By Heimlich A. Laguz – Page 14

Chaos Heathenism

August 5, 2008 by Heimlich A. Laguz

We here at Elhaz Ablaze have been reflecting on the purpose and theme of our website and have concluded that there needs to be a slight change in emphasis.

All of us have interests and experiences outside of heathenism or which, while connected to our heathenism, would not be regarded as “authentic” by the more orthodox heathen crowd.

On the other hand, it would be false to ourselves not to include these reflections on this website. They are part of who we are. Our gods and ancestors do not ask us to deny aspects of ourselves as the Christian god asked of the early heathen converts. Indeed one of the main points of polytheism is to acknowledge the full spectrum of beings and realms – as Phil Hine put it, “a god denied is a devil created”.

So in this vein Donovan has a developing practice exploring Somafera and internal kung fu from the point of view of a natural berserker; I have been having spontaneous experiences in the last year that could only be described as alchemical (even though prior to that I’ve never even had any interest in alchemy)! Clint has always had his own idiosyncratic take on these issues which I’ve not even encountered in anyone else that I’ve met. If we were to force ourselves into the one-dimensional oafish heathen mould then we’d soon shatter it.

On the other hand, there are some areas where we feel great care must be made not to blur important distinctions. For example, I have come to feel that greater clarity around the use of terms like seidh is necessary.

To be really strict, the term seidh refers to archaic magical practices for which we have only the most elliptical evidence. While it is possible for modern folk to create seidh-inspired practices, I do not believe it is strictly possible to practice seidh in modern times because we just do not know enough about the past. There is neither a substantiated unbroken living tradition, nor a collection of Dark Ages ‘how to’ manuals left behind for us to follow.

This isn’t a bad thing necessarily, and I still think learning as much about history as possible is vital to inspire us. But I think we need to be realistic – no matter how ‘accurate’ our reconstruction of seidh, or rune magic, or whatever, it will not be what went before. There will always be room for disagreement and any single piece of evidence will likely be able to generate a number of equally valid interpretations.

This is not some kind of post-modern “its all the same” attitude. It is a recognition that we just don’t know enough and the evidence we have is scanty and ambiguous and covered over by at least ten centuries of dust. We might look to our own personal experiences for confirmation or inspiration and this is a fertile approach. But it is no basis for objective historical research or making objective historical claims.

I therefore will be (and I guess already have been) writing with the understanding that unless I make it otherwise clear, I am using the term seidh to refer to modern practices which may or may not bear resemblance to the historical practices which are their inspiration. I think Clint and Donovan will be taking a similar line on these sorts of issues.

We want to avoid leading others down confusing paths by pretending to be evidence-based or historically authentic when there can be only limited authenticity in some areas. All of us struggled with this when we first became interested in heathenism because so many supposedly reputable authors make just this deception (even if sometimes with good intentions).

We still believe that trying to understand and recover the old ways is essential. We still believe that the spark of our original ingenuity is essential. And we believe that it is good ethics to make the distinction clear.

We also want to be free to document and explore the full range of our magical/psychological/spiritual/physical/martial experiences and ideas so that Elhaz Ablaze is a genuine reflection of who we are and what we are doing. In that vein, we’d like to think that chaos magicians and other magical/spiritual/martial types as well as heathens might be interested in what we have to say.

“Chaos Heathenism” is our philosophy. Heathenism is the spiritual harbour from which we sail, but like chaos magicians we are creative and irreverent and are not afraid to explore all manner of strange new oceans. In this we identify with the spirit that inspired so many Viking expeditions, as well as the far-reaching web of our ancestor’s trade routes and travails.

In that vein, we do not believe that our ancestors were as hermetically sealed in their culture and beliefs as the more conservative end of heathenry believes – and from what I can see archaeology and history are on our side.

We therefore do not wish to indulge in the separatist charade when there are for more nuanced understandings to be had. All too often we have found that the self-proclaimed “true heathens” are just as dilute as everyone else – their only distinction is that they are hypocrites as well. We believe that by accepting the world’s (and our own) complexity we will express our ancestral worldview more fully than by clinging to simplistic and narrow-minded dogma.

Perhaps part of the reason for our perspective is that all three of us are Australian (even though Clint now lives in the States). Australian heathenry faces unique challenges because of the nature of this land and the importance of its traditional custodians.

European-descended people have been in this ancient place for so little a stretch of time and the question of our relationship to spirit of place is much more challenging than, say, the question faced in Europe where heathenism was born or even the U.S. which at least shares some climate and ecosystem similarities with Europe.

Consequently some of the questions, ambiguities and mysteries that are more easily ignored by heathens from other parts of the globe are inescapably scored into our psyches and it would be self-deception if we did not engage with them.

So where this will lead us I cannot say, but hopefully our plan to go a-viking will take us to places we could never have previously imagined!

Rune Magic Adventures and Reflections

November 24, 2009August 4, 2008 by Heimlich A. Laguz

runemagicadventuresandreflectionsimage1 This first rune sigil is one of my “don’t remember what it means” specials. I used an Indian snake skin tambourine to send it off, dancing, singing, drumming, you name it, until I was frothing and spasming and seething madly. Odin appeared at various points and lectured me about various things I didn’t understanding – perhaps related somehow to the meaning of the bind rune.

At the end of the magic I came under attack by a spectral serpent. I’m good at putting magical attackers in their place and this was no exception. But now I feel rather bad because in hindsight that spectral serpent was probably the snake who once owned the skin on the drum I had been banging.

I think that’s pretty bad form for me to have treated it so poorly (although drumming with mammal-hide drums has never produced a similar reaction for me). I’m not quite sure how to make amends but I’d like to make it some kind of offering since it presumably didn’t like being used for magic or perhaps used in the way that I used it.

The second rune sigil I fired off by reaching a state of intent focus using a tambourine. Tambourines offer an infinite array of musical possibilities when played in the style of Greg Sheehan, a brilliant Australian percussionist who plays them like a tabla or darbuka.

runemagicadventuresandreflectionsimage2 I’m no Sheehan but I have a few tricks up my sleeve. The magic kicked in really hard once I got my feet stamping in 4:4 time, then my left hand cutting across that on the tambourine in what I think was a 12:8, and then my right hand banging away on the tambourine for a while in 5:4, then 7:8 and 9:8. I used my forearms to loosely hold the tambourine across my chest as I did this so that the rhythms were very physical, tangible, for me.

Well! All those poly-rhythms rather did my brain in and so I stared intently at the sigil, drumming and stamping, dissolving deep into the magic and releasing the spell like seed to fertile ground.

I’m not really sure what to call the rune sigil magic I’ve been doing recently. It seems to involve runes, dance, trance, seething, chanting, drumming, you name it. If anything, the thread seems to be a chaos magical attitude – namely that technique and practice are what matter, not dogma or even consistent ideology.

The Old Norse word Galdr is often used to refer to rune magic by modern authors. I’m not sure what actual evidence there is for associating it with runes as opposed to verbal magic in general (Galdr means magic and its root meaning is something like “crow’s call”). On the other hand, we are told, there is seidhr, which is in some sense “shamanic” (but that can be debated from what I’ve seen on the very excellent Seidhr Study email list!)

I accepted these definitions and the hard distinction between galdr and seidh for years but now I am coming to believe that it’s a limiting and difficult to (historically) justify distinction. As far as I can tell it was promulgated by Edred Thorsson, whose runic theology seems to have its own, ahistorical, reasons for wanting to make a strict separation between runes and seidh.

Well that’s fine but had he (and other authors) been clearer about where history ends and personal opinion begins my own explorations might have gotten much more interesting much sooner.

Perhaps Jan Fries’ philosophy on the subject is more fertile. He sees runes as being part of a continuum of symbolic representation that goes back into pre-history (and quite possibly starts with the Neanderthals and not our own species). Certainly archaeologists have found some very ancient rock carvings that look like they could be straight out of a Futhark-literate rune magicians’ arsenal.

Of course the integration of the runes into an alphabetical format does come later, probably a century or two before the birth of Christ, but the psycho-spiritual heart of the runes goes right on back, well before tenuously fine-spun distinctions between rigid ‘types’ of magic would be plausible or even possible to establish.

The runes have a strange sense of being like proto-sounds or proto-words in my own personal experience. They somehow reach across ages and speak straight to the lower brain, to the spinal cord, to the tongue, the ears, the nose, the skin. I am beginning to think they are very happy to be related to in chaotic, atavistic ways – this is probably how the symbols that evolved into the runes got treated by our far flung ancestors were used to being treated, and I’m guessing they liked it.

In the big picture there really isn’t much difference at all between a modern human, a 10th century heathen and a 30,000 year old human from prehistory. I think the crucial distinction is that the prehistoric human would have the most intimate relationship to mystery – if only by dint of living closer to death and change on a daily basis. The more abstract and disconnected your way of being in the world becomes, the less you are able to stand in the eye of the infinity of mystery (and Runa means mystery!)

In a sense then I hope that I am forging a new kind of magical technology, one which is moulded specifically to my needs and desires, and which reflects my unique idiosyncrasies. One which reaches into the history of human psychology (albeit from a subjective point of view) – not just through to heathen times but also earlier.

The purpose of this is not to establish some orthodoxy, nor to promulgate a school of thought or practice. Rather the purpose is to make myself more at home in the world of mystery, of Runa.

The Rune Gild motto is Reyn til Runa – Seek the Mystery. I think this is a pretty cool motto, but it doesn’t really fit for me, since mystery is here, around us, right now, and to me it does not need to be sought out like gold or wisdom. The more we attempt to uncover reality, the more it slips away from us.

For me then, the challenge is a little different. I want to conserve the mystery, to provide it a home and dwelling, a comfortable space where it might unfold according to its own unknowable devices. I want to invite the mystery into my life (where it already is, though obscured). We need but recognise what is already true in order to forge a relationship to mystery, to Runa. There is no need to search either within or beyond. Everything else then becomes a simple challenge of making oneself as welcome a ve (a sacred/secret temple), for Runa as is possible.

Is this all as speculative and subjective as heck? You bet. What fun!

On Being Stuck

November 24, 2009July 20, 2008 by Heimlich A. Laguz

(Note: I have offered some interpretations of a few rune poems which are my readings only and should not be seen as “what the poems really mean.” I think my interpretations are reasonable, but I cannot read the minds of their long-dead authors).

So it should be clear by now that for me changeability is an important spiritual pursuit. A shift in consciousness is only a moment away (if only you decide to throw a spanner into the works of the current state you are in).

Of course, its very possible to get stuck. People do it all the time. Sufficient trauma, fear, anger or confusion can trap you in a very restricted range of conscious states for years. Your ability to connect to any kind of magical consciousness is severely inhibited by this restriction. Writers on runes/seid/magic/etc don’t often write about the parts of their lives that aren’t filled with magic, joy, ease, power, spiritual insight, and the rest of it. I think that is dishonest. I think our short-comings and our failures are also a part of our being and deserve to be acknowledged just as much as our wisdom and our creative wealth.

As I’ve discussed before, the root meaning of ergi, appears to be related to trembling, dancing – with a spontaneity so deep-rooted as to be organic. This is any state in which the socialised norms you live by, the defined identity you function within, are scattered to the wind by your pulsing flesh and its ability to shake, sway, hover and shudder.

So the opposite to this embodied magic, this “shameful” seethliness (again see that earlier post) is stillness. Stuckness. Predictability. A human body that is not moving. A body that is completely subservient to the abstractions of ego mind. A body that acts to serve linear, boring, obvious objectives. A body which dwells in the illusion that life is predictable.

For long stretches of my life I lived out stuckness and stillness. There is a particular coldness that can seep through your bones and into your heart. I still go back there fairly regularly, and although it usually doesn’t last long at all, while this stillness is in charge it lays claim to infinity.

That’s right, for all of my celebration of the bodymind’s ability to spontaneously transform I still sometimes allow myself to be fooled by the mythology of ‘everything is always going to be like this’. And of course the more you are convinced that this is the case the more you will act it out, creating a feedback loop filled with lonely despair.

In the Elder Futhark rune row we find two runes, Nauthiz and Isa, lined up consecutively. Nauthiz, Need, is “a difficult circumstance and drudging work”, for in the face of Nauthiz “the naked will freeze in the frost”. Then on the heels of Nauthiz comes Isa, Ice: “a river’s bark, and a wave’s thatch, and doomed men’s downfall” (these quotes are from the Old Icelandic and Old Norse Rune Poems, translated by Sweyn Plowright in his Rune Primer).

The stuckness I speak of, this state in which the magic of both embodied and mental spontaneity is suppressed, is the frost that kills the naked. Exposed to the elements, without protection and without the ability to act, to change, to move, to create safety, to build body heat, to alter circumstances, we are very much needful. As the still coldness comes over us our need becomes greater but it takes more and more effort to spark the fire of change.

The above-quoted Ice poem then expresses, at least in this particular thought experiment, the deception of the stuckness.

On the surface of the ice, freezing to death, there seems no motion, no change, only a stagnation that spirals closer and closer to death. Yet ice is the “river’s bark”. It forms a hard crust but beneath it the water still runs. Beneath the veneer of stillness (dare I say the illusion of a continuous ego?) the reality of change continues on regardless. What a shame to let the smallest and most illusory part of the river, its hard ice surface, determine the needy stagnation and demise of a being once trembling with life force.

The trick is even more wily than this! Perhaps ice is “doomed men’s downfall” because some folks, fooled into thinking its hardness is eternal, suddenly find it gives way and drops them into the roaring currents beneath! What a shock, to have built yourself a psychological ring wall, only to have the ground give way. These are the risks we run when we forget that belief is cheap and change wins.

There is, therefore, a tragic air to the rune poems connected to Need and Ice. An atmosphere of suffering, freezing, dying, through the acceptance of simple illusions.

I am no stranger to these worlds of icy need. I have spent years frozen solid in their depths, or thrust with violence beneath the surface, struggling not to drown as change sweeps me away. It is easy to fear change, especially change that you must create yourself. AS hypothermia begins to kill us we feel the illusion of comfortable warmth. Hence it can sometimes seem that freezing naked in the frost is preferable to taking the risk of breaking the ice and breathing in life.

But I am still here, and so many times I have found my ability to transform and been rescued from the clutches of mono-consciousness. Yet still I have my time in the frozen cave, still I have my times laying out on the bark of the river, cold and shivering.

Perhaps what saves us when we are freezing to death in the rigidity of single-minded consciousness is shivering. If our power to change can be accessed at any time with the shaking, swaying and trembling, then perhaps shivering is the door through which we might escape the seemingly infinite halls of icy despair. We find, in the gateway to the ice-world (Niflheim?), that again our body tries to remind us of its powers. We shiver, our body vibrating and shuddering to generate new warmth and life and change.

Perhaps then Need and Ice also offer a gift – the opportunity to remember our transformative powers. To remember the infinite creativity of the flesh, its embodied spiritual riches. Perhaps those of us who often find ourselves exposed and freezing are being offered a valuable lesson, spiritual instruction.

“Need is tight in the breast; but it often
happens for humans’ children to help and to save
each, if they listen to it early”.

“Ice is over-cold, extremely slippery;
it glistens glass-clear, most like gems;
it is a floor wrought by frost, fair to look upon”.

These are from the Old English Rune Poem, again Sweyn’s translations.

If we listen to the tightness in the breast early it might save us. And as slippery as ice is, nonetheless it is fair to gaze at. Compelling though the illusion of being stuck is, we may find beauty even in the threat of stagnant and rigid death.

Perhaps there is another path into the realms of altered consciousness that seid opens up for us. Perhaps instead of seeking the change, the shift, the movement into other worlds, we could embrace and pursue stillness, rigidity. Perhaps by carrying this intensely icy needfulness to its very end we can pass through it and into the heart of the seething fire. Perhaps we can subvert the seemingly involuntary law of hard ice armour by volunteering for it. Perhaps we can dissolve its unconditional rule by choosing it instead of unwillingly and wretchedly submitting.

“Need is tight in the breast” – perhaps it calls us to recall and rekindle the fire in our hearts, reminds us of the pulsing rhythmic law that rules our blood and our body and the roads of all the worlds. Perhaps there is no need to lament the hard gauntlet of psychophysical rigidity, of illusory ego, of our forgetting of our powers of seething transformation. Perhaps Need and Ice deserve gratitude.

I have ridden far on the back of my horsely unconscious this morning. I have let the waters of reflection spill out into words. Am I cold? Does my frostbite ache? Most certainly. Does my heart feel the weight of constriction? Sadly it does.

But have I recovered my imagination, my flexibility, my memory of the worlds beyond the domain of ice-clad death? I have. When we pass into the lower worlds without guile or motive we sometimes find new roads and camp fires tended by the welcome sight of a one-eyed wanderer. There the naked, freezing in the frost, beguiled or betrayed by ice, might find healing with the hospitality of a god of change. Woden is a god who frees us of fetters (so the Eddas tell us). Perhaps he has power even to dissolve the tightness of cold on the heart that lives to sing.

I am going to start a little experiment of chanting, either inwardly or outwardly, the runes of Need and Ice (you can use whichever of their archaic names seems right) when I find myself struggling with the forces of these runes. Embrace their presence. And see what comes of it.

Easy as Falling Off a Bike

July 13, 2008 by Heimlich A. Laguz

So I have a confession to make – until last week I couldn’t ride a bicycle.

How could this have happened? You might well wonder… the story behind why as a child I never mastered this almost universal skill (at least here in Australia) isn’tall that interesting so I won’t bore you.

I will say that for the longest time I felt like a bit of a failure because so much of my immediate family is Dutch – and the Netherlands are the spiritual home of thebicycle. What kind of Dutch descendant can’t even ride a bicycle?

Well all that has changed very swiftly I’m pleased to say, and my Deep Mind can take a fair bit of the credit.

When I bought my new (well, second-hand) bike, the woman at the shop had a great perspective: she told me she’d love to be able to experience the challenge of learningto ride as an adult. Well, that was sure encouraging.

One thing I did know was this – no way I was going to be able to nut this particular challenge out with my conscious mind. One thing I know about my conscious mind is this: it is awfully lazy. Way more than most people’s. Its almost like a stupid slug that just wants to hide under a branch and gorge on leaves. We really don’t get on very well.

For example my conscious mind doesn’t like doing anything physical, like pruning the bushes in our garden, or vacuuming the floor, or typing up these journal entries. It really hates it when I do work on my private practice to improve my therapeutic skills or drum up some business. It hates looking after my belongings, even prized belongings such as my basses and guitars. It just wants to crawl under a mountain and sleep until Ragnarok. Then it will sleep through the death of the gods and happily snore on as the world is reborn.

But I do know that once I get past my sluggish conscious mind I start to have fun. Take that bush pruning I was doing today. “Oh no!” said my conscious mind before I got started. “It will be horrible! You’ll hate it, it will take hours with no reward, it will stop you from doing more important things!”

And yet once I get started, the task becomes fun, energy and blood flows around my body. My mind becomes calmer and things start flowing onward. The rhythm of the work becomes my lord. The slug is covered in a pillar of salt and my whole being begins to make sense again.

Given that this is how I work, I right away had a chat with my unconscious mind. “Unconscious”, I said, “I’m handing this learning to ride a bike thing entirely over to you, because I know that you will do a much better job of figuring it out than I will”. I’m a bit vague on what my unconscious thought about this arrangement but either it was happy to get stuck in or else it quickly came round to the proposition.

Right! So the first ride was at night (to avoid the gratuitous humiliation of having small children utterly outclass me on their two wheeled machines of doom). There is a small car park near where we live and this was to be the practice ground.

Getting there was a nightmare. Even getting started on the thing was almost impossible for me and I couldn’t focus enough to control the pedals, the steering and the brakes all at once. There were lots of very sudden starts and stops, lots of painful jolts, lots of near crashes. And the frustration! I was getting more angry, feeling more incompetent, by the second. My conscious mind was beginning to crawl out from the salt wasteland and suggest, quite forcefully, that I was never going to learn and that I might as well give up.

Well! After a very trying, exhausting and rather embarrassing ride/walk/stumble/crash/fall to the car park, I was feeling pretty tender. At least I’d managed to survive this far.

What followed was really a conversation that went something like this:

Conscious Slug Mind: You can’t do it. Give up.
Me: No.
Conscious Slug Mind: You aren’t fooling me. This is a waste of time. Take the bike back for a refund and stop eating salt.
Me: No.
Conscious Slug Mind: Hah! You fell off again! See?! No chance. None at all.
Me: Maybe this time it will work.

And so on.

Then I find myself managing to ride a full circuit around the car park without going flying. Maybe losing control here and there, maybe giving myself a bit of a chaotic death-spill scare. But getting there.

I’ve never experienced Bike Consciousness before. By this point I am really starting to love it. Its all about the motion, the rhythm, the movement. Its the ultimate anti-conscious mind, anti-slug state.

So! First attempt was a smashing success. By trusting in my unconscious mind I had the basics down in about 10 minutes (even though it seemed like endless hours).

The next night I went out riding and got a lot more adventurous. Too adventurous. I managed to go soaring through the air and smashed myself to smithereens. Blood, bruises and battered ego all over the place. Worst of all I knocked the chain off my bike and, in the darkness, couldn’t see to put it back on. Yep, I had to walk back home with tail between legs. Despite that the night had still been a success – and it was probably good for me to hurt myself.

I took a few nights off, but on ride number three I learned two important lessons.

1) Few things beat conquering a hill on a bike. The hill I took down would probably be scoffed at by any ordinary rider, for me it was a victory. I am already on the hunt for bigger challenges to surmount. Slug mind doesn’t like rehearsing for victory in this way – more salt on its rubbery skin.

2) My unconscious mind likes to remind me who is in charge. When I started congratulating myself on how clever it was to give over the task of learning to ride to my unconscious, it suddenly stopped helping me. I almost went straight into a tree. Right! Have to remember not to let my ego mind take credit for what my unconscious has achieved.

Well today on my fourth ride I had a great, easy time, and really proved to myself that I can do this. I am now a confident explorer of Bike Consciousness. I like Bike Consciousness. Its a feeling of Going Places that beats Car Consciousness, which is heavily mediated by the chassis, the glass, and the fact that your motion is a product of an engine and not your own bodily strength.

What lessons can be learned from this in terms of trance, altered states, and seidh?

1) Resistance is easy to defeat if you can resist getting intimidated by it. Take small steps into new territory and you can’t go too far wrong.

2) Slug mind hates the salt of action.

3) Pain is your friend. Humiliation and feeling over your head are good helpers – they let you know when you are onto something worth doing.

4) Your unconscious mind wants to help you explore new states of being, but you have to trust it. And give it its fair due. Oh – and you should ask for its help. It won’t know that you want its help if you don’t pay it the courtesy of asking.

I’m planning on using the lessons I’ve learned from my bike in other areas of my life. Fingers crossed that bike consciousness can inspire other ways for me to salt the hell out of my sluggish conscious ego mind.

Incidentally, the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem for Raido reads something like this (depending on the translator):

riding is easy in the hall
but hard for the one who rides
on a powerful horse on a long road

There’s really no substitute for getting out there and taking on the salty challenge of doing. You can interpret the rider as the ego self and the horse as the unconscious or Deep Mind if you like (though I have no idea if that is what the poem’s author had in mind).

Getting out there IS hard, but I really recommend learning how to expand/contract/mutate/dissolve/multiply/unify consciousness with the expert help of your horsey unconscious. Boy, I look forward to taking my own advice more, too.

Slug mind – you are on notice! Hiding in the cozy warmth of the homestead might seem like the perfect plan for your life, but it breeds stinky stagnant mollusc-mind.

I’ve had this growing relationship to salt for a while – salt as a kind of alchemical agent, a producer of transformation. I think about salt a lot in terms of its role in the Norse creation myth (I’ve even written some lyrics about this!) Writing this little piece has brought into focus for me one more aspect of why salt is a friend of consciousness transformation. Shake it!

Recent Rune Magic Adventures (and some Seidh too)

July 2, 2008 by Heimlich A. Laguz

morerunemagicandsomeseidhtooimage1 Well I’ve been firing off a few more sigils, so here they are. I worked out a whole stack of runic combinations for various purposes and am now working through designing them and activating them. As this post is pretty much a report on recent activities it should be classed as mostly UPG, albeit UPG informed by knowledge of historical sources.

The first I sent using the drumming approach again, in particular letting cross rhythms and the drone of my de-tuned drum carry me into strange new worlds to lay the seed of the sigil.

It seems to me that the designs I am making bear the influence of Jan Fries’ Neolithic magical focus, working them up feels a bit like doing cave art. I guess there is a really primitive aspect to rune magic, the crude act of inscribing images. It cuts through endless layers of surface rubbish. We use words now for so many purposes and it feels good to use letters (runes) as ambiguous symbols rather than very finite fragments of meaning.

There is also an honesty to using runes as symbols for magical purposes – it seems to me like the direct opposite of the way that politicians, corporations and so forth abuse language to distort perception and avoid responsibility.

recentrunemagicadventuresimage2 The magic to release this sigil into the world got a bit crazy.

I started by calling on ancestors, gods and goddesses as a way of opening the magical space. The response to my call was rather abrupt – “we are always with you, idiot!” came the words from my mouth. They told me to abandon the drum this time around, got me to lie down.

Next thing their collective voice says “be like the dead” and I find myself covering my eyes. Then “be like the living” and I am covering my ears. There is some humour in these postures. Then the idea occurs that I could use my ear plugs (a metal musician’s best friends). I cover my eyes and become neither dead nor alive.

Ear plugs change your experience of sound, in particular any sound you make, because you hear less of your actual vocal utterance and feel more of the vibrations in your body from speaking. Being in a magical context this very promptly put me in quite an isolated state. When we clear a magical space to do work this usually involves visualisation of some sort and calling on whatever beings seems appropriate. The idea of making everything beyond the immediate situation inaudible is pretty alien to this, but I like it!

Next thing I am communicating with the Celtic goddess Brigit, who for some reason has had a connection to me for a very long time despite my general lack of interest in Celtic mythology. I tend to neglect her because I do not know how to fit her into my generally Germanic spiritual interests/practice. She has been getting progressively more grumpy about this for a while, demanding among other things that I publicly acknowledge her before other heathens. Well, here she is folks!

She soon had me falling through worlds, having basically taken over the show. I found myself by the well of Wyrd, conversing with the Norns. I have often journeyed there before and they have some memory of me, though this time their world seemed altogether more dark and ambiguous. Its hard to hold onto their words but the main theme was related to where Annalise and I live at the moment, an area with a very odd spiritual lay of the land. Spirits around here don’t like humans much (with good reason), and the built environment has had little of the emotional investment and artistic flourish that brings forth the magic of dwellings.

The Norns advised me to perform a kind of reverse Nidstang. Rather than turning spirits again their human neighbours, as Egil used the nidstang in Egil’s Saga, they described a kind of pole magic to invite and make peace with the local spirits, to change my personal relationship to them. They gave me some runes to carve on a staff and suggested that I raise the staff at a particularly loaded bit of land near the ocean.

They advised me that if I do not do this then we should move to a different locality because its not good to have local land spirits that just don’t want to know about you. I’ve known that this is how things have been here for a long time so its good to have some sense of a possible way to bring about some change or improvement.

After that journey I was still in quite a state. I could feel a pressure at the back of my head, a sensation that usually goes with riding states. I have not had a really strong co-mingling experience in a long time and it was quite a joy to feel it coming on. I’m a bit out of practice with letting it happen, but Brigit came through finally. She pulled out the earplugs and the world seemed to open up into sound.

I am pretty vague about what happened after that. It wasn’t the strongest horsing I’ve ever done but it opened up the channel which has been somewhat closed recently. There’s going to be more of this in future I hope! She has quite a sense of humour. Often in this situation the riding god/dess likes to make good-natured jokes at my expense to others, cutting me down. I think its good for me to get the perspective of a consciousness unfettered by general human limitations – to them my hang-ups and ego armouring seem completely absurd. Annalise was quite happy to hang out with her fortunately so things went smoothly.

I’m certainly going to start employing sensory deprivation more for these purposes in future. Its pretty much pure UPG, but I feel it was directly shown to me and it certainly proved effective. That’s about all I have to offer for now.

Hail Brigit!

The Seething Unconscious

June 22, 2008 by Heimlich A. Laguz

In my last piece I had a bit to say about the conscious and unconscious minds. Specifically, I suggested that the unconscious mind is much more powerful, more creative and generally wiser than the conscious (ego) mind. I also suggested that trance – be it seidh related or something else – helps us to disable the conscious mind so that the unconscious mind can run the show for a while.

But I didn’t exactly define what I mean by unconscious mind, and this term is not exactly something which I’ve prized from historical seidh lore.

Before I answer this question I want to take a moment to reflect on various authors’ attempts to reconstruct a map of human psychology using old Heathen terms. Folks talk about the fetch, the hyde, önd, ödr, the hamr, and so forth. There is hugr (mind), related to Old Norse hugrunes, and it is tempting to speculate about Old Norse minni (memory) too.

Edred Thorsson even constructs a whole model in his book Runelore that is based on Jungian ideas. This approach gets some flack from other Heathens for quite shamelessly crossing different traditions/ideologies, but you have to admit it has a daring ambition to it – and some of Jung’s ideas are not so far from Heathenism, either.

Bearing all this in mind, I am personally hesitant to speculate on what a full ‘Heathen psychology’, cobbled together from old words/concepts, might look like. There are a few reasons for this, but the main one is that in modern Western cultures there are a vast number of ‘psychologies’ and often they use the same terms in different ways. Given how varied the religion and culture of old Europe was I am a little hesitant to say “this is how these old psychological terms fit together”. I’d rather give myself the freedom to be a little open-ended.

You find a useful analogy with the runes. We talk about Elder, Younger, and Anglo-Saxon Futharks as though these were very clear, discrete scripts. Nevertheless, no two Futhark carvings from days of yore that I have seen have been exactly the same. There are general trends over time and space of course (e.g. Younger Futhark scripts appearing in the latter Dark Ages in Scandinavia), but not the tight delineations that only really make sense if you are used to a mechanised and fairly abstract modern world.

As a result it’s easy to spot modern rune authors (or modern speculators on Heathen psychology) who are just making up a load of codswallop – but very hard to decide who is right about specific details when comparing authors who have done their homework. I don’t want to spend my time splitting hairs, I want to spend my time doing rune and seidh work!

In any case, all reconstructed systems are likely to fail sooner or later. There is almost always going to be some kind of exception or ambiguous circumstance and we easily risk trying to force reality to fit our (more or less) abstract model if we only have one set way of understanding things. Of course, it is very helpful to learn about as many different models as you can – you’ll have access to lots of different perspectives. This goes for both modern psychology and for reconstructing Heathen psychological ideas.

So having cleared the ground, what do I mean by the unconscious?

I’m using the term unconscious in a very broad way. It can refer to any of the following, and lots of other things
too:

* Autonomic nervous system
For example regulating breathing and heartbeat.

* Immune system
Did you know that hypnosis can significantly improve your immune response? Its been clinically proven over and over again.

* Sympathetic nervous system
For example the fight/flight reaction which can put you into some very interesting states in which you can do things you normally wouldn’t be able to.

* Digestive system
In fact I’ve read that the area around your gut lining has the most neural connections of anywhere in your body other than the brain. This might be why constipation and other stomach problems are often associated with depression or (in my and a few other people’s subjective experience) with magical/spiritual ordeals.

* Subterranean reasoning
I sometimes solve answers to rational problems by asking my unconscious to figure it out. When it is ready I just get an ‘aha!’ moment and there’s the solution. This might not work for everyone; and for some, such as my brother who is a mathematician, the conscious mind might well be able to get to the answer easily enough without deeper assistance.

* Subterranean skill development
When I want to learn new musical techniques, for example, I rarely practice much. I instead strongly intend for the skill to develop, then forget about that intention. It tends to organically emerge in the course of my usual jamming and rehearsing of existing material. In this way I’ve learned to do quite a few things as a bassist and guitarist that at first seemed impossible.

* Root source of inspiration
That part or aspect of my brain and body which can make me see new wholes out of fragments, new angles on old problems, or synthesise music in ways that I can subsequently analyse to see how it works but which I could never have consciously invented

* Intuition
For example, when I was younger I had several very bad experiences with manipulative magical demagogues. I started to realise that each of these people caused a sense of unease in my mind when I first met them. Since then I’ve learned to listen to these kinds of messages. Sometimes they’re wrong; other times they’ve given me valuable fore-warning and I’ve been able to avoid or minimise a lot of pain. Also, people that emit these warning signals tend to recognise if you’re picking up on them and that can also help keep you safe because they can tell you are onto them.

* A source of meaningful or prophetic dreams

* The parts of me that don’t over think things and are therefore much better at designing and activating magic spells (with runes this is assisted also by spending many years chanting runes, meditating on runes, memorising rune poems, etc, so there are plenty of seeds buried in my mind).

* The part of me which dips into the web of Wyrd and provides a rope up which gods and spirits can climb; and which can interface directly with the imaginal realities of the world around me while my ego just spins around in a stew of its own garbage.

* The part of me that can draw strange non-rational (as opposed to irrational) patterns in the shape of my life at times, and which helps me therefore to understand my place in the web of Wyrd.

Ok, so it’s evident that some of the things in this list I could refer to by archaic or mythological names if I wanted to, and that in fact might be an interesting way to make richer magical practices. But I am resistant to just labelling these various aspects of my unconscious for fear of limiting myself and for the reasons already discussed above.

I do think about and seek out experiences characterised by önd and/or ödr – but I wouldn’t declare these to be the only real or true experiences of such things because there is no unbroken tradition for me to draw upon to make such a claim. There’s just my subjective experience which seems to fit with what these words might have meant to my ancestors.

Laterally-minded (a sign of a well-fed and active unconscious!) readers will be wondering how all of this fits with the debate over whether gods and the like ‘really’ exist as independent beings with their own agendas or whether they are part of some kind of collective unconscious, archetypal structuring principles of human experience.

I think this whole debate misses the point personally.

The thing is that archetypes in Jungian and post-Jungian theory seem to have independent wills of their own, just like gods. Conversely, gods affect the individual psyche in a way very similar to the way archetypes do.

Jung offered various definitions of “archetype” but I’m sure that at least once he suggests that they are not just structures of human consciousness or experience, but indeed are inherent structures of reality (or if you are a transcendental idealist, perhaps they are some kind of formal structure which comprises enabling conditions for the existence of consciousness in the world). In any case saying that the gods are inherent structuring principles active throughout reality seems like a pretty ‘hard polytheist’ description to me. So the debate could well be just a dispute over arbitrarily assigned names.

Jan Fries wins the prize for me (he often does). Considering that even recently invented deities can have a good deal of power (witness the Wiccan Goddess), he suggests that things are much more complicated that we can really understand and that while the gods might in fact be illusions, we humans are nevertheless still more illusory. Actually I should clarify – Fries attributes this point of view to something Loki suggested to him. It does sound a lot like something Loki would say. I think Fries is less interested in virtually irresolvable abstraction and more interested in spending time going to meet the gods, whatever their ontological status might be. What a great role model!

One of the richest explorers of ‘polytheistic consciousness’ I have encountered is the post-Jungian psychologist James Hillman. Hillman’s writing is astoundingly deep. I daresay he understands and feels the character of divine beings much more deeply than most hard polytheists (or even most theists), despite the fact that from his point of view he is ‘just’ taking about archetypes.

The lesson on this front is once again that belief is cheap (see my previous post)! Do your opinions help you
understand and relate to the gods, or hinder you? Learn all you can about archaic Germanic psychological lore and learn all you can about your own seidh/magical/trance experiences. Explore your consciousness and unconsciousness. But make sure you spend more time practicing than you do theorising (at least once you have sufficient grounding in the mythology and history). You’ll have a lot more fun, and frankly our ancestors probably spent more time practicing than theorising too.

Jan Fries has popularised the term Deep Mind. This can refer to any of the aspects of the unconscious I have suggested above, plus it can refer to the imagination, to spirits, to gods, indeed to the Axis Mundi itself. It is a psychological term which opens up into things that are far beyond the merely psychological. I think this is a really helpful concept. It keeps us on the path of opening into magical experience and new horizons of consciousness.

Given the extent to which I’ve been assassinating the reputation of the conscious or ego self, I feel I should mention something about this. Its not that I think the conscious ego self, which finds itself in its feeling of subjective separateness and language-bound narrative, is all bad. Following Nietzsche, however, I regard it as the more recent part of human conscious and consequently the least well developed. I think the only way to develop it is to get it into a harmonious relationship with both the unconscious and the world around it (remember that natural world thingy outside our smoke-choked cities?).

This will eventually lead to the conscious/unconscious split dissolving. At that point we might get to dial direct to the well of Mimir via the graceful branches of Yggdrassil (see Bil Linzie’s amazing writings for more on this). Sounds good to me.

Also, your unconscious is sensitive to what you feed it. If you feed it a steady diet of bad TV, fast food and consumerist “I want it yesterday” mentality then it will get sick and your conscious ego will suffer too. It might be helpful to treat it like a high-maintenance and very loving pet which can nevertheless eat you if you mistreat it.

Well this has been a lot of pontificating now and I really should be practicing what I preach. I’m going to try to discipline my garrulous mind and make the next few posts specifically practical in character. Of course for me writing can easily slip into a flowing, inspired consciousness in which one word leads to another word. So even this pulpit sermonising silliness is a kind of magical experience and practice. Jormangand, I suspect, likes to gnaw on his own tail when he gets the munchies.

Til next time!

Seidh and Trance

June 18, 2008 by Heimlich A. Laguz

There is healthy debate in modern times about what exactly seidh is, or how best to construct some kind of modern seidh practice from the paltry historical evidence available.

What seems beyond debate, however, is that seidh is about altered consciousness.

If we consider the various powers it is attributed to provide (shapeshifting, prophecy, cursing), the trance-like descriptions of its uses in the sagas and even the ergi references in the lore to be somehow related to individuals behaving in socially unacceptable or at least uncharacteristic ways, then it seems inescapable to me that seidh magic in what ever form is about attaining altered consciousness, about trancing.

What is a trance? From the point of view of modern hypnosis, a trance is any state of consciousness which has a degree of focus. Right now as I type away I am entranced by the task I am engaged in. Particularly common trances folks find themselves in are while driving, while reading, while exercising, while having sex or in meditation. Berzerkergang, insofar as it is a very dramatic altered consciousness state, is also a trance. Depression, shock and elation are all trances.

If we are in trances all of the time, what is so special about hypnosis, meditation, and so forth? I would suggest that trances which bring positive change are preferable to those induced by, say, television. Hypnosis and the like are basically techniques for using trance to seed positive ideas, feelings, beliefs and so forth. In fact, I would go further and suggest that hypnosis can be a tool for shutting up the endlessly nattering conscious mind so that the unconscious, which is always going to be a lot bigger and more powerful than the conscious, can get on with doing its good, creative work.

Just as you are what you eat, you are what you experience in trance. I haven’t owned a television for years for this very reason. Television exerts a compelling trance fascination, particularly if you aren’t often exposed to it and therefore aren’t used to its effects. The scary thing is that the people who decide what is on the TV have all kinds of agendas. These agendas are unlikely to have your individual needs and well-being at heart – and that is a grand understatement.

Anything I can do to develop my ability to trance-form I consider to be good grist for the seidh mill. Here are several propositions to consider if you agree about the place of trance in daily life and/or seidh magic:

1) Your conscious mind is less important than it wants you to think.

All the really good stuff gets done by your unconscious anyway, often via the doorway of a trance state. This holds for the basics of life such as having a regular heartbeat. This holds for having the co-ordination to confidently move your body. This holds for the eccentric fusion of reason and intuition that produces both
scientific breakthroughs and brilliant art. When I am dancing or composing or improvising my conscious ego self – shrunk by trance into a tiny speck – can sit back and marvel at the endless possibilities for creative expression that the rest of my being produces so easily but which daunt my ego completely.

2) Belief is cheap.

Folks argue endlessly over which ideology or belief or theory is correct, particularly in the worlds of psychology and religion. Truth matters in questions of physics or politics, but I would suggest that it becomes much more complex when we examine our own psychophysical nature. An important question to ask other than “am I right?” is “does this belief help me or others?”. If I believe I am worthless and doomed to failure then this belief is likely to shape my decisions and actions and become self-fulfilling. Fortunately the reverse is also true. To shift from a negative loop to a positive loop we have any number of options. I intend to explore some of these options in this journal.

3) Perfection is overrated.

Many people involved in spiritual pursuits, personal growth, psychotherapy, etc, are interested in becoming better or different to the way they perceive themselves being prior to getting interested in these things. This can have unfortunately consequences. I have met many people who shackle themselves with a perfect image of how they would like to be and flog themselves mercilessly when they inevitably fail to meet this ideal. The fact that they may have actually improved themselves a great deal despite their failures goes unnoticed.

A much better attitude is simply to accept that each of us has positive and negative potential. If I am less concerned with perfection and more concerned with learning how to change the consciousness state I am in at a given moment then it doesn’t matter if I am perfect or not. I can get quicker and quicker at recognising when I am in a bad way and more and more competent at interrupting the pattern I am in so that I move into a more beneficial state.

My point is not that trying to improve oneself is a waste of time. My point is that we are likely to be more successful if we abandon the dream of a perfected ego self and instead work with the far more powerful tides of trance and deep mind – forces which can take us to far richer and more beautiful (and often more humourously humbling) places than we could consciously imagine anyway.

4) Change wins.

Whether we imagine the vast complexities of a quantum universe or the endlessly cycling patterns of wyrd, change wins. The effort it takes to keep ourselves unchanged is monumental. This is even true if one is stuck in a pattern that seems immovable. If you are feeling depressed or anxious you might like to experiment with consciously trying to be depressed or anxious. Many people find it hard to voluntarily keep doing something that they started doing involuntarily or unconsciously. There is no point trying to defend eternal borders, because they never existed. Things can be unique, specific and localised. But they cannot be utterly isolated, unchanging, from everything else. The trick to surviving and prospering, therefore, is not to attempt to rigidly fight the inevitable eddies and flows of change,but rather to ride them.

From these four premises I propose to explore seidh magic as a vehicle, inspired by my Germanic ancestors, for getting better and better at altering and exploring my – and other beings’ – consciousness. Seidh can present an opportunity to take responsibility for my life as a being perpetually entranced – and indeed, I believe that Odin makes an excellent, if flawed, model and guide for this taking responsibility.

–

One of the main areas of interest I have in trance at the moment is rhythm. Although drumming is far from my speciality as a musician, I have been exploring the worlds of percussion in strange ways. For example, it is very difficult to play in two time signatures or two tempos or indeed to purposefully play out of time with oneself when one normally plays in time without effort. As soon as one hand is drumming in a 4:4 rhythm and the other in a 7:8 the conscious mind becomes quiescent. The task requires more than you can manage with surface will.

As I say, I am not a skilled drummer, although as a bassist I do have very good rhythm. So while exploring seidh consciousness and firing off rune sigils I have been drumming myself into very odd states. The drumming that I have been doing would not sound particularly interesting to an audience (unless they were interested in strange experimental improvisation!) – but it gets me wide open to some very positive trance spaces. I find it very hard to play out of time with myself, my conscious mind strenuously resists this – but when I get there I go far and deep and quickly, too.

As I develop better drumming skills in these specific areas I will perhaps post some recordings.

Of course the use of drums by historical Germanic magicians is also debated. I know there is no real evidence either way – although I’ve read that some really old European drums (I think circa 3000 BCE) have been found by archaeologists, so it seems on that basis quite plausible that the old Germanic tribes knew about these things. Also the Saami shamans use drums and since it seems likely that their practices were an influence of the development of historical seidh I think this adds further circumstantial support to the use of drums in seidh. Of course the ways in which I am exploring drumming has no precedent except that of my own musical imagination, which in turn flows from divine forces (IMHO). It does make for more intense trance experiences however.

Another aspect of rhythm I have been exploring has been in drawing. When I design my bind runes I work with my materials as rhythmically as possible, keeping the pastel movements regular and cyclical in motion as the rune images sink deep into my mind. In this way even the preparation of the bind rune for magical purposes serves as a kind of magical rite, and helps to bring together the practices of galdor (rune magic) and seidh. Indeed, all of this leads me to believe that galdor and seidh are much more closely related than some folks opine. Since the lore is pretty much silent on their relationship (and even exactly what these magical practices were), I think my opinion is just as good as the next person’s, with the added bonus that it helps me do better magic (see proposition number 2 above).

So what about this unconscious I’ve been talking about? Stay tuned for more…

Recent Rune Magic Adventures

June 11, 2008 by Heimlich A. Laguz

Last night and tonight I performed some rune magic. The two spells were quite different so I will describe each in turn. Questions of UPG are fairly irrelevant to this post except to say that the techniques used are only loosely inspired by historical evidence and a knowledge of general magical techniques.

recentrunemagicadventuresimage1
The first ritual I performed with my wife. We both have had struggles with certain personality traits which tend to get in the way of getting on with working towards one’s goals, so we decided to do something about it. Here’s what happened.

While Annalise smudged the house, tidied it up a bit and got the ritual space ready, I worked out a bindrune based on our conversations about the concept of the ritual.

We set it up on the ironing board amid lots of unironed clothes as this seemed very appropriate. I played an old, very flammy and out of tune floor tom, both to alter our consciousness and also as an additional vehicle for channelled communication.

Then we personified the habit we wanted to change as a separate being. First I asked her lots of questions about its effect on her life and what she would prefer, which helped to summon it. We spoke in quite hypnotic… repetitive … ways, which really helped shift us into trance. Then she quizzed me about its affects in my life and what I would prefer and it possessed me.

She then bargained with it. In exchange for getting to wallow in the cat’s laziness it would leave us alone so that we could develop new, better habits and ways of being. It was shifty and sneaky, but I think Annalise did quite well with reaching an accord with it.

I think a day later we are both feeling the difference already. The sigil is now on the wall in the lounge room. I won’t analyse the rather complex bind runes and other symbolism because a) forgetting about it makes it more effective and b) some of it came straight from my unconscious mind and I don’t know what it means.

recentrunemagicadventuresimage2

The second bit of rune magic I did was just tonight. It had a specific goal which I’ve already forgotten (read up on your chaos magic or Jan Fries’s books if you need to get some basic understanding of how sigil magic works).

I chose the runes for the bindrune by looking at a picture of the Elder Futhark and letting the relevant runes choose themselves. It was hard to resist my conscious mind’s desire to pick out what seemed like the most obvious runes, but I trust my instincts. I am not a big fan of the Rune Gild approach to rune magic, but when I was in the Gild I spent a lot of time chanting and meditating on runes as per their ‘curriculum’ and all those hours of effort have definitely paid off.

Anyway, I drew the bindrune, then prepared for the ritual. I turned off all the lights and the room was lit by a single candle in front of the bindrune on the floor. I then played that old floor tom and chanted and stared at the bindrune, letting my mind wander, slowly pouring off the endless pointless, petty random thoughts of the
day, then letting my mind sink in and out of trance, touching the bindrune, taking it into the deeps. I chanted the names of runes, I chanted gibberish, and I even found myself chanting “Woden, Vili, Ve” over and over again. After some indeterminate time (and hour?) I fel the urge to wet the image with my saliva and then I knew it was done. Now that bindrune is on the lounge wall too :) Let’s see what results come of it!

Evidence, Sources, and Gnosis

January 7, 2010June 8, 2008 by Heimlich A. Laguz

Because this journal has a primary purpose of documenting magical and mystical explorations, I feel a word is in order regarding my views on what in Heathen circles is called Unsubstantiated Personal Gnosis (UPG).

Heathens are generally trying to reassemble some kind of set of traditions from cultures which once lived. There is a lot of literature calling for authors to be clear about which of their claims are supported by some kind of archaeological or textual evidence; which of their claims are speculative; and which of their claims are actually ideas imported from some other body of mystic, religious, or cultural tradition.

I believe it is very important that this sort of clarity be encouraged. If we are unclear about which of our claims come from evidence and which of our claims are invented (in good faith one hopes), then our readers are at risk of treating our opinion as though it were fact.

Furthermore, I think we need to be honest about how we interpret the evidence of Heathen belief and practice that is available. Every person has biases and these will invariably affect the way they interpret sources. Historiography is a sub-branch of history which looks at the “history of history”, the way in which researchers at different times and places have interpreted the same evidence differently on the basis of their own biases. It is also interesting to note the ways that a researcher’s bias affects which evidence they rely on more heavily in forming and presenting their opinions.

A classic example of this is the interpretation of gender in European burial sites. Archaeologists used to just assume that if a buried body had weapons or armour then it must be male; if it had domestic equipment it must be female. Advances in bone analysis, among other things, now reveal that a good number of female corpses from Heathen Europe were buried with weapons and armour, and many male corpses went to the afterlife with domestic gear. All of this suggests a much more complex picture of how the sexes were organised. It seems the gender politics of the researchers led them to make very inaccurate assumptions about the gender roles and gender politics of the Heathen Germanic peoples (or at the very least, about their burial practices). You can read more about this here, or in a fantastically speculative article in issue two of Hex Magazine.

So where I do personally stand?

Well I am a big fan of UPG, so long as it doesn’t obviously and blatantly contradict the evidence available and so long as it is presented honestly. So for example I am happy to entertain the notion that Odin as the Wanderer or as Grim might have walked with a limp, even though nothing is said in the sources about this either way. Whereas the Rune Gild idea that Odin survives Ragnarok is transparently (for good or ill) a load of UPG. The Poetic Edda clearly states that he is killed by Fenris Wolf.

This latter example conjures a related issue. Some recent authorities on Heathenism have presented themselves as being far more strict about sticking to the lore than they actually have been. Edred Thorsson, as the leader of the Rune Gild, is a great case in point. There is stacks of very wild speculation in his books but there is also lots of solid research. Unfortunately he doesn’t make it clear which is which, leading many readers to take some way out ideas as being academically sound and unquestionably self-evident! you can read more about these issues in Sweyn Plowright’s Rune Primer.

There is one more area of interest with these issues and debates. Folks who argue for the primacy of historical evidence rarely spend much time delving into the possible spiritual or psychological meaning of, say, the Eddic poems. Whereas folks who prefer a preposterous hypothesis to an ugly fact are quite keen to reflect on the deeper meaning of the old lore, no matter how unfaithfully they do so. I would like to see people who take the historical evidence seriously start to also reflect on its possible significance as metaphor and symbol. Perhaps I might even do this myself in these very pages.

You can expect me to present a lot of UPG material in this journal, but I promise to try to always be clear about what I can support with evidence and what my imagination has furnished. That’s a much better promise than you can expect from many of the self-proclaimed lore-masters in the world of Heathenry – its a simple promise that I will be as honest as is possible.

Til next time!

Seething, Seidh, and Ergi

November 25, 2009June 2, 2008 by Heimlich A. Laguz

There seems to be a lot of debate about whether or not seid/seidh has anything to do with the notion of seething. One point in this debate that tends to get overlooked in the to and fro is that of Jan Fries, who pointed out that seid is described as ergi in the old sources and the Indo-European root of ergi, *ergh-, means “to move heavily, to tremble, to quiver, to be excited” – a metaphor that evokes much more strongly the image of a boiling, seething, agitated magician than it does the image of a calmly seated one. This word also cognates, he has pointed out, with the ancient Greek orcheisthai: quivering, leaping, jumping, dancing. Perhaps seid was considered ergi (shameful) because it provoked otherwise reserved and self-controlled individuals to act with complete abandon, to give into to “weakness” and let themselves be driven by impulse and divine madness? And yet I believe something similar is going on with berzerk rage – Odin as both shameful/effeminate AND hyper-masculine!

Given the disagreement around seid it would be prudent for all parties to accept that each has a little truth. In exploring the worlds of improvised and trancing dance I have certainly experienced shape changing, visions, prophecy, and who knows what else. Here are some shots of me going for it in my wife’s energy dance class: