so that I am situated more fully in the path of the flow of the waters of life throughout the world tree.

It should be evident that much of what I have described here is pretty everyday, trivial sort of stuff. But I think spirituality is just as much about manifest reality, or just as much about our deeds in Midgard, as it is anything lofty or subterranean. As above, so below makes just as much sense if we invert it.

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Xylem and Phloem Part Three: the Vessel and Ego

Since my previous journal update I’ve had time not only to reflect more on this idea and project of perfecting the vessel but also a fair bit of very stimulating correspondence with various insightful folk I have the pleasure to be in contact with.

There’s nothing like the sympathetic exploration of other points of view to help you develop, expand, or clarify your own. In this case, I feel might be in a position to find a point of agreement between my own rather anti-ego model of spiritual development and the more ego-focussed models of modern Satanism, Rune Gilders, etc… and also perhaps the more subtle considerations of ego made by Jung and others.

As I have previously illustrated, my spiritual philosophy boils down to a few simple propositions, informed by the old heathen worldview of memory and ørlög:

1) Everything is interconnected, yet each individual entity is unique and divine;

2) Any individual being requires nourishment from the flow of the water of life throughout the worlds (yes folks, that is a metaphor!) if it is to flourish;

3) Isolation and separation cause amnesia, confusion and death;

4) Opening to connectedness is (or can be) terrifying because it forces us to confront our finitude, no matter how good for us it might be or even how good it can feel;

5) Therefore the spiritual task is to develop one’s capacity to sustain connection to what is beyond one – to become a good vessel and conduit for the flow of the waters of life throughout the World Tree.

A corollary of point 5 might be that we need to find our right place in the order of things in order to facilitate good flow of the waters, but this is a new idea to me and I don’t yet know what it means.

Now I generally take a dim view of the ego, that is, the physical and psychological sense of being a separate will or being, a sense which can run the whole gamut from reptile brain reactivity to hyper-cerebral intellectualising. I suppose I have generally regarded the ego as armour, blockage, analogous to the hardened arteries that bad diet and poor exercise cause.

The ego on this view prevents us from being good vessels for the flow of the water of life because it occludes our connection to that flow. Rather than embrace ego magic as a model for growth or transformation, my view seems to imply that the opposite of ego magic – ego destruction – is the door to positive change or evolution.

However in the process of dismantling the ego (which is an ongoing process as the ego is very durable) we risk also destroying the integrity of our vessel, which is after all a finite being. In order to be truly connected to the whole of the Tree we need to retain some specificity, some particularity. In this way the age old philosophical problem of universal and particular is transcended in an almost Hegelian fashion.

A word at this point is called for in relation to the terms Left Hand Path and Right Hand Path. These days in the western world Left Hand Path seems to refer to spiritual practices related to ego development; where as Right Hand Path seem to refer to spiritual practices related to devotion. People like to think of the Left as ‘evil’ and the Right as ‘good’, though such Manichean ideas need have little place in heathenry or magical practice more generally.

This distinction irritates me for two reasons. Firstly, it implies that unless you are a budding ego-maniac you cannot be interested in your own spiritual (or other) growth or development. Clearly a load of rubbish! Secondly, it implies that if your spiritual focus is largely devotional then you are more of a dim-witted follower than an exciting maverick. Again, a load of rubbish.

However there is a deeper reason why the distinction irritates me – that being that these terms, Left and Right Hand Path, do not refer originally to the goal of spiritual practice, but more the journey taken.

The Left Hand Path is the quick but dangerous road to union with God; this is the road that the well-known Sufi Irena Tweedie took under the tutelage of an Indian Sufi master. The Right Hand Path is the slower, but surer, road to union with the divine.

Of course, some Left Hand Path practices involve the use of transgression in order to free the individual from slavery to their received social mores, but if anything this sort of practice is part and parcel of ego destruction – dismantling the individual’s concrete sense of identity and throwing them into a much more vast ocean of possibilities.

Coming back from my digression – how do I find a rapprochement with ego magic? David Tacey makes the point that the ego is an archetype too. Ego has its mythic patterns of manifestation and withdrawal just like any transpersonal being, deity, or indeed the tides of history or the flow of the waters.

If that is the case then a simple linear determination to shatter the ego becomes itself an egotistical project. As I’ve quoted before – “the struggle to free myself of restraints becomes my very shackles” (Meshuggah).

In order to perfect the vessel – to effect a union of universal and particular within our being – we need to have a more organic – and less egotistical – relationship to the ego.

Now my impression of most self-professed ego magicians is that they really don’t grasp this point at all. That isn’t a surprise, since I am suggesting that we need to develop the ego in non-egotistical ways!

Since we cannot do away with our particularity (not if we want to stay alive) we need to find a way to prevent it from occluding our capacity for opening to the flow of waters; but also to find a way to house it in our lives so that it might even enhance our ability to see the forest for the trees, to be good conduits for the flow of waters.

And there’s a lovely seeming contradiction for you – how to invite the ego to serve us in remembering the bigger picture of the World Tree in its full all-encompassing and connecting (and ego humbling) glory?

If anything, Woden is a master of dissolving impossible conundrums. Perhaps he has an answer to this almost alchemical conclusion that my reflections on heathen cosmology and spirituality have led to? Feel free to drop by and make some suggestions, One Eye… and in the meantime the practices outlined in my last post could all provide a good start.

Oh yeah, one final thought, a realisation I had after one of my bands (Sword Toward Self) recently shared the stage with Aleister Crowley-inspired progressive death metal act Aeon of Horus (who incidentally have just released an utterly astounding album).

Crowley on the one hand seemed an inveterate ego-magician; yet on the other hand he seemed obsessed with the fine art of dissolution. I wonder whether his method of keeping the ego groomed for maximum flow was to indulge its excesses – then shift just as dramatically to something new?

Perhaps by playing the ego up to the hilt he absolved it of its power, not unlike a paradoxical injunction in Ericksonian style psychotherapy. If so, then once again it seems we can draw yet another straight line through from Crowley to chaos magic. I have to go back and re-read the Book of Lies perhaps… here are some of Crowley’s own comments about the writing of said marvellous book:

“One of these chapters bothered me. I could not write it. I invoked Dionysus with particular fervour, but still without success. I went off in desperation to `change my luck’, by doing something entirely contrary to my inclinations. In the midst of my disgust, the spirit came over me, and I scribbled the chapter down by the light of a farthing dip.. When I read it over, I was as discontented as before, but I stuck it into the book in a sort of anger at myself as a deliberate act of spite towards my readers”.

I hate to say it… but this sort of thing reminds me of me.

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