Music

How to Meditate Effectively

Since I returned from my travels I’ve meditated almost every day. It’s a fantastic practice and I thought I’d describe what I do and how it helps.

The practice is simple enough. I set a timer for 20 minutes. I lie down in a secluded space – under the shade of trees is good, or if it is cold then I just get under the covers of my bed.

I try to focus on my breath. I turn my attention to the physical sensation of inhaling… and then the physical sensation of exhaling. I let my breathing slow down and become more regular. It can be helpful to think the word “in” as I inhale and “out” as I exhale.

Now the thing about trying to focus your attention on one place is that if your mind is undisciplined – well you’ll be all over the shop. All sorts of thoughts are likely to flood your mind – about your shopping list, the book you are reading, the arguments your friends are having, your plans for the day.

These thoughts will pull your attention away from attending to your breathing. So here comes the key to effective meditation.

Your only task when your mind wanders is to notice that your mind has wandered and tell yourself “back to the breath” and return your focus. That’s all. The thing is, it is totally ok for your mind to wander: that gives you the opportunities you need to practice noticing your own thoughts and redirecting them.

In other words, effective meditation doesn’t make some lofty goal of stillness or oneness the goal – though my method certainly enables me to achieve such a state sometimes. Rather, the goal is just to notice that your mind has wandered and return to the breath.

Sometimes, often, you won’t stay focussed for more than a breath or two before you get distracted, no matter how experienced you are; or sometimes thoughts will quietly worm away under your breath focus. This is good – you are learning the landscape of your mind at the same time as you train the beast. Sometimes valuable insights might even come from this, though the time to dwell on them is after your 20 minutes is done.

There are various Zen stories about the important of coming back to your focus point no matter where your mind goes: “Master, I was meditating and the Buddha appeared and told me that I am the anointed saviour of mankind”, says the student. “That’s nothing to worry about. Keep returning to your breath and it will go away”, replies the master.

This is a good attitude to have. If you really must, you can still entertain your megalomania later. But when you are meditating, meditate.

You don’t have to focus on your breath for this general principle to work. Sweyn Plowright, in his book True Helm, offers a very effective meditation practice utilising the rune Isa, with a similar approach to the one I’ve outlined here. I recommend it, in fact. It’s very classy.

I should also add that I didn’t invent the meditation method described here. It is loosely adapted from various different traditions and modified by my experimentation.

Now, you might be wondering how I know that the meditation method outlined here is effective.

Well it definitely takes a while to get the more dramatic results, but here are some of the benefits I have been experiencing since I renewed my daily meditation practice a month ago:

I am more alert; I think clearer, I’m more able to understand things around me and even my sensory perception seems clearer and more detailed;

I need less sleep; sometimes I can use a meditation session to totally recharge my batteries during a busy day;

I feel much less anxious – more confident and relaxed;

I pay much less attention to the kinds of unconstructive self-critical voices most of us fall prey to at times;

I have become less dogmatic, more open to different points of view, and much less emotionally provoked when I encounter views that contrast strongly with my own (this has been a goal for a little while now, as discussed elsewhere in this journal);

I am more focussed – when I really need to get something done, I can do it;

I’m becoming more disciplined but also less up-tight about maintaining my discipline – I’m more comfortable with resting and taking time out yet I think I’m just as productive.

The real litmus test came over this last weekend, when I recorded all the bass for the next Ironwood album. I usually find recording to be stressful, unpleasant, emotionally taxing and, all in all, something to be feared.

This time around though I felt so calm and relaxed. When my emotions started to get away from me I could see it immediately and respond. I noticed that I tend to hold my breath when I’m feeling under pressure and that if I consciously let go of that armour then I become both more relaxed and more competent.

The consequence was that despite this being the most complex and technical material I’ve ever recorded I finished up right on schedule, didn’t rush, pulled out the best studio performances of my life, was totally chill and relaxed, and basically had a monstrously enjoyable time.

Instead of an onerous task, recording was a pure joy. I particularly enjoyed watching myself skilfully manage my own behaviour, thoughts and feelings, gently steering myself along the path.

And folks, that is after only a month of meditating daily, 20 minutes a day. I’m really, really hooked now. I’ve written before in this journal about the distinction between heart and will based living; how the former is so much more powerful yet is so hard to access for those of us raised in a more or less nihilistic modern context. Well meditation is really opening the gates of my heart and unleashing some serious power.

Oh, and to top it all off, on the weekend I also wrote a really cool poem about Odin and my ancestors.

It can be hard, of course, to get into a groove with meditation, but really to do it effectively you need to keep up the practice. Sometimes you might have to skip a day, but believe me, it gets easier to discipline yourself the longer you do it.

If you think you don’t have time – trust me, you’ll start to function so much better after a while that those 20 minutes spent meditating will end up saving you at least that much, maybe a lot more, out of the rest of your day.

And I’ll say again – it doesn’t matter how much your mind wanderes. It doesn’t matter if you don’t reach some transcendental state. Just keep doing it and you’ll find it hard to stop yourself from deriving benefit from the practice.

I’m laying down the challenge folks. Meditation – get into it!

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Elhaz Ablaze – Happy One Year Anniversary!

One year ago we started Elhaz Ablaze. The idea to have a website where we could express and explore our idiosyncratic and potent brands of mystical Heathenism had been pressing on us for a long time.

Finally our empty talk reached critical mass and, with my discovery of the crappy but easy-to-use Weebly blog system, Elhaz Ablaze was born. It was (and is) an ugly site to look at, but we hoped that we could fill it with enough worthwhile content that readers would not mind.

Of course, we had absolutely no idea who would be interested in what we had to say. As far as we knew, the notions that we have come to refer to under the rubric of Chaos Heathenism would fall on dead (as opposed to deaf) ears.

Actually I have to admit that I hoped to provoke hate mail for the controversial opinions we and our guests have presented. But to date we have gone unscathed (much to my Loko chagrin).

Instead we have discovered that people actually seem to like our stuff – and moreover we seem to have some kind of readership, at least guessing from the Google Analytics thingy I set up in early January.

Since January 4, 2009 we’ve had some 1,238 unique visitors, 2,763 visits and 8,693 page views. Not bad for what must be one of the weirdest Heathen/magic/martial arts sites on the ‘Net! I have no idea what the patronage was like prior to that unfortunately.

I don’t know whether we are preaching to the converted (perverted?) or whether we are actually opening folk to new perspectives – I’d like to hope for a bit of both.

Certainly we felt terribly unrepresented by the bulk of Heathen writings out there and we hoped that we weren’t the only ones. Consequently, one of the joys of Elhaz Ablaze is that it has put us in touch with folk on similar wavelengths to ourselves. It’s a relief to know that we’re not alone.

I’m also pleased that we could invite Matt Anon to join our group. I’ve known Matt electronically for years and we are like cosmic siblings (despite having never met), so to have his ideas presented alongside mine is a deep privilege.

One of the fundamental principles of Elhaz Ablaze is our commitment to the notion that there is only OPINION in Heathenism: there is no orthodoxy and anyone who claims a monopoly on truth in such a sketchy cultural manifestation as ours is a fraud.

Hence, I love that we contradict ourselves and disagree with one another. Nietzsche says that the more permissive a culture is, the stronger it is; the more restrictive it is, the more brittle and weak it is. We want Heathenism to be strong, and therefore it must be pluralistic. I’m proud that Elhaz Ablaze has become a model for this ideal.

That extends also to our guest writers, who do a great job of both agreeing with and contradicting both us and each other! I might not entirely agree with, say, Sweyn’s views about modernity (see his articles in the guest section), but I’m proud to offer them a home, to defy the widespread anti-modernity Heathen attitude that I myself tend to adopt.

For myself, I settled into a regular writing discipline from day one of the site and maintaining my journal has really assisted my spiritual development. Keeping a public diary, writing short monographs on magical subjects, etc, has enabled me to objectify the sometimes all-too-ephemeral unfolding of my spiritual experience.

This in turn has helped me to integrate the various facets of my existence to a much better degree than I have ever achieved – Elhaz Ablaze for me has been a powerful alchemical vessel. Although, of course, there is a great deal more work to come, and many a loose end yet to be brought to roost in Wyrd’s weave.

When I am lost to myself I can turn to my writings on this site and they anchor and reintegrate me into Mimir’s gift of memory, so essential to the nourishment of my personal microcosmic Yggdrasil.

Indeed, writing my journal has been like mapping out a vast and unknowable continent. Every entry I write feels utterly essential to my being once it is done. Some time soon I will read over everything I’ve done – it will be fascinating to retrace my steps over the last year (and the earlier essays I posted in particular).

This journal has been a profound anchor and way-station for my evolution (and in the last year I can barely start to express how much my life has changed, mostly for the better, though certainly not without great struggle and suffering).

Given it is our first birthday I feel it is high time to explain the name Elhaz Ablaze.

Elhaz is a rune of polarities – consider the Old English Rune Poem (this translation by the inestimable Sweyn Plowright):

Elk-sedge is native most often to the fen,
It grows in water; it wounds grimly,
Burning with blood any warrior
Who, in any way, grabs at it.

The fen, the marsh, the swamp, is a liminal place between land and sea. We know these were holy places to the arch-Heathens – the bog offerings archaeologists have found alone confirm this. Yet for all of its liminal openness, the marsh is warded by the elk-sedge – sharp grass, the points of the elk’s antlers, the reach of a deadly blade.

Elhaz represents, therefore, all the beauty and magic of vulnerability and mystery; but also the strength and integrity of the wild beast that dwells within the wetlands. It represents our desire to deal only with those on the ‘level’. This isn’t a question of elitism or anything silly like that, more a question of taste and time management.

Why Elhaz Ablaze? The fire to me represents the overflowing flames of inspiration, magic, possession, enlightenment, purification, celebration, Life itself. The two words in combination to me suggest the meeting of frost and flame, fire and water: in Elhaz Ablaze all oppositions are subsumed into a greater and dynamic whole.

In a sense, then, Elhaz Ablaze is the necessary conceptual twin to Chaos Heathenism. Chaos Heathenism is a philosophy built on the notion of Elhaz Ablaze – the Chaos offers us liminality and magic, the Heathenism offers structure and integrity. In combination they create a synergistic conflagration.

Where to from here? Speaking for myself – I am about to go travelling for six weeks and this journal will likely be fallow in that time. However I will soon post up my voluminous (circa 13,000 word) essay in response to Alain de Benoist’s book On Being a Pagan.

This essay was written originally for Heathen Harvest, where it will also soon appear, but they have graciously let me present it here on Elhaz Ablaze too. I figure it should offer plenty of mind-meat in my absence for those that care to read it!

A word on the creative process of this essay. I took extensive notes on the book as I read it, until my brain was super-saturated. Because the book provoked me emotionally as well as intellectually it put me into an intense fervour over the fortnight or so that I read it.

Then, the day before my current university course started, I sat down with all my notes and wrote the whole thing out in one sitting. Since then I’ve been tweaking a little bit and getting a little bit of feedback from a few trusted readers (Volksfreund deserves particular praise in this regard).

In short, the writing of the essay was itself an act of applied seidh. I utilised extended altered states of consciousness, full activation of my deep mind, variegated forms of trance and seething, runic incantations and the riding of my Wode – my personal River of Fire – into the arms of inspired creation.

I could not have written it with cold blood, but thankfully I did not have to. So when you read it, please see it for what it is – an exercise in poetry as much as philosophical discussion.

Now – what next? I really cannot predict what I’ll do once I get back from my adventures (or what I hope amount to adventures), and I’ll be very busy with my studies as soon as I get back. But I’m sure that wherever the creative impulse leads me, you’ll read about it right here.

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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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Chant Like a Heathen

While we know little about archaic Germanic musical and magical practices, we can be pretty sure that they were into their singing and/or chanting.

Old Norse Galdr means “magic”, and alludes to the crowing of a raven. In the Saga of Erik the Red the seidkona (loosely speaking, “seeress”) has a singer perform songs called Vardlokkur as part of helping her enter trance and have clairvoyant visions. And in the poem “Runatal Thattr Odinns” (part of “Havamal” in the Poetic Edda) we are told that Odin fell “screaming” or “roaring” from the tree once he won the runes.

We also know that our ancestors thought rhythmic speech – that is, poetry – was powerful and magical. The ability to speak well was highly regarded. Modern Heathens like to say that “we are our deeds”, but the truth is that our ancestors demanded more than deeds and believed that words and speech had great power.

There are few specific singing or chanting techniques recorded, although following the hints in the Saga of Erik the Red we can guess that anything which helps to induce an altered state of consciousness, a trance of some sort, is fair game.

I’m also told that in battle warriors would get themselves into the right head-space with repetitive chants of phrases like Antanantan – which sounds like a runic formula to me. In any case, this seems like a good bit of evidence for seeing the kind of trippy, repetitive chanting that I so enjoy as being continuous with the magical traditions of old Heathen Europe.

The main factor to remember if you want to explore something that approximates galdr or vardlokkur is that you need rhythmic repetition to get yourself tranced. Also, chants that make it hard to catch your breath are helpful because oxygen deprivation will trip you out nice and proper. Perhaps this is part of why Odin hangs himself to perform the rune-winning rite.

You can chant just about anything. The names of runes is one option (but be careful if you aren’t too familiar with the runes’ meanings); but I also like calling on the power of mythological beings or even phrases from archaeological finds. Chanting names like Yggrdrassil, Runa, Wodanaz and so on can be quite an education.

Your chanting could be rhythmic speaking, singing, droning, vibrating sound through your chest and throat, screeching, shouting, whispering, or even silent. If you can get some good momentum you might find yourself emitting noises you didn’t know you could make. Just keep going and going and ride the wave to wherever it wants to go.

We experimented at Yule this year with a chant of Wihailagaz, which comes more or less from an archaeological find (the Pietroassa Ring) and means something like otherworldy/sacrosanct/forbidden/set apart (Wih-) and whole, hail, healthy, holy (-hailagaz).

I think that it sort of brings you into a relationship with both the sacred uniqueness of who you are, and simultaneously into awareness of the grand interconnectedness of the web of Wyrd. In other words, a kind of neither-neither/all-all state where anything is possible. This is also a great one to chant because it offers some good rhythmic possibilities to wrap your mouth around.

Oh, and you needn’t just be sitting there when you chant. I involuntarily move my body; sometimes swaying, head-banging, through to bodily hurtling about the place. Sometimes when I am dancing I involuntarily sing or chant runes or names of gods or spirits.

I sometimes beat myself rhythmically (body percussion) and get some good bruises. When hitting myself I tend to move the ‘one’ of the bar around relative to the singing and this can create different kinds of momentum and intensity – if you are a rhythmically confident person you should try this.

Chanting can turn into the recitation of poetry, too. It might be something stored in your memory, or if you reach a suitably inspired state of consciousness then you might find yourself spouting words free-form.

I found myself doing this just the other day while celebrating Ostara with Donovan – we watched the sun rise over the ocean (see photo) and after spending a little time just listening to the environment around us and watching the sun I discovered that the words came easily and just wanted to be said.

Not only that but they came out in perfect form, with all manner of rhyme, rhythmic structures and patterns, etc. I doubt you would have known I was improvising if you’d been listening – I stood there, seething lightly, senses overloaded with sunlight and sea, and out came the poetry.

In some senses all speech is magical. The reason is simply that speech is a tool we use to make sense of, and communicate about, the world around us. As such it helps us to take things by the scruff of the neck, to establish a relationship between ourselves and the object of our focus.

So the objective with some forms of chanting might be to open a conduit between our wyrd and the wyrd of the thing we are focused on. On this approach, the words we use become the conduit – and the repetition of the phrases is analogous to a wheel turning on its axis. The words repeat, the wheel turns seemingly without getting anywhere – yet the car itself can travel great distances as a result.

While a lot more needs to be written on this subject, if you are interested in the magic of chanting and speech you might like to do some research on the great psychiatrist and hypnotist Milton Erickson – whose ability to use speech was almost unbelievable. He had a flair that can only be described as Odinnic.

One other thought on all this – regular chanting is good for you. It strengthens your lungs, strengthens your voice, improves your singing skills and it is great for relaxation and stress reduction! It can also get your body really pumping, energetically speaking, and that can’t be a bad thing.

Well I hope you try to experiment with some chanting! I am sure that with only a little effort you can invent ways of chanting much more magical and fun than what I have described here.

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Of Iron and Ocean

After my recent anti-nidstang magic, aimed towards connecting with the local land spirits, some pretty amazing developments have occurred.

There is a stretch of beach near my home at the foot of a sea cliff. The rock is layers, smooth, black and red-brown. I’m no geologist but I think it is mostly layers of igneous, volcanic stone.

Piles of black angular boulders litter the beach here. At high tide they slip from view, only to stubbornly emerge as the sea gasps its last and recedes.

There are mysterious outcrops and places here, including a depression in part of the rock wall which looks like a door to another universe – and from which runs a huge thick vein of red rock that stretches into the ocean.

Last week while wandering among the rocks at low tide I stumbled over a rock formation that offers a perfect “throne”. Somehow the rocks are positioned perfectly for one to sit on in regal style. Even though I have seen these rocks many, many times, I had never before recognised the gestalt of their arrangement.

I sat on these rocks and it felt not unlike how I would imagine a mound sitting, albeit a very royal mound sitting. It felt as though I was being privileged with noticing this seat, as though it were hidden from view unless it wanted to be seen.

And as I sat there, just briefly in the corner of my eye, I saw a mysterious being for the briefest moment.

As a child I read a number of books about Aboriginal mythology, and one of the staples were tall, jet-black, angular land spirits, beings with flaring ears, pointed nails and sinister airs. Australia is no land of spandex-wearing faeries or cute little elves and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Now I can’t speak for someone else’s spiritual tradition, but what I saw in the corner of my eye as I sat in that throne was the spitting image of one of those spindly black land spirits. It was tall, and the surface of its body was like a sinkhole to light. It was watching me with a wary curiosity and its eyes glowed a deep red.

Unfortunately as I turned suddenly to get a better look it was gone. But I hoped this would not be our only meeting and I was not disappointed.

A few days later I returned to the rock throne. This time it was just past high tide, so the water almost lapped at my feet. I sat and I called, and made animal noises and shrieked as spontaneity dictated. Eventually I got a response.

Having handed over my actions to my unthinking reflex-mind I was soon exploring the rocks, as an inaudible voice guided me first to this nook, then that cranny. It was as though I was being educated about the secret life of the cliff and boulders, as though I was being shown the insider’s point of view on this place.

I spent quite a long time leaping and bounding, climbing and jumping, until I think I had a pretty good feel for the place. But no spirit. No spectral presence, not even when I sat once more on the throne.

I was starting to get frustrated because I really couldn’t see the point of all this stone ballet. Then I noticed something odd.

Sitting further out from the main boulder area is a single huge, flat-topped rock. This boulder was still water-bound by the tides.

Sitting on the boulder was what looked like the much rusted blade of a saw. Since I had just been about ready to leave, I debated with myself whether to examine this strange sight. But I knew that I had to. I hated the idea of leaving without having made some kind of connection with the being I saw amid the rocks and cliffs.

So out I went, narrowly avoiding getting very soaked. I clambered up onto the boulder and discovered that it was indeed a severely corroded saw blade. This saw had been swimming in the ocean for a very long time, from what I could see. The blade was so rusted that it virtually crumbled in my grasp. No more cutting for this one!

The waves started lashing much higher as I inspected the saw, and I had the strangest feeling that someone was laughing at me as I realised that I had to move quickly before this new watery assault had me soaked. Carefully and swiftly I clambered down the rock and back across the slippery surfaces to the main boulder area.

As soon as I was back to safety the waves resumed their steady seaward march – so it seemed anyway. I didn’t really understand the meaning of the saw, other than perhaps bait to lure me onto the rock where I could be the victim of a wet prank. Oh, and I cut myself lightly as I escaped the seas clutches. “Blood sacrifice” I thought to myself.

After some deliberation I dumped the saw. I figured it was so badly corroded that it was about ready to disintegrate – indeed, it was disintegrating – and that somehow it belonged among the boulders. With that I headed back across the rocky space and off home.

As I neared the edge of the boulder area I heard a noise behind me, I turned to see the strange being, this time in a small rock alcove behind a boulder – another obvious feature like the throne that I had somehow never before noticed. Then it was gone.

I ran over the rocks to where the spirit had stood. I picked among the boulders, finding more hollows and secrets, mystified. Now I knew that it was watching me, but still things seemed rather opaque.

Eventually, no more enlightened as to the being’s purpose, I turned again to leave. This time I stumbled over an iron bar, as long as my forearm, also corroded to the point of disintegration.

As I tested the bar’s heft my mind wandered to an article I recently read about how prehistoric humans made chimes out of resonant stones that would sing when struck. I decided to test some of the local boulders for their tuning.

The rusty bar was not much of a drum stick, being heavy and soft, but to my surprise the rocks sang clear and true! I amused myself for a few minutes recapitulating the prehistoric version of rock stardom before this discovery too seemed to reach the end of my attention span.

I couldn’t help but feel that I was missing something. Then the connection became clear – the rusted saw, the rusted bar, my blood and the veins of iron oxide that run through the rocky cliff face. The being I had seen was the spirit of the Iron here!

With that realisation it began to speak to me in my mind, its voice slow and heavy and clanking. It told me that once all had been hot and liquid and it had danced joyously.

But now for untold stretches of time it had been cold and rigid, bound to the cliff and the boulders that had once been like water. And slowly the sea ate away at the rock, stripping out the veins of iron ore and dissolving even their hard shapes.

The spirit lived a lonely life here, with few for company and an inexorable oceanic aggressor at its doorstep. I felt moved to ask it if it could travel somehow – perhaps it could ride the iron in my blood? Then it presented its own solution – a small-shaped piece of corroded iron that had been wedged between two rocks for what looked like a very long time. The spirit told me to take the iron so that its awareness could travel wherever I took this adopted piece of its form.

It also led me to a beautiful shell hidden among the rocks, a gift it said.

Now it was finally time to head home.

On my way it spoke to me a little. It told me that I am the first European-descended person to have noticed it or been able to engage with it. It told me that what made the difference was my connection to my own spiritual heritage.

It told me that most white people in Australia are completely addled and befuddled when it comes to their spiritual identity, that they don’t know themselves and therefore are unable to go beyond their own context to meet the land and people.

It indicated that my anti-nidstang ritual had specific importance in allowing me to interact with me, and that my ability to perform this ritual was one example of the kind of self-knowledge it feels is required.

Strong words from an Iron Spirit! And as always with such experiences to be taken with caution. But as I sit here with the spirit’s mobile iron “transmitter’ on my lap I cannot help but wonder where this will all lead. At the very least, I hope to learn from it and I hope to offer it the chance to explore the world beyond its harsh and wet home.

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Altered States, Electric Bass

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Rune Magic Adventures and Reflections

runemagicadventuresandreflectionsimage1This first rune sigil is one of my “don’t remember what it means” specials. I used an Indian snake skin tambourine to send it off, dancing, singing, drumming, you name it, until I was frothing and spasming and seething madly. Odin appeared at various points and lectured me about various things I didn’t understanding – perhaps related somehow to the meaning of the bind rune.

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

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

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

runemagicadventuresandreflectionsimage2I’m no Sheehan but I have a few tricks up my sleeve. The magic kicked in really hard once I got my feet stamping in 4:4 time, then my left hand cutting across that on the tambourine in what I think was a 12:8, and then my right hand banging away on the tambourine for a while in 5:4, then 7:8 and 9:8. I used my forearms to loosely hold the tambourine across my chest as I did this so that the rhythms were very physical, tangible, for me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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