Chaos Heathen?

As with questions relating to “black magic” I’m tempted to ask “Is there any other kind?”

But I’m teasing, of course. There are many legitimate varieties of Heathenism, just as there were many different cults in Ancient Greece and Rome just as there are many variations of Hinduism. (Four or six “orthodox” schools, depending on who you ask.)

Actually, this sense of intellectual freedom and openness is a big part of what drew me towards the greater Indo-European Tradition in the first place. It’s the exact opposite of the rigidity, dogmatism and anti-intellectual authoritarianism that characterizes the Abrahamic Traditions.

So I’m kind of baffled that it would be necessary for us to make a distinction between what we’re doing here and “plain vanilla” Heathenism. As if Heathen automatically means “strict historical reconstructionist”. Since when?

I certainly didn’t become Heathen out of some sense of racial obligation, or desire to turn back the clock. I consider myself a Heathen because the Norse Mythos appeals most closely to my sense of life. I never made a decision to convert to Heathenism. Rather, like Donovan, I have slowly come to realize that a Heathen is what I’ve always been. No reconstruction required.

But, what the Hell? Chaos Heathenism has a nice ring to it. It implies the right combination of sinister, primitive and reptilian. Nice call Henry, well spoken. I like it.

Clint.

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Fire and Water

I preface these comments by saying that I have omitted some important details from what follows and edited what remains to make sense in light of these omissions. The elements omitted are simply too personal and/or too way out for me to want to share to the whole of the internet. What remains will, I hope, prove to be of interest nevertheless.

In the last few years I’ve had four particularly magical dreams. In these four dreams the experience was so vivid that it felt as though my physical body were in the dream. At the end of several of these dreams, figures from the dreams have remained once I’ve woken up and continued to very tangibly communicate with me.

These dreams aren’t a result of my attempts to develop my spiritual power or use ritual to contact spiritual or magical forces. They fall more into the category of spontaneous experiences that Bil Linzie says distinguish his notion of “real” seidh from the more structured practices performed by groups like Hrafnar.

I should emphasise that even though these dreams (and other experiences I’ve had) probably place me more in the Bil Linzie camp in terms of the kind of seidh I’ve known, I disagree with his view that more considered or consciously constructed seidh work is necessarily inferior.

The first three dreams happened in the space of a week back in 2006. I will only give a short synopsis of each.

First Dream:

In the first I found myself part of a choir that was to perform at a strange concert on a boat in Sydney Harbour. One of my fellow singers was a very intriguing woman who seemed completely larger than life. Her radiance and spirit made everything around her seem completely dull. I felt immediately drawn to her.

After the rehearsal it occurred to me that no one had explained the money side of things to this gig (which I had after all just suddenly found myself in the midst of rehearsing for). This was my excuse to talk to the intriguing woman.

I ran after her and asked her about how we would get paid. She did not know, it turned out, but was loathe to part ways with me. In fact she simply stated that she wanted to stay with me forever! I must admit to feeling overwhelmed with desire for this being, whose radiant aura so thoroughly outshone everything and everyone around
her.

But although it was clear by now that she was non-human and that, despite how real it felt, I was probably dreaming, I could not accept her offer – in particular, because I am married and I love my wife! I stood fast and so we parted ways, though it seemed this would not be the last time I would meet this being.

Second Dream:

I am visiting my father. A pall comes over him and, like a lashing dragon (which is certainly something like how he can be in reality), he starts tearing strips off every decision and act I’ve ever made. My career, my interests, my marriage, you name it – even things that are out of my control (such as my musical taste)!

I am overcome with hurt and rage and then chaos breaks loose. The fabric of the dream tears and everything is destroyed, my entire worldly existence and all markers thereof.

It seems there is a theme here, one which I had not previously noticed – namely that both the woman and my dream-father sought to pull me away from my material, earthly life and point me to different horizons. Their means – seduction and violence – differed of course, but perhaps the intention was the same.

Third Dream:

I find myself living out a series of life-spans. In each life span I face some terrible struggle and I am defeated – only to be reborn again, and again, and again, and again. The life spans zip by faster and faster as I become more and more bewildered by their endless torrent.

Finally I find myself in a strange parallel reality in which we have to remake one of the Rambo films on an alien planet and I have to play the lead role – except there is no acting, it is all real. Thus I find myself in an extra-terrestrial jungle, questing for who knows what.

I am ambushed by the tree-dwelling alien locals and after a swift battle they subdue me. They inform me that I am to be initiated into a very high mystery. I am forced to ingest poison and black out.

Then I am in a strange multi-dimensional open space which I cannot describe. To my right and left are scintillating beings of pure power and the two of them hold me up. We are hurtling through this strange space, the flight seemingly powered by the blazing energies that pour off them.

These two being pass me through a series of initiations, as my perspective becomes broader, and richer, and more expansive. They explain that they have come to assist me on my way through existence. I ask them what their names are. Odin? Freya? All of these – and more – they reply, smirking at my earthling provinciality.

I don’t really understand how they can both be and not be my ancestral gods, but somehow I am deeply convinced. They explain they are taking me somewhere important.

Then I wake up in what seems like the house where my band-mates in Ironwood live, an old and dilapidated home of faded glory. Except in this dreaming reality it is far larger, more ramshackle, and more eerily gothic than in real life.

I somehow know that I must seek out something in this house, something which I will know only when I find it. And so I find myself exploring dark tunnels, strange stairwells, a whole mould-covered, shadow-drenched universe of mystery. Dangerous beings abound and I realise that my time is running out.

Finally I come into a large hall, the ceiling lost in darkness. There is someone else here, but they are invisible. A ghost. He tells me a terrible tale through ethereal sobs. Once he had a daughter but then through his arrogance and foolishness she was lost to him. And he has worn himself almost to nothingness seeking her.

I realise that, somehow, this ghost and I are connected or related. It is a kind of ancestor to me, passing on a torch and a challenge.

Suddenly, I am awake – for real awake. My body is on fire with energy. But the ghost is still there! I hear his voice as clearly as I would a physical human being: “the challenge is passed on to you now”. The challenge to seek out whatever it is that his daughter represents.

In the months after these dreams I generally lapsed into a rather non-spiritual phase, mostly due to a number of very difficult challenges that entered my life financially and so forth.

But since I met Donovan my spirituality has been getting fed a lot more regularly, and starting Elhaz Ablaze has forced me to open into the stream of magic even more – after all if I am going to have a regular column then I need to have something to write about, and I would much rather write (and read) about practical experiences than my opinions and beliefs.

I think this renewed attention to this part of myself has created a fertile ground for the deeper aspects of my being to awaken again as they were back in 2006. Reading a lot of James Hillman’s work has also had a critical impact on this re-awakening. I think his work should be mandatory for all heathens to read, even though he isn’t a heathen but rather a psychological polytheist. Start with A Blue Fire
and go from there!

Heading into Yule this year I started having very strange and wild dreams and I knew some strange new upheaval was coming towards me.

A few weeks before Yule I fell very sick and became quite depressed for a little while as a result. It was a very hard thing but I have learned that you come back from the depths if you have patience and a little contempt for the ego’s mind games.

On the day of the Yule celebration I was very sick in the stomach and spent most of the day vomiting.

We couldn’t figure out what was the cause except the vague possibility of food poisoning. Eventually I must have thrown up whatever caused the problem however because just as the Yule festivities were due to begin I suddenly completely recovered.

While I was sick during that day I wandered through all kinds of strange worlds, and in particular the dark lands of Helheim. Freya appeared to me and she told me that I was in a process. I had died one death with my recent sickness, and this illness and attendant world-walking was a second death. She warned that I would have to die one more death yet.

Incidentally, this little but of Unsubstantiated Personal Gnosis (UPG) seems to fit with the idea that Freya is identical with Gullveig, the volva who the gods destroy three times by fire – and who is then reborn as Heidh, the Shining. Who would be more likely to come to tell me I was undergoing a somewhat similar process of
triple death?

After Yule I continued to have many wild and strange dreams – until a few weeks ago when I had the fourth of my significant dreams – and the third of the three deaths Freya spoke of.

The last night of dreaming I had series of intensely embodied dreams. In them I had to pass all sorts of tests and challenges, in all kinds of identities. In some cases it was members of my family that set the challenges.

After completing many of these tests I started to be overcome with déjà vu – indeed, it felt as though I had actually done every one of these tests many times over in the past.

The realisation woke up – and on either side of me there was a being composed of intense white light. The two beings started to speak to me. They were quite circuitous in their manner of speaking and very direct.

After a great deal of negotiation they agreed to permit me to refer to them as Fire and Water. They were the woman in the first dream, my father in the second, and the two great beings in the third dream.

Fire and Water are like trans-mythological beings, who predate even my heathen ancestral gods. They represent a distilled expression of divinity – at least insofar as I am able to experience it.

They told me that, though I might not know it, my task in this life is to bring together the riches of my internal spiritual life with the physical realities of finite existence. To me this is a great challenge but they were very certain that watching me would be an interesting exercise!

By passing the challenges of my dreams it seems I have been granted the perspective on life that they were trying to give me those years ago through seduction and destruction. This was the third death – the death of my limited horizons. I think that this in turn frees me to seek whatever the “daughter” in my third dream represents.

There were other things too but I won’t go into that here.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve had some spontaneous experiences in the last year that could have come straight out of an alchemy handbook. On a whim I therefore did some research – and discovered that alchemical Mercury is the union of Fire and Water, and of Spirit and Matter. Given that Mercury and Woden are cousins this explains a lot about my connection to the latter.

Since that experience a month or two ago I have been feeling myself changing, becoming more confident, or at least less enslaved to my limitations. The full consequences of these experiences are still unfolding. I don’t know if I should describe them as “real” or “psychological” or something else, but I do know that their consequences are proving to be highly positive.

Of course, Fire and Water do not exactly have a home in heathen mythology, but their existence does make me ponder the nature of the boundaries of any set of myths.

Insofar as any mythology is a cultural expression of mysteries which are (at least somewhat) beyond human comprehension, I find myself reaffirming the importance of heathenism being more than cultural/practical reconstruction.

Fire and Water seem to consider themselves as trans-cultural, able to manifest in a variety of unique and individual ways. I think it is a bit like how for the ancient Greeks the gods often had to be met in very specific manifestations.

Thus they had, for example, the Temple of Zeus at Athens. Now Zeus at Athens is a different entity to Zeus at Sparta from what I understand, even though they are nevertheless both Zeus. This kind of looseness around the distinction between universal and particular seems a common hallmark of polytheism, especially Indo-European polytheism (look at all of Odin’s identities or the many incarnations of the Hindu deities).

Our ancestors lived on the horizon of the unknown; introducing border-dwelling into our own lives is just as important as reconstructing the communal/cultural dimensions of heathenism – otherwise we risk modern heathenry becoming a caricature of the old ways, not their rebirth.

Furthermore, when the unconscious/deep mind/magical beings/gods/whatever speak (choose-your-own-belief-system), they may or may not have a concern for our beliefs about how things are or should be. In order to respect them and allow them to help us grow or transform or distil we need to be open to possibilities that our conscious (ego) reconstructions might not anticipate.

The well known chaos magician Fenwick Rysen has written about Fire and Water as essential forces in his spirituality. I’ve not been able to contact him but I’d love to see what he would make of the experiences I have described.

For me I know that Fire and Water are essential parts of who I am – and their presence changes my heathenry for the better, even though they appear in no historical manual and no Eddic poem. I’ve never incorporated such wholesale UPG into my spirituality before but it seems right.

Such mysterious and elemental beings certainly would not seem out of place in the old poems, although their machinations probably work in a different context to the Aesir, Vanir and Jotnar. And of course, Freyja knows about them and predicted their coming too.

It’s often been pointed out that the heathen lore we still have was once the UPG of our ancestors. It’s important to keep the difference between our and their creations clear so that others are not misled, but that said it would be a sad reconstruction of heathenry that we engage in if we do not do as they did and delve into the realms of magical experience with trust that those experiences are meaningful.

Fire and Water might also be found in the more purely animistic beliefs that polytheism proper grew out of. They certainly have opened a door for me into a wider, darker and richer world.

Neurosis sing:

We stand encircled by wing and fire
Our deepest ties return and turn upon us

Heathenry might be about finding ourselves here and now in the grand weave of history and life, rather than slumbering in disconnected numbness. If this is so then Fire and Water, and the entire process I am experiencing, are about as heathen as you can get.

I’d like to conclude this article with some of the lyrics I wrote for our forthcoming Ironwood album :Fire:Water:Ash: (incidentally the title of the album and the reference to fire and water in the lyrics occurred prior to my encounter with Fire and Water, though with hindsight it all seems connected).

The Serpent Seeks its Tail

Streams of steaming ice
Streams of molten flame
Compelled to clash
In the whirling halls of chaos

Is this a creation myth?
Screeching atomic tide
Stars blaze with insanity
In generation destruction delights

Formed by ice, forged by flame
Frail mortal breathing
Lathed by salt, poison laced
Frail mortal dreaming

Is this a parable?
An endlessly retold tale
A failed symbol for moment:
Thus untamed is time

Nature dismissed as nothing
Ancient Ur-laws lost, defied
Can you remember your own being?
Where does your weary heart hide?

A glimpse of boiling Ginnung
Sloughs off this armoured weight
Purging power of Salt,
Fire, Water and Ash

Dismiss with contempt
The false forms you hold
Become what you are
Become what you must be

Destroyed by ice, destroyed by flame
Frail mortal breathing
Lathed by salt, poison laced
This frail mortal dreaming

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Where I am Coming From

My surname, McDowall, is a Scottish variation of the Irish name Doyle. Originally Clann O’ DubhGhaill, the name means Dark Stranger or Evil Foreigner and refers specifically to the Danish Vikings who came down into Ireland raping, pillaging, plundering and eventually conquering and settling to found towns like Dubhlinn, Limerick and Cork.

The Scottish branch of the family were the Lairds of Argyll, for a time, and very briefly royalty on the Isle of Man. They fought alongside William Wallace against the English but then opposed Robert the Bruce for control of Scotland and lost. Exiled to Ireland, the clan became Galloglass, hereditary, professional mercenaries.

Now, my father was a soldier and his father was a soldier. I was an Army Reservist for a little while and later worked full time as a bouncer. But really, I’ve always been the black sheep of the family, the bookworm, the weird-o, the artist and philosopher. My grandfather once predicted that I’d “wear a collar one day”, meaning that he thought I’d become a priest. He may not have even been completely wrong, though I strongly doubt he would have guessed which denomination.

I spent the better part of my teens and twenties trying to force myself into the box of being a Warrior, and the worse part drowning the other voices in my head with liquor and beer. Now, at the age of thirty, I’ve come to realize finally that a Warrior can at best only ever be a small part of who I am.

I must become an Artist, a Philosopher, a Husband and Father and a Businessman. I must be true to myself and let the voices speak. But I can never forget where I came from. It’s where I come from that makes me who I am.

Clint.

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Altered States, Electric Bass

In amongst the rest of the chaos of my life one of my bands, Sword Toward Self, is in the midst of recording our debut full length album (my other main band, Ironwood, has a full length currently being mixed).

We commenced laying down the bass over the weekend. My goal was to finish half of the album over the weekend which I managed comfortably – there was even time to develop some new ideas for the bass arrangements and record some of the bass solos. I think we also managed to get just about the perfect bass tone, which is an ongoing challenge given the huge tonal range of the six string basses I play.

Recording is a very intense process, but I found this particular session to be the most full on recording experience I’ve had. And yet it went quicker and more smoothly than, say, when I recorded my vocal parts for Ironwood (of which there were a lot and often very challenging to get just right).

So if this weekend past’s recording session went so smoothly, why do I say it was so intense?

The music, the hours of intense focus on performing everything perfectly, sent me into an extremely altered state of consciousness. There is something particularly indulgent about recording. It makes one’s creative expression as a musician the absolute centre of the universe for a condensed period of time.

Even during breaks, having meals, etc, one’s mind becomes utterly captivated by the music. Music exists even when it is not being played, even when it is only being imagined. So during those moments of the process when I am not actually recording the songs play on, shutting down more and more of my higher functions, concentrating all of my faculties on the task at hand.

You might say that I take the task very seriously – and I really do. Particularly for a band like Sword Toward Self, where the music is so complex and often very fast. But this last weekend it felt like my deep mind was rising up through the strata of my being and consuming my entire being as it sought to grapple with the
creative process.

Perhaps part of the reason for this intensity is that I feel somehow spiritually connected to electric bass. That is an odd thing to say, but I really know of no other instrument that will ever feel as right in my hands.

I do play guitar as well, and I’m pretty good with finger-style acoustic guitar in particular. But I’ll always be able to do much more technical things and express more emotion on bass than on guitar (even things that conventional wisdom says should be easier on guitar because it’s a lighter, smaller instrument!)

Something I occasionally have pondered in my life, however, is the curious particularity of my connection to an instrument which, after all, was only invented some 60 years ago. I do have a great-uncle who played double bass (though I never met him), but there is a massive gulf between that and modern six string
electric bass guitars!

I often wonder: how many people never get the chance to find the medium that is perfectly suited to them? If I had been born in a third world country I would probably have never encountered electric bass. I might have played something else, but I would never have developed the level of skill or depth of musical connection that I find in playing bass.

Or if I had been born one hundred years ago? Again I would have missed out. This sort of invisible tragedy of possibility lost must be occurring all the time in all the arts, crafts and practices our species has invented and lost – or has yet to invent – or which are only available to some of humanity at a given time.

Or does the collective unconscious tailor the movements and motifs of its endless performance to the available resources and technology of the time? Am I so attuned to bass because, somehow in the infinitely complexity of wyrd, bass and I were made to be for one another? Perhaps some other instrument or art would have been the heart for my blood to beat in if things were different.

This still doesn’t guarantee that I was destined with any certainty to find my way into the world of bass. Yet it was a burning desire for it that drove me to take up the instrument, a fanatical love of bass which one rarely encounters in the guitar-obsessed silliness of most modern western music.

Coming out of the recording session I have found myself struggling to readjust to reality. I’ve been so deeply and completely dissolved in that world that this one suddenly seems totally ill-fitting. The last few days I have been struggling to recover my sense of drive and purpose. Perhaps there is a high cost to squandering so much of oneself on something so gratuitous and extravagant as artistic expression.

I am still not fully ‘back’ in this world, and I know that I will be finishing the remainder of the album this coming weekend. So now I feel like I am suspended in a valley between two dark and mysterious mountains.

These thoughts about the manifestation of zeitgeists in individual lives lead me to reflect on the philosophy of attempting to reconstruct specific magical practices from archaic times. If the seidh and rune workers of old were using what was available to them then perhaps it could be more important to feel into their mindset, regardless of the trappings and forms of one’s magical practice.

This psychological reconstructionism could never amount to more than arbitrary opinion, yet for each individual undertaking this challenge I suspect that rich veins of spiritual wealth might await.

So in this spirit I am going to attempt to use the massive and prolonged altered state that I am likely to enter again when recording this weekend. I will simply specify the particular performance of each song as a symbol of a magical intention. Every take, every time I retune, every time I finish getting a passage of
music perfect – this will be another trigger of the intention symbolised by the performance and the process.

And also, this time I am going to indulge in some measures to help myself adjust to consensus reality after the recording process is complete. Perhaps consume some raw sea salt for a start, and definitely get outside. It’s very painful to be caught between worlds and I need to prepare myself now for the realmshift that the recording process has so far involved.

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Somafera Journal

Let me start with a little history into my choice of practice.

I have always been involved on some sort of self defence art, whether it was boxing, Muay Thai kick boxing, or another form of martial art, mixed with a lot of weight pushing.

The biggest issue I had was when I did get into a situation where these practices could be used was that I would just black out, and when I came to the other person was not in any hurry to move. (I am not trying to blow my own trumpet here I am just making a ground point of how I first started this Journey).

One example of this really scared the crap out of me.

I was out with a friend and he had a scuffle with someone, anyway when we were leaving the guy ran up from behind and hooked my mate in the face with knuckle dusters, spreading his nose all over his face.

Then the guy ran at me. I don’t know what happened next I seem to have lost a few minutes which to this day I still can’t recall. The next thing I know there is the head light of a car about 30 cm from my head I am sitting on the guy’s chest beating his face in.

There was blood pouring out of this guy’s face, the guy was out cold and not moving, all the security were screaming at me to stop but they wouldn’t touch me.I ran off up the road I stopped about 50 metres away and the guy still hadn’t moved.

The next day I was freaking out what if I had killed this guy what was I to do. I even watched the news to see if they had said anything.

This wasn’t the first time this had happened though definitely the most serious so I started looking for a reason this was happening.

I happened to stumble across a site called Uppsala online; after reading the segment on Berserkergangr it all started to make sense. The berserker had always been of interest to me.

I read over this site repeatedly for a few months then I notice the link to something called somafera.

After reading through this site I could not stop thinking about what I had read, it really tripped something within me. Please read through the somafera site for a full understanding and description of what is involved.

The only thing that was missing to make this a full spiritual / physical training system was there was no set martial art to use.

I started asking around and the system I found to fit with the somafera training is a style of kung-fu called YANG MIAN where as you use internal pressure to create power.

You raise the pressure in your body by doing repetitive exercises while keeping your mind, breathing and muscles relaxed similar to raising the wode (check out their site it has some great videos on it).

Lucky for me a good friend of mine has been given permission by his Master (Master Yang) to start his own school. I have been training with him over the last couple of months to get my body conditioned and am now ready to tie Somafera and Yang Mian together in a experiment to see what can be achieved.

I will be keeping a monthly journal of my experiences on this page, it will be quite a journey.

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On Being Still

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer” – Albert Camus.

At the end of my recent article “On Being Stuck” I suggested that I would experiment with the application of the runes of Need and Ice (or Nauthiz and Isa in the Proto-Germanic) to deal with the feeling of stuckness, coldness and despair.

I’ve had recourse to these runes on three occasions since then. Each time they have indeed helped me to move from stuckness to stillness and from stillness to fluid action.

Each time I either thought about or chanted the runes. The first time I used them to help myself feel better the change was immediate. Just thinking about their significance, their power to pass through the constriction, the cold, the hard armour of the winter river – it made it impossible for me to stay in my corner of shadow.

A similar trick occurred next time, with the difference that this time I chanted the runes and pretty soon had a good spontaneous sway going too, a bit of seething-style seidh. I felt like a veil of cold poured backwards away from me and dissolved. I felt free, flexible, warm, my heart beating strongly again.

The third occasion was some chanting I did with Donovan. As always we explored some wild territory, rasping, singing, roaring, screeching, droning. Every time we do magic together we manage to get a little more relaxed, focussed, and intense. I think this bit of magic unblocked some things for both of us, psychologically speaking.

The speculative idea I had – that embracing Need and Ice, the vanguard of stuckness/stillness/coldness, can produce transformation where even transformative fire dares not tread – has born immediate fruit. One of the outstanding elements of this approach is that it runs with the direction that the pattern of wyrd is already headed. Instead of resisting the shadows and cold we turn with their tide. At their heart we find their negation and come forth out the other end.

There is not even the fear of going back that more obvious or pro-active responses to such spiritual coldness can create, forged partly from anxiety as such fiery responses are. I have found a way of walking frozen, subterranean roads with total yielding, yet without being destroyed in that yielding.

From these recent and promising experiences I must say that Need and Ice represent a kind of transformative passivity. They require us to respond to the circumstance – “in this weather we must build fire” (Neurosis) – but the response is founded on a acceptance of what cannot be changed, only turned with. Even a negative wyrd can be ridden to a positive outcome, like tacking against the wind to take your ship home to its port.

Ice offers the illusion of immutability, but now I see the illusion as illusion as well as an invitation to despair. The two forces cancel one another out when we embrace them, leaving us, slightly dumbfounded, in the clutch of spring.

I started this article with a quote from an existentialist philosopher, Albert Camus. Apart from the immediate relevance of the quote I chose it deliberately because I see heathenism as being an existentialist spirituality.

For all the belief in gods, giants, elves, other worlds, magic, mystery and the unknowable order of wyrd the heathens of old were necessarily very practical, this-worldly people. I suppose living in old Europe with limited technology, close to the earth and the seasonal cycles, you just had to be to survive. They seemed to regard one’s actions in this world as more important than any particular afterlife or cosmic plan.

They might have been animists – recognising the living spirit of all things – rather than materialists/nihilists as the existentialist philosophers tend to be. But the same attitude – that this life is what matters – is shared by heathen and existentialist.

So the idea that we can overcome shadow, ice and despair by following the path of Need and Ice into their heart – rather than resisting, fleeing or bowing down to some transcendental ideal – well, I guess this recent foray of mine into Need and Ice magic is a kind of existential rune magic.

I should add that although here I am celebrating a this-worldly, existentialist attitude to heathenism, I am by no means dismissing the other-worldly aspects of Germanic mythology/folk lore, nor the otherworldly and transformative magical elements of heathenism.

Indeed my own native tendency is towards otherworldliness – even as a child I identified with the changeling folk stories of the Brother Grimm, in which an elven or otherwise otherworldly child is mistakenly left with human parents to great anguish and difficulty. It has been a long struggle to even become as this-worldly as I now am, and I am a long way from where I would like to be.

So I am certainly not arguing for the more boring, anti-spiritual model of heathenism in celebrating a kind of existential approach to heathen spirituality. Rather I am finding with relief that as I embrace this life I slowly discover the ways that I can exert power in this reality, to make at least some part of it turn to alignment with my own nature and being. The magic of Need and Ice represents a powerful step for me along this path.

Of course, most people must struggle with the question of their own power to effect meaning and change in the world. Indeed, Alfred Adler’s model for the cause of psychological problems was the “inferiority complex”, which occurs because when we are children we really are mostly powerless in this world of adults. To lead happy and successful adult lives we need to unlearn this powerful lesson of growing up so that we can act with strength and confidence.

Perhaps Need and Ice could offer an initiatory doorway for those of us struggling with this-worldiness (whether due to our age, character or fears). Face death without struggle and who knows what might come of it?

“Give up what thou hast, and then thou wilt receive” (Jung).

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Chaos Heathenism

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!

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Rune Magic Adventures and Reflections

runemagicadventuresandreflectionsimage1This 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.

runemagicadventuresandreflectionsimage2I’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!

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On Being Stuck

(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.

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Easy as Falling Off a Bike

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!

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