By Heimlich A. Laguz

Generosity Means Resistance

Sutton.hoo.helmetRecently I wrote about the importance of hospitality within Heathen tradition, as well as about the importance of generosity. Something I did not point out in that article was this: the virtues of hospitality and generosity were of particular significance when it came to rulers. The tight fisted king could not expect to win good regard, nor expect to have a comfortable reign. The community was worth more than any one individual, and was not afraid to flex its muscles.

As I discussed in my essay on Heathen Harvest about why universalism makes infinitely more sense than folkism, the picture of unitary ethnic tribes ruled by monarchs was something more or less invented by Christian missionaries. It was a tactic, since it legitimated the fiction that converting the ruler of a tribe or group was de facto converting every member of the community. A transparent bit of political sleight of hand, yet history teaches us that even the flimsiest pretext can be enough to excuse all sorts of outrage. (I love the irony, too, that the folkish notion of ethnic exclusivity was originally a Roman Catholic concoction to facilitate the pacification of the Northern barbarians).

Let’s compare these two ideas: on the one hand the miserly king, on the other, the pretense of uniformity as a device for making a monarch into a tool. We can see how tight-fistedness in a ruler saps the strength of the people ruled, rendering them both more and more vulnerable to abuse and less and less empowered to be creative, magical, and vigorous in their lives. No wonder the mean master was deplored and the unwelcoming lord held in contempt.

The original Heathens, I suspect, were conversant in what we now call game theory; they recognized that a co-operative strategy for dealing with life yields richer rewards than a war of all against all. This doesn’t mean there was never conflict, greed, or selfishness of course; but individualism and aggression for its own sake would have likely been seen as absurdities and death wishes by anyone grounded in the lore of Heathen spiritual tradition.

Underlying this co-operative approach to life, I suspect, was the awareness of the concept of wyrd, the recognition that all events have some degree of significance, and that all things are interconnected in profound ways. As such, rash actions easily have undesired consequences, possibly far in excess of anything that could be expected (who could have predicted, for example, the unfolding crisis triggered by the decision so many years ago to start burning fossil fuels in industrial quantities?).

Generosity makes sense when one recognizes the interconnections of wyrd and grasps that the value of another person cannot easily be gauged by first impressions. When we consider that the smallest action could have incalculable implications (the classic chaos butterfly at work), and that we are incapable of guessing which, when, and how, it makes sense that generosity and hospitality should be default stances. In other words, generosity and hospitality are not just noble gestures; they are expressions of self-interest, and expressions of care for the horizon of mystery, that which rune magicians  refer to as Runa.

To trust Runa is to embrace the unknown. One who is strong with mystery, who has powerful will, is able to trust in all the unimaginable threads of the web of time, in all the infinity of rivulets that trickle down from the fleeting present back into the well of the past. So generosity and hospitality are gestures of grace and power and trust that one can become aligned with Runa for the betterment of all.

Modernity has been rife with masters who have been misers. Colonialism, capitalism, (ironically, given its stated values) communism, and (especially) fascism have been built on principles of miserliness. Of tight-fistedness and inhospitability. Indeed, one could argue that modernity has been a process of attempting to abolish mystery, to abolish uncertainty and the awe and fear that is inseparable from Runa herself. It does not work of course; the tighter the fist is clenched, the less it is able to grasp.

And so that brings me to the topic of January 20, 2017. The day that one of the most flagrant misers in the world, one of the pettiest haters of all time, will ascend to mastery of the most powerful empire in human history. This man, who has done so well at convincing his own victims to vote for him and celebrate him, does not understand generosity and hospitality. He fears and hates wyrd, for it is the omnipresent threat to his callow ego. And in his (and his followers’) attempts to clutch to illusions of certainty (such as illusions of lost glory days that never were), he will gladly sacrifice anything. And for a man with that much power, that means sacrificing everything.

Heathens must stand against this fool and his lackeys. Trump and his gang of thieves have  nothing but contempt for the institutions that have elevated them, for the people that have elected them, and for the people their actions have and will hurt (which includes those who elected them and many others besides, nationally and internationally). We must not be fooled, distracted, discouraged, or bought off. The ancestral ways are clear: Trump and his lackeys are terrible rulers, guided by nothing but cowardice and willful ignorance.

This is not to pretend that Trump is an accident, or that the pointless greed of the corporate-controlled Republicans is an accident, or that we should be surprised that the Democrats have become so ineffectual, bought off as they are by the same masters as those who rule the Republicans. It is apparent that few in positions of power have the slightest interest in service. That the institutions of the US have never protected its citizens with even a pretense of equality.

Yet here is where we stand. We must fight the miser with weapons of generosity and hospitality that can build unbreakable communities. We must reach out without stint and resist every outrage. This new master, who holds his own office and responsibilities in contempt, must be contained and constrained. The institutions of power and governance must be reclaimed from the control of the corrupt. Because of our values of generosity and hospitality, our honoring of wyrd and Runa, we Heathens have more obligation than most to stand up and be counted. Let us not waste any time.

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Thoughts on Generosity

img_0612-1Generosity shows up as a central value in the remnant corpus of Old Norse Heathen literature. Whether celebrating the ruler who shares wealth readily, or exhorting the hall to welcome the stranger without hesitation, it is clear that for the old Heathens generosity and hospitality were fundamental practices that benefitted both the individual and the collective. The Gebo rune, and other references in the lore, also suggest the importance of gratitude, an attitude that recent research indicates can physically heal the brain of trauma.

Arguably a component of generosity is acceptance. Acceptance is a stance I can adopt or set aside, and it entails a gift to both myself and my recipient. Naturally, my acceptance of the other provides them the  freedom to set aside armor (literal or psychic) and find either repose or the opportunity for deeper engagement with life. And in accepting the other I free myself from the burden of resisting what wyrd has brought to pass. As such I become more free to respond with creativity and intelligence.

A common mistake one encounters is the confusion of acceptance and acquiescence. The latter refers to a passive submission, often involving allowing another to harm me. This, however, is not acceptance. Acceptance is merely the act of recognizing what is before me. It does not instruct me on any course of action, be it passive or active. It merely instructs me not to waste my energy on phantasms of my own mind and instead attend to what is.

If I were to wax poetic, acceptance is a means of romancing the Norns and the work that they do. It is a form of religious piety; if Heathenry is a this-worldly tradition (in contrast to, say, the otherworldly focus of much of Christianity) then acceptance must be a fundamental Heathen practice.

Acceptance runs both directions when the question of generosity or hospitality arises. Not only is it poor Heathen form to decline to extend the generous hospitality of acceptance, it is also poor form to decline generosity or hospitality when they are offered. The Heathen perspective, being fundamentally practical, sees reality in terms of relationships (this is what Wyrd is, the dynamic unfolding of relationships). It follows that isolationism and autarky are ill practices from a Heathen point of view.

As such, in the practice of generosity we discover that the ancient Heathen customs are designed to break down rigid dualities. This is difficult for modern people to approach because the modern world – rooted in Christian assumptions – is founded on irreconcilable binaries: good and evil; progression and regression; rich and poor; black and white; colonizing and colonized; dominance and submission. Given such a context it is no wonder that people cannot tell the difference between acquiescence and acceptance, seeing as the latter violates the prevalent binary mentality.

Rigid binaries also existed in premodern times and non-Western cultures of course; the difference is that in some times and places, people realized that binary opposition is just one link in the eternal pattern that wyrd weaves, and not the absolute condition of existence. Thus it is that non-dual philosophies exist, and are often misunderstood by those coming from a Western context. Buddhism, for example, has often been called ‘world-denying,’ yet in reality it teaches radical embrace of this reality as it is right now. How ironic projection can be.

Well, the ancient Heathens left many clues for the overcoming of rigid binaries. We modern Heathens have a lot of work ahead of us. The great danger we face is that, lacking perspective on just how deeply binary thinking has been embedded in our bodies and minds, we will anachronistically project dualism onto the Heathen current as we rebuild it.

This is what is happening when we encounter, for example, folkish Heathens who cannot escape the very modern terms of racial categorization (and often too, poisonous and gratuitous narratives of dominance and submission, which are ultimately founded on a very modern autarkism that would not have been well received in Heathen circles).

One generous way to approach Heathenry itself is to treat it like an estranged lover with whom we have just begun to reconnect. We must be tentative. We must reach out from beyond our own assumptions. We must be wary of cutting the Heathen cultural corpus to fit our pre-existing prejudices and perspectives (those who use Heathenry to justify the worst in themselves would be better off removing themselves). If we can resist the lures of disowned projection, we extend hospitality to Heathenry itself. Only then might it begin to enter our halls and enrich them with its songs.

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The Crossroads and the Gallows

Odin by Jacob Hood 1893Gods upon gods upon gods. Big gods. Little gods. Perverse gods. Strange gods. Gods of mystery, mysterious gods. This cosmos is so full of the things called gods that one cannot walk for treading on one. Is there anything that is not god?

The little god of the toothbrush, no, that is the toothbrush. The little god that is the bathroom door, that is the stair case, that is the kettle, that is the shirt on your back, that is the oxygen molecules you absorb into every cell of your body, drawing over the surfaces of your lungs, into your blood, your heart, to the very limits of your capillaries, into every single cell, that life-giving divinity called Oxygen feeding the divinity called Your Body. Fall down in reverence.

The bad mood, the stained conscience, the mean thought. All divine beings. The good mood, the selfless deed, the languid afternoon in the long sun’s demise, all deities sublime. The familiar, the alien, the comforting, the disturbing. Gods.

They are stacked up together in fractal arrangements, endless recurring icons of magic and power. As above, so below; the structure of the tiniest is the structure of the ALL. Divine, gods all. One and many, both at the same time. Is this illogical? Illogic is the name of god. Is this contradictory? Contradiction is the name of god. (Logic and consistency are also the names of God, coincidentally).

Tragedy is a god, and serendipity is a god. Change is a god, one who facilitates all the others most eagerly. Change is, you might say, the crossroads of the gods, or perhaps the traffic cop of the gods as they comport themselves to and fro along the byways of Mystery, she who may well be the greatest of all the divinities (but who can claim to know such a thing?).

Change, the crossroad of the gods, itself a god. Standing by the crossroad called Change are two wooden pillars. They are joined by two crossed beams, forming an X between the tops of the pillars. A rope is tied to the X. A tattered, black-wrapped figure creaks and groans in the wind. It is the rope’s divine purpose to be the saddle of the figure, who is the rider of the horse called gallows. Gods stacked on gods stacked on gods.

This riding god is a crossroads god, for the crossbars of the gallows are a recursion of the crossroads of change upon which the whole sordid glory of life sings its marvelous and whimsical opera. This riding god, this dead god, hanged by the neck. And is that the broken end of a spear that thrusts from his side, like a phallus cutting through the ribs? I believe it is.

This riding, hanging, rib-fucked god is my god, god of the crossroads of change upon which vast epics and homely familiarities alike unfold. They gamble, these infinite stories, these tangled up threads. Gamble at the feet of the hanged god, at the crossroads of change. The horizon of mystery (which we call The Present) looms but never arrives. All of existence, every last bit of it, playing out in ever-more complex Mandelbrot sets below the swaying dead feet of the swaying dead god who rides the gallows.

My god, this rib-fucked god, dressed in his tatters. At his feet all of existence unfolds, stretching forth from the rim of the goddess Mystery to the rim of the goddess Mystery (id est Runa). Thus is he sometimes called All Father.

Not as though he is some patriarch, some dominator, some well-spring. No. He is weathered, weakened, withered. He is desiccated, drained, death incarnate. There is no romance in what this god is. It is a gallows-riding, wind-whipped, spear-fucked god. It is my god, or least the god that occupies my attention the most of the many gods that occupy my attention.

It is my beloved god, this god at who’s feet all the other gods unfold their hour upon the crossroads called Change as they dance from Mystery Past to Mystery Promised. I love him without varnish, without the dressings of human fear, power, or control. I do not need to make him into a pompous patriarch, would not thus deign to slander he who swings from the gallows, the blood drained from his veins. Mandrake takes root at his feet, where blood mixes with semen and seeps into earth. My beloved god, who gives life even in death.

He watches, accepts all that he sees as it is, sans alteration, sans erasure. Yet always remains unscarred, for he is not ruled by the waters that run across the river bed of his undead senses. Without judgment. Death affirms life.

See how the endless multitude of gods which comprise God pulse and throb and ebb and flow back and forth on the crossroads called Change in their voyage from Mystery to Mystery (id est Runa). See how the hanging, rib-ergi god watches. Is that the ghost of a smile that haunts his lips, curved as they are? Perhaps just the faintest hint of his love for all that he surveys? Who knows what molten life lies below that cold corpse shell? “Only death is real.”

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Prismatic Reflections

prismHere is a thought experiment for you.

Suppose that you are a kind of transmitter and receiver. Just for the sake of argument – and you can modify the metaphor as much as you like – that your heart is constantly sending and receiving beams of white light, which are the currents, threads, attractions, and repulsions of the web of wyrd, the vast interconnectedness of existence.

This gift of being a vessel of light is pretty handy, because everything else is also such a thing. Imagine all of existence as a vast lattice of interconnection. Call it cosmic fornication, or universal empathy, or even (if you’re a glass-half-empty sort) the unending savagery and strife of existence. Hey, it’s your metaphor, you can do whatever you like with it.

Uh oh, now it gets more complex. You know that heart of yours? Turns out that it is a prism. So every time white light hits it, seven beams of rainbow color spray forth, Dark Side of the Moon style. Suddenly we have this riotous panoply of color bursting from our chest. And, oh, everything is spraying this stuff all over the place. It is possible that actually there is nothing at all but light, in ever more complex refractions and hues.

And all of this light is communication, did I mention that? It is. How much of it are you aware of right now? Probably not so much. Can you feel the sensations right now as you, for example, scrunch your toes together? Can you feel the floor or your shoes or whatever against your feet? Can you feel the light from your screen hitting your retinas, plunging down your optic nerves, turning into words? Maybe you can now.

Chances are that, if you’re like me, most of the time you’re so deeply inside this endless torrent of sensation that you completely take it for granted. You become utterly habituated. This infinite magical matrix of existence, and we become habituated and bored by it! We resent its inconveniences, its inefficiencies. We become armored. The armor prevents the entry and exit of light. Which means we start to deaden.

This deadening does not reduce our yearning for the light’s nourishment, variety, and beauty. We become misers, greedily hoarding what little sparks we can grasp. The more we tighten around the pathetic bits of color left to us, the more they wash free of our possession. For light is not property.

Here the tragedy is in full swing, a vicious cycle of clutching and scarcity. A whole universe of abundant, multi-colored light! And we glower in the shadows, resentful, wounded, blaming everyone and everything else. Eventually the light hurts our once glorious senses, and we cannot even bear it, so now we are greedy for a thing of scarcity that we have taught ourselves to hate.

Need this be the end of our story? Or might we somehow begin to become willing to do something different? To hazard the slightest risk of vulnerability. Oh, and maybe a little bit of scaled psychic armor comes free and we feel good. And maybe that feeling good is frightening, and it feels like what the grey-minded authorities are always telling us is sinful and wrong. So we shrink back.

Perhaps, however, that little taste of our prismatic birthright is too good to forget, to abandon. And so, with great care, with false starts, mistakes, setbacks, we begin a quest for the prism-heart. And then for the light that it emits and receives. And for the whole, vast, interconnected cosmos that the light literally is.

This requires us to recover the sensitivity of our organs – of our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, mind. Our nervous system has to gradually be completely re-calibrated, reorganized. We fear we are losing ourselves, and we have to mourn the loss of our captor, our miser self, for we are victims of Stockholm Syndrome. It is important to honor even the poisoned, barren parts of ourselves, to mourn the loss of the one who causes our self-inflicted wounds.

Is there an end to the story? Chances are, you’ve been making your own metaphor up this whole time, and now my words are gibberish. And if your own metaphor is telling you what you need to hear, then that’s better than if you slavishly molded yourself to my little tale. What happens as more of the prismatic light enters our life? This business of becoming is no certain thing. I am a worshiper of mystery, however, and so I can do aught but follow on.

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Take the IAT Challenge!

Little Red Riding Hood(Yes, I said IAT, not IOT, sorry, sorry).

Many Heathens of European descent are mortified at the prospect of being called racist – regardless of their political beliefs. This is understandable; the Nazis tainted the reputation of Heathen mythology and who wants to be associated with Nazism? Well, I suppose some people do, but I would like to think that if they’re Elhaz Ablaze readers then maybe they’re hip to the possibility that they’ve got some exciting growth opportunities (e.g. away from all that Hitler crap) when it comes to politics. Here’s a hint of how getting away from fascism might be good for Heathens currently enamored of it or its echoes:

“I have in this War a burning private grudge – which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler… Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.” – J.R.R. Tolkien

Of course, outside of Heathenry, folk of European descent also tend to be mortified at the prospect of being accused of racism. Who can blame them? It’s a dirty word. Or wait…maybe there’s something about long histories of violence and inequality that persist right through to the present day. Oh yeah, we wouldn’t want to be seen as having anything to do with that.

And no, I’m not trying to invalidate all the kinds of suffering and even structural inequality that white people also experience. If you’ve known suffering, how about experimenting with the fine art of finding empathy for someone else’s? You might find it healing for you as well. That’s what they call solidarity, and it’s what our capitalist masters have been busily working to constantly undermine for a very long time now.

I’m sarcastic perhaps, and perhaps a little unfair. The reality is, racism has been a huge force in the world for a good few centuries, a central component of imperialism and colonialism, and of the gradual unfettering of the capitalist class as it inches its tentacles across the globe (but note that it doesn’t seem to have had much to do with Heathenism…). (Marx predicted that the exploitation of the proletariat would reach its apogee in the ruthless domination of developing world economies by Western corporations, and he was spot on). And there are plenty of European descended folks who are genuinely disturbed by this continuing legacy.

But I digress. European-descended Heathens are afraid of being called racist, and to some extent that’s very reasonable, particularly in light of the events in Europe in the 20th century. It is also very reasonable because some of us actually are racist. A few are hard-core, card carrying haters, but let’s set them aside for a moment and acknowledge that it is hard not to allow broader racist social narratives affect one’s mindset. Mainstream media – Fox News, CNN, etc. – makes a vigorous habit of pumping racist BS into our minds (though I would like to think that even conservative Elhaz Ablaze readers would be too sensible to muck about with the likes of Fox News!).

So this isn’t an article in which I wish to point the finger in a shrill, moralizing sermon (any more than I already have?). What I really want to do is quietly, soberly ponder the realities of racism in contemporary Western societies. And I want to invite myself and my readers to withdraw all projections on the issue. I’m not asking you to change your mind, or anything like that. Projections can be accurate or inaccurate, but either way we always have them (they’re the basis of our consciousness) and it is worth our while to withdraw them, to hold them out and evaluate their weighting and momentum, to evaluate the ways that they contort and construct our perceptions.

Isn’t it worthwhile to reclaim one’s mind from social conditioning, especially the banal and miserly conditioning that predominates these days?

If we can bring this kind of sobriety to the question of prejudice, we are first freed of the indignity of making excuses. For example, folkish Heathens on the racist end of the spectrum will try to say they are not racist simply by disputing the definition of racism. I have often seen, to pick a common scenario, the invocation of that magic phrase “separate but equal.” Such folk seem to forget that such language provided the scaffolding for Jim Crow, South African apartheid, and ultimately for the Holocaust as well.

So even if they genuinely do not wish to express a racist sentiment (I’m giving the benefit of the doubt for the sake of the argument), they might like to know that “separate but equal” is so steeped in histories of racism that it only makes them look worse, not better. And I feel genuinely embarrassed on their behalf.

Since it is clear that the issue of race (and, actually, many others too) makes Heathens of European descent go loopy (regardless of their political views), I would like to propose a quick and efficient tool for settling the question of where projection begins and ends. It is called the Implicit Association Test (IAT). It won’t solve all our problems, but it will give some constructive grist for the mill.

The IAT was developed by Harvard psychologists and has been adapted to study all kinds of unconscious preferences (so there are actually many different IATs, depending on the subject at hand). They’re simple web based tests, and they rely on reaction speed to access the underlying preferences that surface once the conscious mind is distracted or overloaded. They’ve been robustly researched and validated, and if psychology can sometimes be rigorous and sometimes a farce, they’re definitely up over on the rigor end of the scale.

There are IATs for various aspects of racial, religious, gender, sexual identity, ability/disability, etc. prejudice. They’re a great tool for expanding one’s self-knowledge – even if we might not always like the answers!

I did 8 of the IATs tonight. Turns out I think Muslims are alright, prefer African Americans to European Americans, and I see Native Americans and Asian Americans as being more “American” than European Americans (being a European-descended immigrant to the US myself, this last result doesn’t seem so surprising). I found out that I have no preference in any direction when comparing young folk and old folk, but I do have a slight prejudice against disabled people, which is useful information and points to an opportunity for my own growth. Yes! I’m not afraid to admit my shortcomings.

I also found out that in a comparison of my views on Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, I was very positive about Hinduism and Judaism, somewhat positive towards Islam, and very negative toward Christianity (but not as negative as I expected). I’d still like to be free of all bias, even against Christianity. The false comforts of prejudice are much less valuable than the possession of true perception.

SO! Instead of mouthing weasel words about how you aren’t a bigoted Heathen, why not step on up and take the tests. I suspect some universalist Heathens might be embarrassed by hard-to-admit prejudicial peccadilloes , and more than a few folkish Heathens might be forced to wonder whether their racial or other convictions really are so rational after all. The best of both groups will aggressively pursue the question of how to grow and change, regardless of the results they score.

Since my results were pretty consistent with my progressive politics, I learned that I need to consider conservative opinions more carefully – not that this means I have to become politically centrist, but that I need to consider my bias and strive to see truly. If I really believe my way of seeing things is correct then I should not need to fear that exposing myself to other points of view might prove me wrong. “The prover proves what the thinker thinks” is a threat regardless of the content of one’s beliefs.

Take the IAT challenge! Most of the tests will not only tell you where your prejudices (if any) lie, they’ll tell you also what the general American population’s distribution of attitudes is as well, so you can situate yourself in the bigger picture. Sorry, its rather American-centric, and as a non-American I found some of them a bit tricky to make sense of at first. Yay cultural hegemony. But don’t let that ruin the fun they can nevertheless offer.

Maybe Death in June and their ilk could do the IAT for us all. And maybe so could their detractors. Maybe Steve McNallen could put his money where his mouth is and do a few IATs, since he still insists he isn’t racist no matter how many politically stinky bombs he drops. Maybe Heathen United Against Racism members would be willing to take the IAT and perhaps even have the courage to admit if they too have work to do on shifting prejudices.

This test won’t “prove” or “disprove” whether a person is “a racist” or “not a racist,” (a number of champions for racial justice have flunked IAT tests looking at racial prejudice, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t done important and worthy work), but it certainly grants a powerful reality check, and it would certainly help separate out the lovers from the haters.

Look, I’m writing flippantly because the reality of prejudice in the Heathen community is enough to make me want to cry. I’ve seen a few haters, but also plenty of unconsidered projection and unconsciousness. I’d love to see en masse completion of the IAT, and en masse honest reporting of the results, and en masse commitment to step up and work on changing whatever prejudices and blind spots are revealed. Maybe we would end up with a more honest  and (here’s my own bias speaking) more inclusive community.

Do it for social justice, for honor, or just for the sake of your own intellectual honesty or curiosity. Seriously, life is too short to let unconsciously held beliefs shape the course of our lives (whether those beliefs be politically charged or no). Just click the link and get cracking, and be willing to share your results (even if just with a few trusted friends) and what you’re willing to work on, whatever your prejudices turn out to be:

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html

Do you really own your own beliefs? The IAT gives us a tool to help stop our beliefs from owning us.

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Arguments in Favor of Universalist Heathenry

the-ash-yggdrasil-by-friedrich-wilhelm-heineA little over a year ago I wrote a piece which I intended to be the ultimate critique of folkism in favor of universalism (ironically I now feel it could benefit from being made still more comprehensive, but you have to start somewhere). Elhaz Ablaze was on hiatus, and the article ended up being posted at Heathen Harvest (thanks Sage!).

It went on to garner plenty of excitement; I received hate mail and love letters in even measure. I also received many promises of folkish rebuttals, though none materialized (which does little for the tattered intellectual credibility of the doctrine).

Recently someone added a new comment to the article, a brazen anti-Semitic ejaculation. It would be funny if it weren’t, as far as I can tell, dead serious.

I posted a riposte to this comment – and then realized that I had never shared the piece on Elhaz Ablaze itself. And seeing as this month has been grueling and I’ve not had time to write a new article for the site…it seems like a cheap way to dig my way out of the publication hole (part of the reason I’ve been busy is that I’ve been doing editing work on our forthcoming book).

So I hope you enjoy the essay, or if not, then I hope you are willing to at least consider its challenge and respond in a less silly, or even ugly, way than some others have (I gave folkish Heathenry some measure of benefit-of-the-doubt in the essay, but since then the folkish response hasn’t exactly been making it easy for me to maintain that stance). Anyway, here’s the link:

http://heathenharvest.org/2014/09/28/arguments-in-favor-of-universalist-heathenry/

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Returning to Seething

Groa's Incantation By W.G. Collingwood (1854 - 1932)Recently I reactivated my interest in Jan Fries-style seidr – namely the induction of shaking, swaying, and trembling as a healing tool. I’d like here to discuss the background to this technique, draw some parallels with the findings of trauma psychology, and discuss my recent initial foray back into the practice.

First of all, Fries has been criticized by many Heathens for his apparently bogus connection of seidr to “seething,” and thereby to trembling as the basis of Northern trance work. Fries has actually addressed a lot of these criticisms and even pointed out that his ideas were only ever presented as playfully speculative.

I have always maintained that there is nothing wrong with speculative innovation so long as one is transparent that this is what one is doing, so that others can make their own informed choices. Fries, I do not think, has tried to pass off speculation as historical fact. For me, Fries’s notion of seething makes absolutely perfect sense. I do not believe that anyone can really claim to practice “authentic” seidr in this day and age, but seething seems to fill that function for me just marvelously. So there.

More importantly, Fries’ research on traditions of magical trembling seems to indicate that such experiences are common in a vast array of cultures, and symbolically speaking they make sense in a Heathen context too, even if the specific technology of seidr (whatever it even was exactly!) makes no reference to trembling experiences. That said, there are boiling cauldrons and ecstatic furies aplenty, and the magical power of ergi seems very nicely compatible with the flowing vulnerable liminality that trembling can produce – states of healing and sorcery.

As such, I feel confident that in going back to the testimony of my own bodymind, and connecting that to my Heathen practice, I cannot really go too far wrong. I trust the flesh to tell me what is best for it (at least if I know how to listen!). That doesn’t mean I have to sacrifice my keen interest in reconstructionism, it just means I have healthy senses of irony and humor.

In Fries’ book Seidways the theme of healing recurs in his accounts of different seething-type practices from around the world, be they San magic rituals or Mesmerism. My own experience of trembling, shaking, and swaying practices align with his accounts most marvelously; in fact, reading that book was like coming home for me, spiritually speaking. Finally someone had put words to the deep, wordless experiences that I knew and craved.

Indeed, long before I consciously realized the significance of trembling, I had already undergone several powerful healing experiences in which I spontaneously trembled, shook, swayed, or even several such behaviors at once. These movements were automatic, unguided by conscious intention. Since I started consciously seething I found out that these behaviors could move from consciously willed into automatic modes, and that the more this involuntariness suffused them, the deeper the magical effect.

Imagine, therefore, my surprise on reading research on the psychophysiology of trauma. It appears that when a mammal experiences trauma (e.g. almost getting killed by a predator) it first experiences the potent neurophysiological event of the fight-flight-freeze reaction. After the danger has passed, the animal will then tremble and shake. And this behavior releases the body of the traumatic damage done to the nervous system and organs, so that the creature can shortly return to normal life without any chronic harm from its harrowing experience.

Humans, on the other hand, do not listen to our bodies (this comment applies mostly to modern Westernized humans) and so by and large have forgotten how to allow ourselves to tremble after experiencing trauma. This in turn is the root of many chronic problems that can be caused by trauma. It is not necessarily the traumatic event itself that causes the depression or the anxiety; the culprit can also be that the body’s natural mechanism for correcting systemic imbalances (imbalances that are adaptive in the moment of danger but not long term) has been suppressed.

The parallel with seething is significant: what Fries documented in Seidways is nothing less than a catalog of the ways different cultures have sought to ensure that cultural praxis serves the biological and psychological necessity of trembling. More than this! Such practices also marshal the tremendous psychic potency of trembling and, aligned with conscious intent, make it into a powerful engine for the working of magic.

Seething, therefore, is a particularly primal kind of magic, one which activates every layer of the nervous system’s evolutionary strata and brings all that power to bear on the seether’s intent. Yet this is not something that can be mastered overnight. First much self-healing through trembling must be accomplished (meditation, particularly in the Vipassana tradition, which emphasizes the experience of the sensate body, is a valuable adjunct).

This is where I am up to – this process of self healing. It is funny that, even though I have understood the significance of seething for years, I am only now finally taking it to my deepest heart. Well, we each have our journey, our voyage onto the sea of irony and mystery.

Recently I undertook a session of seething for the first time in many years. Since that session I have been astounded at the loosening of certain very persistent and difficult psychological fetters. I find myself more able to become conscious of the ways in which unconscious, emotional forces hiddenly direct conscious thought into flights of justification, attempts to pass off as rational what are really courses of action that have been shaped by unresolved trauma in the bodymind. Deep shifts are occurring in the tectonics of my psyche. I can intuit that if I keep up with this practice, then this profound shifting will get progressively more potent.

So what does my seething practice look like? I run from Jan Fries’ directions in Seidways pretty much as written (admittedly he allows plenty of latitude for individual preference). I find low light with candles to be helpful; I put a randomized iTunes playlist of Dead Can Dance on softly in the background, and I open the rite with the invocation of runes for protection.

But most importantly – and this is a detail that in earlier years I neglected to my cost – I am sure to ask, rather than tell, the deep mind/spirits/gods/whatever for what I would like to experience. I am humble and respectful and invite its/their instruction, rather than thinking I have to be the “master magician” in control at all times. No, such an ego-centered attitude runs utterly contrary to the sympathetic and autonomic spirit of seething, which loves to undermine the illusion of the ego’s supremacy.

As I shake, sway, tremble, and seeth, I sometimes chant, moan, sing, and laugh. My mind wanders and then returns. I am sometimes vigorous in my movements, sometimes subtle. There is little about this that is intellectual, formalized, or precise. I turn again and again to accepting what the body wishes to share, seeking to cultivate trust in that deep self from which all spontaneity and magic flows.

I call out to Odin and Loki mostly, and they are helpful, though each embodies seething in a different way. My recent Loki-themed articles reflect the building unconscious anticipation that was leading me to return to seething; if Loki is the body, then seething is worshipping Loki. It is restoring to the body recognition of its innate beauty, just as it is.

I have never loved my body. I have never trusted it. I have hated it, circumscribed it, battered it, despised it, treated it with contempt. I have been learning in recent years to nourish it, to be kind to it, to embrace it. Ill health and emotional struggles forced me to do so. Now I wonder if this whole journey were not a prelude to my decision to reintroduce seething into my life.

I am ready for this now as I never have been before. I am grounded in a vigorous meditation practice, and this seems crucial. I encourage anyone reading this article to stop now, and instead get stuck into active, practical magic, in whatever way you see fit. Magic is meaningless if it is not actively practiced. Perhaps I’ll see you in one of the worlds that only the trembling seethers may enter…

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Loki is the Body

Gosforth_Cross_Loki_and_Sigyn

What if Loki is the god of the irrepressible body? The body that speaks, sings, sways, shudders, grows, fades, pulses, aches, dies, rebirths. What if his threat to consciousness is the threat of body to dissociated mind? Oh, well, we have to suppress this body thing – thus speaks dissociated mind. And so the drama begins, culminating in Ragnarok.

Loki, then, is the enemy of denial. Yet he did not start the war. Denial started the war. We cannot accept the body as it is and so we begin to dictate terms. We begin to try to consciously manipulate the body, the sensations of the body, the pleasure and the pain. And once we begin meddling in this way we become irrevocably attached to the very sensations we are trying to regulate, dominate, do away with.

Irony of ironies! The more we fight Loki, the more his serpent coils tighten around us, make us gasp and splutter and choke. We resist the body, we refuse to know it as it is, and it comes to rule us. We armor up. We escalate the combat. The body responds in kind.

Consider the opponent process that occurs in addiction. At first the drug we use to control and dissolve the body and its sensations, to regulate and efface it, works wonderfully. Yet soon the central nervous system begins to compensate, and more drug is needed. And more. Until eventually, we need the drug not to feel “good,” not to impose our denial on the body…but rather just to avoid feeling “bad.”

At either end of the continuum we are running from our embodied experience, the serpent god Loki (is he not a serpent god? Consider his underworldly ordeal…). At either end of the continuum, our denial, our dissociation, has taken us into a conflict with the body and its spontaneous truth of flowing experience. It need not be a drug; any kind of attachment will do. Our aversions and our lusts in all their polymorphous perversities (to retrofit one of Freud’s more poetic turns of phrase).

So who makes Loki the villain? The body is not evil and the body is not good. The body just is. “It will chew you up and it will spit you out/Behold the flesh and the power it holds” (Chuck Schuldiner/Death). Perhaps the body will destroy itself, as it did in Schuldiner’s case. Yet it is our judgment that determines the meaning of even this sort of tragedy.

So who makes Loki the villain? Judgment makes Loki the villain. Denial makes Loki the villain. Ignorance of self makes Loki the villain. For we are Loki. We are the body. Only ignorance of ourselves could make ourselves a villain. Yet we are so wonderful at not even noticing that we make ourselves the enemy. The more dissociated we become in our quest for denial and control, the more self-destructive we become. As Loki is persecuted, so we persecute ourselves.

The corollary of these musings is that one’s spiritual well-being can be indexed by one’s relationship to Loki. Why do so many accept Odin, the god of strife, murder, ergi, and betrayal, yet they cannot accept Loki, their own embodied selves? Dissociation. After all, Odin and Loki are brothers in blood.

Who fears Ragnarok? It is a transformation and a healing event. It entails terrible loss, yet the loss is caused by the debt of dissociation. Without the resistance to what is, there is no need for a terrible catastrophe. Thus we are called to embrace the real as it is, to observe it without reacting, so that the bad blood can be allowed to flow free and clear, and the festering wounds can heal.

This is a remarkable and terrible discipline, this embracing and observing of what it is as it is. Loki is a remarkable and terrible god. We like to think that healing and growth are happy, safe, joyous processes, but this is dissociation again. Loki teaches us that healing is a bloody, strange, tortuous affair. We have to observe our experience, and our experience hurts. Worse, sometimes it feels good, and then when it ends, we’re addicted. Back to the opponent process, unless we’re very disciplined.

Mastery in the sense that Loki embodies is not the mastery of total obliterative domination. That notion, that idea of absolute control, is an illusion. Where in history may it be found? Only in wishful thinking and propaganda. So no, mastery is not domination. We do not gain domination through the embrace of the body. Or, for that matter, through any other means either. Domination is an illusory artifact of bifurcated consciousness.

What we gain is the willingness to be. As we are. What, does this not mean acquiescence, stagnation? This question is born from the untrusting attitude of dissociated mind. Have we so little trust in the divine materials from which the gods have woven us? Who could dare say that this remarkable thing, this body, is anything but a well-spring of divine possibility? Let us not slander it, as we have been trained to do all our lives, with accusations of fault.

If we deny the body we deny the divine. The divine as Runa – mystery. The divine and her consort, Loki. Let us heed the call to embrace the divine that is Loki. Let us embrace the body, the sensations of the body. Without resistance. Without judgement.

We will, of course, fail. There is no end to our capacity for resistance and judgment. So we must accept this failure before we begin. Ahh…and there lies the magic of Loki. For in accepting defeat, he is liberated to become more than he, or we, could know.

To become what one is. A task that defies our dissociated mind and its projections of power and control. As Nietzsche would have it, we must go under to go up. And love and accept all that we revile, lest we discard the alchemical gold of the body in our haste to shed the dross of our loss and our fear.

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Loki: Strife as the Harbinger of Love

Faroe_stamp_498_Djurhuus_poems_-_Loki_Laufey's_SonLoki confronts us with the inevitability of loss. The awesome tragedy that each of us confronts every day. Loki is an advocate for the gravity of grief in our lives; for without gravity, how would there be life on earth? How would the planets orbit the sun? The very structure of our cosmos would be as nothing without gravity; so too the very structure of our consciousness would be nothing without grief and loss.

Sometimes Loki is the catalyst of loss; sometimes he is merely its herald, even its scapegoat. Many times, he serves as the gods’ wild card: get out of loss free. His manipulations, for example, ensure that the gods get walls built around Asgard at no cost; they drive a bargain with a giant to do the work, yet on seeing that he will meet their deadline and collect his payment (Freya, no less!), the gods enlist Loki to sabotage the process. And he does, most assuredly.

One wonders, therefore, whether the embrace of loss is the antidote to loss. Our fear and loathing of loss: perhaps this is the opening through which loss seeps its cold and deadly waters into our soft and vulnerable hearts. Loki challenges us to have a more conscious relationship to loss; our vilification of him as a symbol of the inevitability of loss is merely a function of our own lack of character.

In meditation we find it helpful to learn to observe the phenomena of our experience without indulging in the habit of attaching our identity to them. Not “my breath,” or “my sensations.” No, rather it is the breath, the sensations to which we turn the lens of our awareness. The self begins to wash away, yet nothing is lost but the illusion of the same. We find ourselves instead to be integral threads in the infinite tapestry of Wyrd – and nothing more. Yet…this is everything, for that is what we are.

Ah, so then Loki is a god of meditation, awareness, enlightenment, the sacred oneness and difference of all things. Perhaps in this light he is enlightenment’s ardent advocate, its patient and persistent provocateur. Enlightenment not in the misunderstood notion of somehow shedding the physical. No, enlightenment in a more true sense, the shedding of the illusions held about the physical, and about the beholder of the physical.

In the window of enlightenment there is a knowing and loving embrace of that which is – known in the perfect and irrefutable medium of direct personal experience. When we come to separate the carapace of ego from the endlessly flowing experience of sensation that is the body, we find that we begin to release ourselves from reactivity. We begin to respond to the flowing current of temporality. As such, in stepping back, we step forward and live with unprecedented fullness.

It is this fullness to which Loki wishes to seduce us. Yet we cannot achieve it so long as we are ruled by our fear of loss. So Loki goes to work, admittedly with a toolkit of strategies that shows mixed effectiveness. And he is stigmatized, hated, scapegoated for it. We believe we must protect ourselves from him; yet ultimately what are we protecting but the illusion of control? The illusion of knowledge? The illusion of certainty? The illusory notion that we can have honesty without a sense of irony woven through it?

Yet I would not dream of trivializing loss. It is a profound doorway for Mystery – for Runa meant in the fullest, broadest sense – to announce herself in our lives. And as such, it’s means are often profoundly hurtful. We have to be kind to ourselves first and foremost, for if we are infinite we are also crushingly finite. Those of us who truly know loss know that some wounds can never be healed; we can only learn to live with them, in an armistice that we can never entirely trust. And yet just as there is no limit to attachment, there is also no limit to liberation.

As such, to sit in judgment over those who judge Loki is itself a denial of loss, a denigration of human vulnerability. Which would stand against all that Loki is; would stand against the central column of Odin’s mysticism too, the embrace of vulnerability ,of death, on the tree of the world. To sit in judgment on the judgers is to become one of them. If we sit in judgment in Loki’s name then so much the worse – now we are not only hypocrites, we are mired in unconscious irony, an almost unpardonable sin.

What could be possible if we were to gently come to know Loki? Not back him into the corner of cruel retorts and spiteful war. What if we were willing to experience ourselves as embodied beings without resentment, without distrust? We can enter into ourselves gradually, after all. The fear of Loki is the fear of being thrust too quickly into the eye of mystery, of Runa. It hardly seems fair to blame him for our own shortcomings, our own projections, our own self-doubt. Why resent ourselves for our finitude? Our frail mortality is the best and only door into all of Being.

Adherence to dogma, authoritarianism, and absolutes seems to be grounded in denial of the body. Loki wants you to live in your flesh, as it is. He want you to do it right now; not in the ruminative past or the illusory future(s). He wants you to find your way, through letting go of effort, into being both masterful and unattached to that mastery. To have a light touch that can yet bear more weight than the heaviest grasp.

Those who refuse to let the mystery of loss into their lives – who ward it off with whatever kind of psychological chicanery they can afford themselves – will ultimately be defined by that very mystery. They will hand it only the most narrow, barren blueprint for their existence. And yet they blame the loss, the inevitable price that life exacts, for their woe. And they will blame Loki, the scion of loss, just as readily.

What of those who can learn to accept loss? Who can allow themselves to sit in its suffering, its agony, its discomfort, its sheer, threatening novelty? These will become free in their relationship to mystery. They will not become superhuman, or immortal, or exalted. They will achieve something far greater: they will become themselves.

Nietzsche has Zarathustra declare to his pupils: “to find me, first lose me and find yourself.” Odin gave himself to himself as he embraced Runa on the gallows. Loki, Odin’s Blood Brother, summons strife into the world so that we might know loss and – if we are fortunate enough – step through its uncanny door and into the very heart of our own living beingness. Loki: strife as the harbinger of love. And let us not forget that Loki experiences at least his own fair share of suffering. He asks nothing of us that he will not himself endure.

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