Health

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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Clean, Sober Heathen?

It’s been over six months since I quit drinking and cleaned up my diet.

Living really clean has been a strange experience. On the one hand I feel a lot more solid, a lot more present and a lot more me than I have for a long time. Physically and emotionally, I feel like I’m seventeen again.

On the other hand, I’ve been feeling a lot more cut off from the people around me. I won’t share their drink and I can’t share their food. I’ve become an outsider and, for once, that’s not the way I wanted it to be.

The question of how to handle Heathenism without drinking has also been bothering me for a while. 90% of my experience with Heathen group ritual has always involved massive binge drinking. It shouldn’t really be an issue, as I’m mostly what you’d call a solitary practitioner anyway, but I really miss toasting the gods (and a glass of milk just doesn’t seem to have quite the same zing).

This gets even more complicated when you consider the fact that, for a long time, I’d been getting signals that “the gods” wanted me to quit drinking. Alcohol had definitely ceased being useful as a social lubricant and instead become a threat to my work, my health and my family.

Staying clean is undeniably the right thing for me to do. My new ascetic path has, in some ways, brought me a feeling of being much closer to the gods (Odin in particular). Unfortunately, it has also left me confused as to how to properly express that closeness.

Perhaps now I finally have an answer.

In the past I’ve always “shared” a drink with the gods. Perhaps now I have a chance to really sacrifice. I’ve given up drinking (a sacrifice of self to self) but of course the gods have not. What greater sacrifice could there be than to offer them that which I crave without ever taking so much as a drop?

This idea requires exploration.

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My Bookshelf

Next to my computer on my desk I keep a small selection of essential texts for my Chaos Heathen proclivities. These are the books that I find myself referring to in casual conversation about myth or history or nutrition or healing. I’m sure everyone has their favourite reference texts (and I’d love to hear what they are): here are mine.

The Art of Simple Food, Alice Waters
Nourishing Traditions, Sally Fallon
The Fourfold Path to Healing, Thomas Cowan

First stop: nutrition and food. I am a huge aficionado of the traditional cuisine movement. Returning to traditional cuisine has almost totally cured my once utterly crippling allergies; it has also gone a long way to improving my fitness, mental health, and immune system. It has also taught me how to love food, to really savour it, to deeply appreciate the pleasure of eating in a way that all the production line rubbish I used to eat never did.

I haven’t talked about it for a while, but I remain convinced that if you are serious about spirituality, magic, growth, healing, Heathenry, or whatever…then you have to get serious about food: its history, its ecology, the experience of eating it, the nutritional science of it. NOT out of some punitive, sin-based body-hatred or pleasure-hatred (neither of which are a part of traditional cuisine); but out of the binary joys of gustatory sensuality and making oneself more whole, more powerful, more buoyant.

This isn’t to say that I always stick to my own culinary principles, of course, but mostly I do, and I’ve never been fitter or healthier or enjoyed cooking, eating, and even the washing up so much. All of these things help me integrate myself into the flow of the waters of life (Bil Linzie) that runs throughout the roots and branches of the World Tree.

If you give a stuff about the environment or the principle that what goes around comes around then traditional cuisine is even more important…and I’d like to think that anyone interested in Chaos Heathenism would be at least curious to know what they can do to preserve the precarious equilibrium of this fragile planet.

Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales
Prose Edda, Snorri Sturluson
The Poetic Edda, trans. Lee Hollander
Dictionary of Northern Mythology, Rudolph Simek

While personal gnosis is awesome, I believe that when we closely research historical belief and practice it often turns out to be far more subtle, inventive, and just plain fun than the half-baked ideas that modern folk turn out and pass off as spiritual or magical. This is no fault of ours: traditions that have had centuries to ferment, passed from hands to hands, are almost certainly going to outstrip our raw and hastily conceived insights.

Grimm’s Tales I use for divination purposes, as I’ve previously documented. It’s a font of endless free association and symbolic hilarity, often with blatant Heathen motifs and stories writhing just below a wafer-thin veneer (and just to upset the Heathen dogmatists out there [yeah, like those jerks would ever threaten their puny minds by reading Elhaz Ablaze articles]: the Christianly ones are good too).

The two Eddas are of course extremely valuable. Dipping randomly into the Poetic Edda is always fun and rewarding – not unlike the Bible, it’s actually a really weird collection of tales. When I read these texts I can’t help but think that once upon a time the only kind of Heathen around was the Chaos Heathen kind.

And finally, Simek. I bless a trillion times the day I bought this book. What an indispensable gem! Getting nastily out of date now, but still the ultimate starting place when you want to know anything about Northern mythology (and much more besides).

People think the Internet has made knowledge much more accessible, but only someone who doesn’t read books could possibly be convinced of this mediocrity-inducing illusion, which merely panders to our laziness and our vanity. If you are even marginally interested in anything even vaguely related to Heathenry…then go buy Simek right now.

Visual Magick, Jan Fries
The Rune Primer, Sweyn Plowright

Visual Magick is Jan’s first book, and I swear by it. It is so fun, inspiring, profound, playful, self-satirical…just what magic should be. It’s a slender volume, yet it contains ten to the power of infinity more wisdom and knowledge than just about any other book on magic ever written (I don’t know how he crammed it all in there, but he did). If you want to know about anything related to anything to do with the stuff we talk about on Elhaz Ablaze then this is the book.

That said…I actually like his Seidways even more, but it’s a little more specific; and his Helrunar is the best book on esoteric runes ever. No contest. I know lots of Heathens don’t like him because he isn’t Heathen, but that just underscores the point: this guy understands runes better than the best esoteric Heathen authorities and he isn’t even a Heathen. Sock that to the ideologues, dogmatists, and Master-of-the-Universe-type cult leader blow-hards.

Sweyn is of course part of the Elhaz Fellowship, so in celebrating his book I’m completely guilty of nepotism and all the rest. But the fact is, this is the best point of departure there is. His translations of the rune poems are absolutely perfect (much better, I must say, than Thorsson’s or Fries’), and the supporting documentation is extremely valuable for getting your brain sorted out before you do anything runic. Indispensable reference? Tick!

Everyday Tao, Deng Ming-Dao
The Places That Scare You, Pema Chodron

Many Westerners don’t know anything about Eastern religion except that “uh, isn’t it, like, life-denying?” No, actually it isn’t: if you bothered to actually pay attention you’d realise it is all about being radically present, and the otherworldly stuff circles back into that.

Take Buddhism, for example. What’s the highest deed you can do? Escape Samsara, achieve oneness…then become a Bodhisattva and come back to the physical world even though you don’t have to in order to help the healing of others. It’s easy to be world-affirming when your dogma doesn’t really give you a choice anyway, but these guys want to be here even once they’ve overcome the bloody place!

And when we all get to Nirvana? Holy cow, who even knows how hilarious that’ll be?! One thing is for sure, and this is presaged by some recent comments on other Elhaz posts: Woden is one of those utterly furious Bodhisattva types, I’m almost certain of it.

Uh, anyway, so yeah. Pema’s book is all about having the courage to do the things that scare you, to commit to your integrity, your spirit. It’s a great tonic and soul-nourisher. Enough said.

Everyday Tao is a book that has saved my brain many times. When I am stuck, blocked, down, whatever, I open it at a random page and invariably it blows away all fetters. Deng Ming-Dao is a genius. And there are patterns in the things I get; I can’t tell you how many times that book has told me in moments of self-doubt: “we have to stick to our perceptions and our feelings.” I dare you, go on, be stupid enough to call that sentiment life-denying.

So there you have it – the indispensable books I always keep in easy reach. What are yours?

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Wolf

There is something deeply, primally satisfying about jogging shirtless and barefoot under the hot, midday sun. I feel like a wild animal, some un-caged beast running free on the streets of suburbia.

I feel wonder in the gaze of the civilized mortals around me. They know that I am not one of them.

For five months I’ve been living sober and eating clean. I run, I lift, I box, I wrestle and I fence. Each day that goes by I feel myself growing harder, stronger, closer to the earth.

We each must find our own way to relate to the gods. This is mine.

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Building a Life: Health & Safety

It’s been over two months since I wrote the first post in my intended series on “Building a Life”.

Some readers may have wondered if I’d dropped off the face of the earth. Well…that’s actually pretty near to being an accurate explanation, but there’s a simpler explanation for why it’s taken me so long to get back to writing. Before I could comfortably preach my new philosophy, there were certain elements that needed to be put more rigorously into practice.

That said, let’s take a look at the first elements of a life…

Health

It should be pretty obvious that if you haven’t got your health it’s going to be pretty difficult to get your life together in other ways.  It should be obvious, yet we so often ignore common sense preventative maintenance until it’s too late.

When you’re sick or out of shape your productivity declines, making it that much harder to make a living. To make matters worse, poor health decreases your your sexual and romantic attractiveness. It’s going to be that much harder to find true love when you’re fat, sick and tired looking. Finally, physical illness can lead to depression and other psychological disorders. Your brain is a part of your body, after all.

Letting your health slide is usually the first step in a vicious cycle. Stop taking care of yourself now, and you may soon find that you no longer have the energy, resources or support you’d need to stop the downward spiral.

To begin on the path to building a life, you must first come to understand your body as your vehicle and your temple. If fact, it is often best if you stop thinking of your body as “your body” and start thinking of simply as “yourself”. I am my body and there is no sense in which it is possible to conceive of “my body” as spearate from “me”.

While it’s obviously not necessary, possible or desirable for every adult human being to go to medical school, there are a number of basic skills that are necessary for self maintenance. A preliminary (i.e. incomplete) list for your consideration would be…

A working knowledge of basic hygiene.

A working knowledge of nutrition.

A working knowledge of cooking, in order to make good nutrition pleasant and palatable.

A working knowledge of exercise science.

A favored sport or physical activity, in order to make exercise fun, purposeful and meaningful.

A basic understanding of medical principles, in order distinguish good medical advice from bad.

A working knowledge of natural home treatment options.

and

A working knowledge of First Aid.

This last item on the list brings us to my next point, the other side of the first element…

Safety

Make no mistake, the primary causes of death for educated people living in civilized countries are the completely preventable, self inflicted “diseases of civilization”. There are few things more ironic than the sight of a sick, out of shape “martial arts expert”. (Except perhaps a sick, out of shape doctor, fitness trainer or nutritionist.) That said, there are other threats to your long term health and physical integrity that need to be adressed if you plan on functioning in the real world.

Just as it would make no sense to spend your life in paranoid fear of criminal attack, only to end up dying of heart disease, it makes equally no sense to cultivate a perfect healthly body only to end up stabbed, shot or smashed up in a car accident.

With that in mind, there are a few additional skillsets you need to master…

A working knowledge of practical self defense (note, I did not say “martial arts”).

A working knowledge of the most common weapons in your area (should be included under the heading of “practical self defense” but people tend to skip over this part).

A working knowledge of First Aid (yes, I included First Aid twice).

A high level of competence in Defensive Driving (car accident is a much more common cause of death than violent assault).

Again, note I did not include Martial Arts anywhere on my list essential skills. Now I happen to love martial arts (or rather, I love real martial arts) but formal training in martial arts is not necessary for most people.

As I believe I may have mentioned before, not everybody can (or should) be a warrior. Every free man and woman should , however, take responsibilty for their own health and safety. What we’re talking about here is the development of basic, practical skills, stripped of any  ritual or tradition. On the other hand, basic practical skills are where it’s at when you’re talking about real martial art, anyway. It is precisely the process of taking responsibility for yourself and developing these practical skills that leads to the catharsis that warrior training is so famous for.

Now the above may sound like a lot to learn, but remember that these are essential life skills we’re talking about. This is stuff you need to know to keep yourself fully functioning, healthy and in one piece.

These are also, ironically, topics that have been among the most terribly abused by confidence artists great and small. There is a huge amount of disinformation out there about health and safety. Learning to see through the bullshit may well be the first and most important step on the path to becoming a true Occult Philosopher, as well as a healthy, happy, free human being.

Think about it.

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The Joy of…Fermentation

Tonight I came home from work, ate dinner, and then got busy preparing some traditional foods – a bucket of salsa, a jug of beet kvass, and three buckets of sauerkraut! The more I explore the art of making food from scratch the more joyous it becomes and I wanted to share some reflections that came to me tonight.

First of all, getting into more traditional cooking is easier than it seems. At first having to work from raw ingredients, putting it all together by hand, seems intimidating for anyone used to pre-made supermarket convenience. But traditional cooking is like meditation – the effort invested quickly pays itself off and then starts raking in the interest on very favourable terms.

After only a little experience you begin to realise just how fun it is to make salsa or kvass or sauerkraut or whey & cream cheese. I feel deeply energised even though I worked all day and then spent more than a couple of hours in the kitchen.

I spent my time cooking listening to the music of Ironwood, which always makes me happy, and preparing food from raw ingredients involves a lot of repetition – cutting, and pounding the cabbage for the sauerkraut. This work provides brilliant doors for trance!

Everyone knows that repetitive rhythms can induce trance and in the process of my cooking tonight I drifted into some lovely and quite blessed states. I wandered through different worlds and I could literally feel the small wounds of daily life healing throughout my body from the altered consciousness into which I had drifted. What a bonus!

And of course it makes my soul happy to know that I am making fermented foods, which are super-nutritious and super-delicious and fun to make. My kind of traditionalism (small t used on purpose folks) is not ideological – I am neither against nor for the modern world, though I have many criticisms to make of it.

Rather, my kind of traditionalism is empirical in basis – for there is extensive and very sound science for the view that premodern approaches to cuisine are far superior to the high calorie, low nutrient rubbish so prevalent these days.

The fact that making food as healthy as sauerkraut (a far superior source of Vit C than any pill), or beet kvass (which cures allergy attacks, mouth ulcers, and jet lag with casual alacrity in my personal experience, as well as tasting divine) also connects me with the living experiences that shaped the mythic worldviews of old Europe is just beautiful, elegant even.

I really think that exploring such practices and ways is just as essential – perhaps more so – than even delving into mythology or runic artefacts or whatever. These simple domestic practices were and still can be the bricks and mortar which nourished the pre-Christian Heathen imagination.

You’ll notice that all the foods I made tonight – salsa, sauerkraut, beet kvass – are fermented foods. Fermentation is a fascinating thing. Before we had fridges we used fermentation to make food last – and it just so happens that fermentation (of which making alcohol is only a very small part) also loads up the food with nutrients and makes them super-easy to digest. A nice little bonus which we in our fridge-age unfortunately no longer reap.

Fermentation is essentially the art of letting food rot into something tastier, healthier, and longer-lasting than what it would be straight out of the ground. There’s something brilliant about the way this simple practice marshals the vast chemical complexity of food molecules.

One of the reservations I have about untrammelled technologisation is that it invites us into simplistic understandings of the world, since we begin to focus on what we understand and tend to forget that things are way more complex than we might like to think (a common problem that has been studied extensively in experimental psychology, and to which it seems even the most brilliant scientists have been found to be susceptible to).

But fermentation elegantly marshals the vast chemical complexities of food with a dead simple strategy – chop it up and let it sit at room temperature for a few days. Brilliant! I see fermentation as a brilliant analogy for various alchemical processes, and so as I make my fermented foods I experience it as a spiritual analogy, just as alchemists use the quest for gold as a physical metaphor for their spiritual quest for the philosopher’s stone, for enlightenment or healing.

This is one of those things that really illustrates the fact that spiritual life and everyday mundane life are not qualitatively different. They exist on a continuum and if we are imaginative, curious, and a little bit industrious we can shorten that continuum so that the spiritual permeates the everyday and the everyday permeates the spiritual. To me that is nothing more or less than animism in action, the gods living at one with our every breath. And isn’t that the whole goal of premodern spiritual paths such as Heathenry?

Incidentally, for those wondering, I’ve been doing more research on premodern lifespans and health. The only sound and genuinely empirical, quantitative study I found (other than Weston Prices’s work) looked extensively at fossils and human remains from before the current age, and also at contemporary premodern cultures (mostly hunter gatherers).

They found that the average lifespan under these conditions is in the mid 70’s. They also made some other surprising discoveries – for example it appears that infant mortality rates were not through the roof in these cultures!

From other archaeology material I’ve read – Barbarians to Angels provides some low key but very clear examples – it is clear that the premodern lifestyle produced good health generally, including good dental health. Monty Python’s mud-eating, snaggle-tooth peasants are hilarious, but they’ve maybe unduly prejudiced our ability to understand the lifestyles of premodern times.

This is all in line with Weston Price’s work on nutrition. His theory was that the premodern diets of many cultures were and are superior to modern processed diets because they are super-dense in nutrients and relatively low in calories – just the opposite of McDonalds, really.

Can anyone really argue with such a view? Certainly from reading Michael Pollan and Nina Planck it seems to me that rigorous research (and sadly much nutritional research isn’t) strongly supports this view.

So eating traditionally accords nicely with the modern scientific method, a perfect example of why “going back” to the past for inspiration can sometimes actually be much more scientifically sound than the reckless technical “innovation” to which we in the West are unfortunately quite invisibly addicted to.

Incidentally if you think you can’t afford to eat organic or small-farm grown you might like to look at what you do spend your money on…do we need cable TV, three cars per household member, 10,000 inch televisions, etc, etc? There’s more room in your budget for good food than you realise.

Raw ingredients, even organic or small-farm grown, have two other advantages – making food from scratch generally works out more economically than processed premade foods anyway, and also such foods (in Australia at least) are largely GST exempt, so its cheaper than you think.

Plus you can explore food co-ops, growing your own, etc, etc. If you are willing to use your imagination you can do it. That said, please don’t take my comments in a finger-pointing or moralising way. I’m hoping to inspire rather than harangue. Did I mention how fun and easy it is to make  fermented foods?

Incidentally, from what I’ve read it also seems clear that premodern cultures traded food with one another extensively. The poisonous monoculture that lurks in this modern world is not a product of cross-cultural food munching, despite what some more ideologically based traditionalists might like to think.

Multiculturalism is not monoculturalism, and premodern peoples, from what I have read at least, loved to chow down on each others’ specialties.

Sauerkraut, that quintessential German dish, arrived in Europe with the Mongols. That doesn’t take away its special Germanic-ness, which has accrued quite legitimately over some nine centuries, it just reminds us that there’s a difference between cultural purity (which pretty much doesn’t exist and never did and is purely a modern fabrication) and cultural specificity (which clearly did and does exist since we can talk about distinctly unique and different groups, but which included intercultural exchange as one of its elements).

In other words, the isolationist tendencies of ideologically-based traditionalists are anachronistic and untrue to the ancestral ways – and do not in fact do much to safeguard the old traditions. How ironic.

As often is the case my writing jumbles together politics, philosophy, history, spirituality, mythology, domesticity, health sciences, psychology, and eating! We divide the world into neat categories but in doing so we lose our ability to understand it. As Mr Heinlein said, “specialisation is for insects.” My thoughts keep rotting up into more and more complexity and richness, and fermentation is a great metaphor for both the creative and the intellectual processes…

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Building a Life

I have a long term quarrel with our education system. I’ve always believed our present system spends way too much time teaching us things we don’t need and de-emphasizes or completely ignores way too many things we do.

Most, so-called, magickal and occult training systems are no better. In fact, they’re usually worse.

But it’s easy to level criticism without offering any solutions. What is important? What do we need to know? I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about these questions, and I think I’m getting pretty close to having a definitive answer.

In my view there are four elements, four key components, to building a life.

Health & Safety

Wealth & Lifestyle

Sex & Relationships

Meaning & Purpose

Each of the elements has two main aspects and each of the four (or eight) implies a critical skill set you must master in order to function as a complete, independent, adult human being.

Astute readers may notice some similarity between my list and Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs”. You may also notice there’s a fair degree of crossover with Carroll’s “Eight-Colour Theory of Magic”. Actually, the inspiration for my four element model came from somewhere much more unexpected. A simpler version of this model was published in the book “The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed” by Erik von Markovik. (Told you that was unexpected.)

In Mystery’s (von Markovik’s) version, the meaning of life is given as “Survive/Reproduce” and the elements of a life are given as Health, Wealth and Sex.

I was immediately attracted to the cynicism and simplicity of this model (for reasons obvious to anyone who knows me) and even more impressed with his explanation of how the elements are interrelated. According to Mystery, the three elements are interdependent. A deficiency in one area will sooner or later lead to a deficiency in another area and eventually to the collapse of the entire system (your life).

This is a radically different way of looking at things than the more commonly known Maslow model, but seems much more correct to me. My expanded, four element model is also intended to be taken as interrelated. Some elements might seem logically to be more fundamental (or more urgent) than others, but if you don’t cover all four you’re going to have a serious problem.

In my next few posts, I plan on reviewing the four elements in more detail.

Leave a comment if you feel I’ve left out anything important.

Clint.

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Take the Elhaz Ablaze 30 Day No Sugar Challenge!

I’ve been reading a book called Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered by Peter Wells, and it is brilliant (I’ll review it when I’m done). He reports some fascinating information about the health of ancient Londoners (gleaned from extensive examination of their bodies):

“The bones indicate that overall nutrition was good. Remains of foods recovered through archaeological excavation indicate the extraordinary variety of foods available…Dental health was generally good, corresponding with the good diet and some degree of dental hygiene.”

This point about dental hygiene is notable. We have a modern myth that prior to scientific dentistry human beings – unlike every other species – had terrible teeth. Yet again and again in my reading I seem to find that the evidence  indicates that the only premodern Europeans who had bad teeth were the rich.

Why the rich? Well, take Elizabeth I for example, who reputedly had terrible teeth. England was raking in the cash partly through the sugar trade. The rich therefore had access to vast quantities of the stuff and it ruined their teeth. This is rather analogous to the Roman nobility who got lead poisoning from their water pipes – their privilege ended up working against them.

If we didn’t eat so much sugar in modern times the dental profession would probably shrink dramatically. They’re an inadequate intervention against a problem that is nutritional first, a question of hygiene only second. Weston Price found in his survey of traditional cultures that not only was their teeth excellent but, for example, their jaws even had enough room to comfortably accommodate their wisdom teeth!

The fact that we moderns have to get our wisdom teeth removes reflects the poor quality of our nutrition compared to various supposedly backward peoples, including our own ancestors.

In that vein, Price also found that when isolated traditional cultures started eating modern processed food their good dental health declined dramatically and almost instantly (and in fact their health in general).

All of this just reinforces my argument that being Heathen should probably mean being anti-refined sugar. I mean, everyone should be anti-sugar regardless of their spiritual affiliation really, but for Heathens it seems especially important because of our emphasis on reconstituting the old wisdoms of Europe.

Despite how strongly I feel on this subject, I still find it very hard to overcome my sugar addiction – even knowing how bad the stuff is I still get tempted, for example in situations where I don’t expect to be offered some evil sugar-based substance.

I worked out that I need to have a blanket no-sugar policy established in advance. So a couple of days ago I set myself a dare – for the next 30 days, no refined sugar. I can assuage my addictive voices with the promise that this isn’t a permanent break, just an experiment.

At the end of my 30 days I’ll be able to take stock. Already my allergies are getting less severe (though this is also due to high consumption of Eyebright, Camomile, and Licorice root teas, and rubbing them on my eyes and forehead, which is incredibly effective against even the worst hay fever migraines). I seem to have more energy and be less irritable, too.

It is quite likely that after 30 days I’ll choose to keep going for another 30 days, and keep doing that ad infinitum. Sounds good to me! 25 months ago I quit smoking cigarettes and that was hard – it took years and years of struggle and effort. But now I know I can overcome any addiction, because nicotine is powerfully scored into my personal and family orlogs as a deadly foe. I’m sure many readers could find similar sources of inspiration to fire up the anti-sugar quest.

Here comes the part where I lay down the challenge: join me on the 30 day no-sugar challenge! Think of it as an act of devotion to your body, your life, your spirituality. I’ve already managed to inspire two people to commit to a similar project and I want to spread the no-sugar disease!

It takes a little advance preparation, and you’ll find it necessitates a few big changes, for example only eating very high quality bread (or none at all) – because most white bread is just sugar; and also you might want to cut back on fruit juice (actually, orange juice is much nicer when cut with water anyway – smoother and more refreshing).

Trading white rice for brown is also a part of “no sugar”, because this extremely simple carbohydrate is basically sugar. You’ll never get over your chocolate and candy cravings if a third or a half of every meal is white bread or white rice.

When I first tried to move away from a carbohydrate overloaded diet I couldn’t imagine what I could eat instead. Then I discovered vegetables! The less white bread, white rice, and refined sugar you eat, the more you realise that vegetables actually taste really good.

Also, traditional cookery offers a myriad of creative ways to make them even more mouth-watering than they are in their natural state. My homemade sauerkraut is so good that people ask for second helpings when I serve it to them. Note that I am not advocating an extreme anti-carb diet, just a balanced diet with “real” carbs rather than refined wheat and sugar poison.

If you want to Take the Elhaz Ablaze 30 Day No Sugar Challenge then please, post a little comment to that effect, and let us all know how you are going with it. This has to be one of the most constructive and fun ways to express our Heathenry that I can think of. See you at the other end of the big Three Oh!

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Sugar: The Other White Christ

Warning: any resemblance to anti-Christian sentiment in this is article is purely coincidental.

One of the distinct impacts of Christianity has been the unilateral and wholesale destruction of cultures. Wherever missionaries have gone traditional ways of life, traditional knowledges, cuisines, religions, and material cultures suffer and dissolve. The blinding light of Jesus disintegrates everything before it, like a noxious cosmic bleach.

The Old Norse referred to Jesus as the “White Christ,” and he stood in particular conflict with blustery, red-beared Thor. The Christians of the day presented their religion in terms that would make sense to the Heathens, with the intention that they could then change everything around once they had power.

This still goes on today with Bible revisions and retellings tailored to specific audiences. Such duplicity, such slimy legerdemain, was the antithesis of straight-shooting, honest-to-the-root Thor.

The Heathens didn’t even have a word for themselves, let alone destructive designs. Indeed, new research suggests that even the Viking raids may have been little more than self-defence (of course, the Christian kings also got up to the same sort of behaviour, but to the Christians of the day it seemed that rape and murder was only verboten if you happened to worship more than one god).

There you go though: in place of the rich and subtle constellation of spiritual flavours afforded by decentralised polytheism comes the bland, one-size-fits-all model of Christianity (of course the reality is that there are infinite versions of Christianity, too, but none of them seem willing to acknowledge the extent of their de facto and abstract polytheisms).

In recent times the White Christ has taken on a new form: refined sugar. Refined sugar is the enemy of traditional cuisine and cooking. It is the enemy of healthy eating, the product of a worldview uprooted from the sacred interconnections of all things. This worldview might be nihilistic, but it borrows its contempt for the world from Christianity.

Don’t believe me? Here is an example of a good, respectable Christian opinion on the matter, from Robert Boyle in 1686:

“[love of nature is] a discouraging impediment to the empire of man over the inferior
creatures of God.”

We might as well say “reverence is a discouraging impediment…” or, given I am here writing about sugar, “good taste is a discouraging impediment…”

As I understand it, refined sugar causes massive health problems: obesity, diabetes, cardio-vascular disease, hypoglycaemia, depression and mood swings, and probably cancer. It contains no nutrients of its own, and apparently to process it the body needs to strip mine itself of existing minerals and nutrients. Eating sugar makes you fat and malnourished at the same time.

In my case sugar also exacerbates my allergies terribly, making my body attack itself. I won’t labour that particular analogy to Christianity, it should be perfectly obvious.

You could say that sugar is like monotheism. Instead of the endless subtle tastes and nutriment of polytheism – which has something for everyone, and acknowledges the sacredness of all things – we get the White Christ of the dinner table, White Sugar, which is poisonous, ruins the palate, and reduces human beings to a low ebb.

Trying to get White Sugar out of one’s life is not easy. Almost all processed, mass market foods have sugar added – regardless of what the food actually is, and even if it is meant to be sour or bitter. Don’t believe me? Have a good look. Oh, “high fructose corn syrup” is like the Pope of refined sugar, in case you were wondering. It isn’t just Jesus that gets rammed down our throats as children.

So not only is sugar very addictive, but it takes a lot of effort even to get food that doesn’t predestine you to sugar addiction. Imagine trying to quit smoking in a world where tobacco was put in everything in the supermarket!

I don’t know if Christianity is addictive but it is “the opiate of the masses,” and really, I think that it can be very hard for folk to disentangle themselves from Christian mentalities, even if they have formally rejected the religion. The apparently widespread presence of dualistic thinking in some Heathen circles attests to this in particular.

Keeping off the sugar once you are on your way is no easy feat either. I am at a point of getting onto and falling off the wagon at the moment. Last year I managed to stay “clean” for six weeks. I have never felt better in my entire life. Then one night I decided to indulge in an elaborate dessert and the next day fell into a rock-bottom depression, just like that.

All that said, as I eat less sugar I crave less sugar. Tastes are relative so the less we expose ourselves to the junk, the less our palate will require distorted and exaggerated flavours. We begin to appreciate richness, subtlety, the delicious tang of sweetness in its natural flavour context of bitterness and all the rest. I am getting there, slowly but surely.

If latter day “capitalism” (I use the inverted commas to distinguish from the thing that Clint would call capitalism) wants anything, it wants to present a seamless veneer of fixed-white—teeth-and-a-shiny-new-car happiness, the kind of shallow happiness that is utterly empty, like having a priest absolve one’s sins so that one is ready to recommit them for the rest of the week.

Much better is the honesty of vulnerability and depth, putting aside the ridiculous shining ideals (I use the word loosely) of capitalism and (particularly evangelical) Christianity. When we pass through the fake happiness of refined sugar (and its attendant ideologies), we give ourselves a chance to shoot for something much better: well-being.

Well-being isn’t necessarily happiness (sometimes happiness is an irrational and unhelpful emotion), although it does include a good deal of happiness. But rather than this happiness being the product of endless consuming, or the bloody death of some distant messiah, it comes from setting things right between you and the world.

How to do that? By adopting an attitude of reverence, by working to cultivate and deepen the living memory of the sacredness of all things – including our own bellies. Christianity tends to devalue the spirit of all things but their distant messiah (pantheistic Christianity is ok though), and capitalism sees only opportunities to cash in, sees no forests or people but merely resources and consumers. Units of exploitation.

So just as quitting refined sugar in our sugar-saturated world is hard, so is quitting irreverence. I think perhaps that if I make my battle against sugar a twin to my battle against the nihilistic amnesia that can so easily sweep over me (and most of us) then I might get just the boost I need. After all, if there is only spirit…then eating right is a spiritual practice of great sacredness.

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Take the Elhaz Ablaze Traditional Food Challenge!

I’m very proud of myself: I spent the evening chopping, pounding, and mashing cabbage mixed with salt and whey into glass jars so that they can rot for a few days and turn into that super-nutritious wonder-food known as sauerkraut.

Not only that, but the whey I used I made myself just a few days before that, along with some delicious cream cheese (now all eaten). Ohh, and I’m getting déjà vu as I write this, always a good sign.

Yes! 2010 is the year of the Healthy Chaos Heathen! I have several goals for this year, but one is to make good on my Substitute Living rant from last year. I have this vision of Heathenry as being a movement which incorporates traditional food, organic farming, and a rejection of industrialised agriculture with all its iniquities, environmental destruction, capitalist greed, and shocking malnourishment.

But you know what they say: be the change you want to see. So there I was, bits of juice-flecked cabbage flying up around my mallet, as I joyously got to work.

I feel more and more strongly all the time that Heathenry really needs to get its sleeves up and get serious about nutrition. If we abandon the miserably conveyor belt diets that cause heart disease, cancer, and diabetes then we’ll be well on the way to demonstrating why faith in old ways is a winner: we’ll be the healthiest, happiest – and maybe even most attractive – fringe group of weirdos around!

I made a lot of sauerkraut and I spent about an hour working away, doing the simple, repetitive, hypnotic tasks that were involved. There is a real magic in preparing one’s food from the ground up, especially when fermentation – which unlocks incredible nutritive powers in food – is involved. I wandered into various gentle trance states, connecting deeply with my simple sense of lived, embodied being.

Next week when I get a chance I’m going to hit a local farmers’ market (not literally) and see what lovely organic treats I can lay my hands on; and soon I’m going to be creating all kinds of delicious, nutritious foods. It is easy to dream up the notion that its too hard or I haven’t got the time or whatever, but I suspect that the better we eat, the more energy we have, and the more energy we have, the less convincing these excuses will seem.

So here are some proposals for what Heathenry applied to food would look like:

A rejection of refined flour and refined sugar, surely the two biggest enemies of good health that there are;

A rejection of the (now debunked scientifically anyway) crazy idea that fats are bad and that food made from synthetic chemicals such as margarine is better than the natural foods that humanity has been thriving on for millennia;

A celebration of localised food production, the idea that you get to meet the person who makes the ingredients for your meal, that food buying is more than just the anonymous and mechanised task of collecting plastic-wrapped, sorry looking morsels from the sickly-lit supermarket shelf;

A celebration of slow food, taking time to treat one’s body right. As I say, I suspect that the more time one expends on such worthy endeavours, the more time one ultimately gets back in good spirits and energy;

A recovery ultimately of the social essence of cooking and eating, rather than miring ourselves in TV dinners and fast food gorging.

I’m dead serious, Heathenry has to be about our bellies first and foremost. I don’t care what else you believe, say, or do. If you aren’t serious about reconnecting to traditional, genuinely nutritious food, then I strongly question whether you are actually serious about Heathenry.

Hey, we don’t all have to be perfect, or build our personal gustatory Rome in a day! Just taking small, methodical steps is enough. Having the courage to question and experiment.

Of course, this process isn’t necessarily easy, mostly because of our brains. Even after I read the research showing that the “fat is bad” hypothesis pretty much never had any sound empirical basis (except for those deadly synthetic trans fats that you get in the margarine that was supposed to “save” us from butter), well, I still struggled to free myself from the spell. It has been beaten into us all so thoroughly, this vile propaganda.

But folks, eating a lot of fat doesn’t mean overeating. A diet can be low in calories and high in nutrients, and part of that is all those lovely fat-soluble nutrients like Vitamin A, and Vitamin D, and all that. I read somewhere that body fat is so essential that when we starve our body will break down brain tissue to survive on rather than touch certain types of fat stores.

One of the bad things about fridges (apart from the greenhouse gases) is that we stopped doing all the food fermentation tricks we used to use all the time to preserve food, not realising that those tricks serve to make the food easier to digest and more nutrient-dense. But now, in this best of both worlds scenario, I can leap headlong into my fermentation and use my fridge to make my efforts easier and more efficient. No one said you have to do this whole food renaissance thing the hard way, just the right way.

Anyway, these are issues that need more than my rapid-fire, scattergun opinions in order to be compelling. I strongly, strongly recommend that everyone who reads this buy copies of In Defense of Food and Nourishing Traditions. These two books will set you unerringly on the right path. Michael Pollan and Sally Fallon are absolutely honorary Heathens for their efforts to open the minds and bellies of our jaded 21st century culture.

Anyway, I have some beans on slow simmer I need to check, and some big tall jars of sauerkraut-to-be to marvel at (all it takes is time to ferment, how brilliant is that?). Have a joyous and maybe even inventively healthy new year, and – go on! Take the Elhaz Ablaze Traditional Food Challenge! Sure beats dressing up in ye olde clothes or giving yourself stupid, grandiose Old Norse titles!

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