Imagination

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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Storytelling as the Weaving of the Self

We moderns have nothing whatsoever of our own; only by replenishing and cramming ourselves with the ages, customs, arts, philosophies, religions, discoveries of others do we become anything worthy of notice.
Friederich Nietzsche

Exit all legends, enter the laws of magick.
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

“You got no love in your heart. When you got no dreaming, no story, you got nothing”, an Aborigine says to the hero in a movie called ‘Australia’ (the movie is crap, but I’m used to look for gold in shit). The aborigines have a very mysterious concept that they call dream time, this is the mythical & magical time, where the ancestors still live & sing and every thing has a ‘song’ attached to it: rocks, trees, bushes asf. – all have a ‘song’. And the initiated sorcerer of the Australian natives can communicate with these ‘things’ by singing their songs (a form of verbal magic, in Norse magic represented by Galdor). Here we are once again confronted with the holistic vision of a sacred landscape, where everything is interconnected & alive – a worldview that was also common to our European ancestors (or wherever your ancestors come from). This vision is contrary to the modern myths created by the visions of Descartes & ‘Newton’s sleep‘ (William Blake). Both of them had literally visions. Descartes’ thinking has been influenced, for example, by his dreams & Newton has been an occultist, who has received his vision of the mechanistic ‘clockwork universe’ from an ‘Angel’ of the Enochian system of magick ‘invented’ by Dr. John Dee.

Their visions are the stories about the universe we are brought up with. (If you have really bad karma you have been brought up with Kristjan stories about the universe :-). They do not stem from dream time, but from the modern myth of linear time. (‘Our enemies are material. Our enemies are direction and fact. Our enemies are Because.’ GP-O)

Anyway, what really strikes me is the idea how much power a story has over our lives and that – since nobody owes the absolute truth, if such a mysterious thing exists at all – all religions, philosophies, myths, histories, fictions and movies are essentially stories, stories we tell ourselves or that are told to us. Of course, this is a postmodern attitude that I am extremely wary of as it includes the risk of fundamentalist relativism and an ‘epistemological hypochondria’ (Geertz), where ‘anything goes’ and thus real knowledge becomes impossible anymore. But everything has two faces and there are also great advantages, when one uses POMO thought in a critical & self-conscious fashion.

“Post-modern research … embodies a critique of the conventional logical positivist discourse derived from rationalist Enlightenment philosophy, which privileges the European, male, individual subject and the indisputable authority of scientific explanatory frameworks.” (Robert J. Wallis 2003: Shamans/Neo-Shamans: Ecstasies, Alternative Archaeologies and Contemporary Pagans, p. 2).

I think this critique is a necessary step, if one really wants to understand the local knowledge of a native people, like the Aboriginal tradition (or our Heathen tradition). This means, too, that to select carefully a few essential tenets of postmodern philosophy can bring about changes in attitudes, values, perceptions, and worldviews that help us to heal the wounds between ‘whites’ and the peoples we have hurt (see Henry’s article Culture, Genocide and Whingers). More generally speaking, such a ‘paradaigm shift’ on a grand scale can help us to heal the wounds between humanity and the Earth Spirit (Anima Mundi).

Further, the positive effects of postmodernism can be, if used wisely, that we deny to follow ‘universal rules’ (of life, art, philosophy, or anything else). And those who have the will and determination can choose pathways to individual fulfilment & self-empowerment based on the story (‘paradigm’) chosen or created by themselves, instead of following the universal appeal or supposed authority of a story they were told to believe (be it religious metaphysics or scientific materialism, or whatever your favourite mental prison is). If something feels internally authentic & right, it’s the way to go. For us Chaos Heathens / Pagans this attitude makes it possible to liberate us to return to the trú traditions of our ancestors in new, exciting, and creative ways, in ways that adapt and apply the ancient wisdom to the circumstances and the Need – in the sense of :ᚾ: – of our times.

However, to me storytelling is a form of magick and a form of knowledge. Imagine a tribe 10,000 years ago in a dark forest at night. You can hear the wolves howl, and you hear the strange sounds of other dangerous animals, above you the stars and a full moon. Only a little bonfire enlightens the night and you sit there in a circle with your comrades, the shaman of your tribe – a miraculous man with special powers, who is treated with awe by all men of the tribe – sits with you there and tells wyrd stories of cosmic, uncontrollable and daunting forces, of Fire and Ice generating the events that created the universe. He tells you about Ymir, the bipolar Giant, dismembered by the mighty Gods, Odhinn (Master of Ecstasy), Vili (Sacred Will) & Vé (Hollowed Space), who made order (Futhark) out of the totality of existence (Ginnung) and shaped the first man & woman, Askr and Embla, out of trees (!), giving them the triple Gift (Gebo) of human shape (Lík), life-breath (Önd = Prana, Chi, Libido) and (divine) consciousness (Ódhr). His stories tell you about the adventurous journeys and brave deeds of heroes that are your direct ancestors, whom maybe your dead great-grandfather met personally, when he was a child. These journeys of those heroes turn into ordeals & initiations, where they gain insights into the mysteries and cycles of birth, life, death & rebirth. These stories are strange allegories that illumine your understanding of the world surrounding you. They give you heroic models of behaviour that help you to live in an honourable way. Our shaman from 10,000 years ago is a storyteller. He creates a sense of self, of who and where you are. He gives codes of meaning & an intelligence to your life that makes you aware of the interconnectedness that the Web (Wyrd) woven by the Three Norns originates. Magick is possible here – you are not alone, disconnected and alienated from the world!

But 10,000 years later these stories of old are not told to us anymore. They became myths in a negative sense, fantasies of stupid, uneducated, brutish barbarians. The modern stories describe such states of consciousness (as mentioned above) as being ‘primitive’, ‘infantile’ and ‘wishful thinking’. They are something that must be ‘overcome’ by logical & scientific thinking. The French ethnologist Lévy-Bruhl interprets such a healing and wholesome state of unitary consciousness in a negative sense as participation mystique and the Austrian psychoanalyst Freud called this ‘magical thinking’ (based on his idea of primary narcissism). ‘Magical thinking’ is the belief that a person can impact reality by wishing or willpower. Such a belief demonstrates a belief in the self as powerful and able to change external realities. To put it shortly, magical thinking is in many ways what I strive for! For many years now, I try to decondition myself from this vision of ‘flatland’ logic by psychedelic drugs, meditation and magick (more or less successfully until now :-). Though in the long run POMO thinking is not at all ‘magic-friendly’ and, though the whole POMO current has created in many areas a body of knowledge of rather dubious value, I still believe that on a philosophical level some POMO ideas are useful to regain ‘magical thinking’ in a positive, ‘enlightened’ way, namely by creating new stories. Don’t get me wrong, science is invaluable! But the scientific story – if not balanced by wisdom, if not shown where its authority ends, and if not shown where it failed (!) – has not much (interesting) to say about the most important questions of life: What is the purpose of life? What happens after death? What is wisdom? Or, if I may quote again my ‘Aboriginal friend’ (from Hollywood:-), his answer to science would be the same as to the white man: “You got no love in your heart. When you got no dreaming, no story, you got nothing”. This is not completely true, of course. Science has a story: it dreams of ‘eternal progress’ and a condition where all disease, probably even death, is cured. For those who haven’t been so optimistic, it has created nihilism. And what is the story of nihilism? It goes: “The story is pointless. It all makes no sense. End of story.” But we Need a story. A brighter story, a greater story, a hopeful story!

But what can a story do on an individual level? Isn’t a story just a story? Well, yes and no. For example, what is the ego? From a meditative point of view, my ego is just the stories I tell myself about myself. But some stories are charged with a very high emotive energy. So, before my ego would give up its ‘core’ stories, it would probably run mad & defend them from extinction like a religious fundamentalist would protect his belief in God, just because the ego consists of these stories. Probably that’s why it’s so hard to ‘Cross the Abyss’, as Crowley has put it. Probably that’s why most humans fear death! Probably that’s why it’s hard to change at all! Because, you know, ‘that’s just the way I am!’, so I won’t give up this-or-that habit or such-and-such a way of thinking or repetitive emotional pattern, even if it’s bad for ‘me’. Because ‘that’s me’! You get the picture… The ego will all-ways convince you with its stories, why you shouldn’t change, why meditating is boring, or why you have the right to behave angry, feel depressed or be xenophobic. So, in a fundamental way, it’s of great importance what story dominates you, what story you tell yourself about yourself. This, probably, is the reason, why meditative systems of the East have only little use for ‘developing a strong personality’ etc. and focus very much on developing ‘egolessness’, developing equanimity towards life, pain & death and fostering devotion towards the God/dess or the guru, who represents the God/dess and, ideally, works as a ‘mirror’ for the apprentice. Our Northern Tradition fosters instead the development of a strong Hamingja (cp. Sweyn’s True Helm) and of courage towards life, pain and death (cp. Dave Lee’s Bright from the Well: Northern Tales in the Modern World).

On a more profane level just consider what psychotherapy basically does to people. It just gives them a story, a meta-narrative, that makes sense out of all the shit that went wrong and by explaining why this shit has led the individual to feel ‘so-and-so’ about himself. By giving sense to that which seems senseless, by explaining the pain and giving it a meaning, and by telling the person that s/he is not defined by its past and that s/he can now choose to do better. Basically, it creates a better story and thus a better ‘self’ – the stories, of which the ego consits, are changed! (‘Change all memory. And change your ways to perceive.’ TOPY proverb) In a way, the therapist is a modern echo of the storyteller, as is, of course, the priest. But finally that’s not enough, because today, if you are a genuine member of the holiest of all holy orders, the COT (= Club Of Truth-seekers :-), the truth of someone else won’t suffice. The shamanic storyteller from 10,000 years ago is dead and gone. The only one who can ‘replace’ him today is not a politician, priest, psychotherapist or some self-proclaimed guru, but it is you. 

Remember You Are Made Of Star Dust

So creating your own story is a good starting point. The chaos magician Andrieh Vitimus suggests:

“The imagination is more powerful than merely the facts. An idea backed by emotional responses can be seductive enough to enslave many to its cause, whether the idea is a spirit, a piece of art, a cause, or a concept. The majority of people seem content to give away their imagination and creative power. Often, this manifests in letting other forces (advertising, religion, ideas, spirits, whatever) decide what they should do and what they can have and be. This is the power of imagination. It can free us or be our worst prison.” (Andrieh Vitimus 2009: Hands-On Chaos Magic , p. 365, my accentuation)

In days of yore Imagination was a natural part of daily life and regarded as valid as any other human faculty. Walliam Blake, whose Poetic Genius has created a unique poetry (see ‘The Proverbs of Hell’), embraced Imagination as ‘the Body of God’. Today our Imagination, our visualising asf., is ‘stolen’ by the story-sellers, who created the ‘Body of (Pavlov’s) Dog‘.  Advertising is a good example. It sells ‘imagination’. So you buy the ‘myth’ surrounding the package, not the content itself. You don’t buy a perfume, but the ‘imagination’ that it makes you more erotic, attractive, seductive asf. Today we have no genuine storyteller except, probably, the artist. For example, artists who sing about the way they experience truth, like this one: “Waking sleep, cocooned within a veil of fog, Sight no further than my hand, Tearing at this web spun through reality … Through the sacred dance I Awaken, Through faith in myself and my rhythm, Conscious for the first time…” (Ironwood – here’s a fantastic German review). But today such artists are rare. Because in these modern days even the artist has become a whore of capitalism and thus he turned from a genuine storyteller to a storyseller – a faker, a peacock, a good-for-nothing. Mehr Schein als Sein (‘More Appearance than Being’). And stories they sell, packaged in a ‘consumer-friendly’ form, devoid of meaning and any real depth. A true storyteller, shaman & madman, Jhonn Balance (now dead dead dead – may he be blessed by all horned animals!), has warned our culture by proclaiming that Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil! The German artist and shaman (of sorts), Joseph Beuys, has said once: Every human is an artist. I would like to add: …and a storyteller. At least s/he should be. POMO theory started out when it proclaimed that there is no ‘grand narrative’ anymore (that the ‘scientific myth’ of modernity of eternal progress & secularization has kind of come to an end – that’s why post-modern). So, after Nietztsche proclaimed that ‘God is dead’, now the ‘grand narrative’ is dead, too. But I believe that we, as individuals and as a folk, need a narrative again, a story. And, in this globalized world, we need also a story for the earth community – a story that makes us aware of the interconnectedness of everything on this green-blue and fragile planet. Because when I poison the air over here in Europe, your air will be finally poised over there in Australia, too. So what could this story be about? Well, I’m not wise enough to answer this question, but we can silence our minds and listen to what the voice of our hearts has to say (what our ancestors called ‘High Rede’). And surely we can look with confidence to the wisdom of our ancestors and apply it. If the climate catastrophe shall be anticipated in time, science must be part of the solution, I believe. As the Permaculture slogan goes: ‘The problem is the solution.’ Mid-gard – Middle-Earth must be guarded, and it can only be guarded by us humans.


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Music and Magic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note:

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

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

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

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Heathen Imaginings

I wrote this paper a few years ago, and my views may have since changed…

–

The first great challenge to modern Heathenism has come. Will we dare to overcome ourselves, or will we fall into the death of stasis? Will we dare to overcome ourselves, or will we let our weaknesses, our fears, our baseness, overwhelm us? This is the question I see, more and more, facing us.

The time has come that we begin to imagine ourselves. We need to ask, “Who are we?” No longer are terms like ‘universalist’ or ‘folkist’ appropriate – these have come out of grasping at particulars. At best, they refer to people who believe fundamentally the same things – the terms thus virtually lose their relevance. At worst, they are reactive, fearful stances that choke upon themselves. Therefore, the time has come to do something radical. The time has come for us as Heathens to take the radical step of imagining ourselves. *

Our ancestors were not the isolationist hicks that extremist folkish Ásatrúar want them to be. They were profoundly in tune with the ‘outer world’. From the earliest times, they travelled vast distances. They aggressively incorporated ideas from other cultures that were in essential conformity with their own.

The Elder Futhark is itself a product of this eager syncretisation, a syncretisation that came when a Northern
magician recognised the power of Roman/Etruscan alphabetic language and combined it with the Germanic grasp of pictographic symbolism. In this one move, Rune magic came into its own – too syncretistic for the extreme folkish understanding, yet too true to its inner essence for extreme eclecticism to grasp. No surprise that both of these ‘camps’ in modern times think of the origin of the runes in hobbled and politically circumscribed ways.

Our ancestors did not see the world in the fear-laden terms of separation, the terms that extremist folkists deal in. Our ancestors understood that a thing’s essence is not the sum of its particulars. They understood that their own essence was not the sum of their particularity.

Ásatrú has in modern times been intensely insular, and with good reason, for she was weak for many years. But now she has stabilised. She has regained her grounding. It is time to break open the protective armour of Ingwaz and step back into the world. It is time to cease bickering over academic minutiae. It is time to accept that we are REVIVING, not accurately reconstructing, a tradition. It is time to activate our mytho-poetic imaginations, as much wiser souls than myself have put it.

Ásatrú in modern times has never been ‘pure’. Its major magickal exponents have always brought their influences, usually of the western esoteric tradition, with them. Politically, it has always had elements of its number infected by the contempt-worthy fear that is racism. It has always been infected with those who argue for the ahistorical notion that “each people should be locked away by itself”, a notion which was and will always be the position of apologists for totalitarianism.

This alone reveals the bankruptcy of those who want modern Heathenism to be culturally isolated, or who think that all cultural exchange equates to new age eclecticism. As it happens, these people have already accepted many ahistorical additions to Ásatrú – the foremost being the notion of our ancestors being insular. Sadly, these people have also often accepted the infantile fears of right-wing extremism.

Our ancestors revelled in the wide tapestry of the world, and yet managed to maintain a multitude of distinct and coherent religions and cultures (for truly it is fair to say that the dark age Norse were significantly different in culture and religion to their Bronze Age forebears). Cultural integrity and coherence is not maintained by cultural isolation – history seems to prove this a thousand times over.

We must remove the pedestals we have placed our ancestors upon, and critically engage with them. We must understand that they too made mistakes. In saying this, I mean to say that criticism is the highest form of praise. He that cannot question turns the object of questioning into a sacred cow. May Loki lay low all stodgy spirits of seriousness! Nietzsche was right – we need gay scientists, not dour pharisees.

Our ancestors eagerly innovated. All-too-often we moderns cling to the record of the past. In doing this we obey their example to the letter, not to the spirit. It is time to release a little of Tyr’s academic hold and abandon ourselves to the exhilaration and dread of Woðanaz. The fruits of research need to be interpreted, developed, explored, not taken as pronunciations ex cathedra. If we imprison ourselves within the woefully limited picture we have of the past, we will doom ourselves to stagnation, psychological illness and devolution.

Will we become a tradition of fear, insularity, pettiness, backwardness? This is the danger that now faces us. The challenge is no longer survival. The challenge is to become a living, breathing, evolving – yet still coherent – life tradition.

The time has come to imagine ourselves, to cease pretending that Need impels us to reactivity. We are long overdue in ending our tolerance of the Christian-born instincts of racism and right wing extremism. The time has come to become a living religion, in a modern world.

As Heathens, we are inherently atavistic. We must trust the deep taproots of our ancestors and our gods to protect us as we grow and evolve, and cease clinging to fear. The struggle for the Heathen imagination has begun, and the very survival of our tradition as something other than a series of pseudo-political parties or isolated cults is at stake.

Let us take up this challenge with ecstasy.

(* For more on the idea of Imagination, I can only refer my reader to John Ralston Saul’s masterpiece, On Equilibrium.)

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