orthopraxy – Elhaz Ablaze

SMART Sigils

March 24, 2018March 24, 2018 by Heimlich A. Laguz

There are a lot of ways to approach the construction of sigils. I am skeptical of the idea that any one approach can be considered the best for all purposes and circumstances.

That said, one important but often overlooked aspect of sigil magic is the process of devising a statement of intention from which to derive a sigil. Here is a framework to help with this process.

Setting SMART Goals

Setting goals is a skill. If a goal is framed poorly it will be more difficult to make desired progress. The concept of SMART Goals can help with framing effective goals. It can also help with framing a statement of intention on which to base a sigil.

SMART = Specific + Meaningful + Achievable + Relevant + Timely

Let’s say I am creating a statement of intention that I wish to sigilize. Here’s how to use the SMART principle to frame that statement.

Specific:

Target the intention. “I receive a windfall of at least $500 in the next 7 days” is a pretty specific goal. “I get more money” is not. Why does this matter? If I used the latter statement as the basis for my sigil then the spell’s terms would be met by bestowing one cent upon me in 30 years’ time; hardly an outcome to be celebrated. Also, with the first example I can unequivocally know if my spell worked or not.

Meaningful:

Frivolous magic is a waste of time. Before creating a spell, take some time to dwell on whether it truly serves your best and most inspired values. Magic cast out of spite, greed, self-doubt, or other ego-flaws will be harmful even if it “works.”

Similarly, how does a given sigil’s purpose fit into your larger life vision and purpose? If you don’t know what your vision and purpose are, you need to spend less time throwing sigils and more time meditating, reflecting on your dreams, journaling, and practicing divination. Impulsive magic has its place, but we are called on to be more than just psychic pinballs.

Achievable:

The easier you make it for the magic to happen, the more likely it will happen. There are a few ways to enhance achievability.

Firstly, the more time you allow for the magic to take effect, the more likely it will succeed. As we move closer to a deadline, wyrd gets more and more cemented and there is less room for the steering of possibilities. Enchant early!

Secondly, you might not want to rely only on magic for an outcome. Take action in as many ways as you can. The universe seems to like a go-getter.

Thirdly, know your limits. A quickly and haphazardly fired sigil may well lack the power needed to achieve a massive change. Practice with smaller magical goals and progressively build your confidence.

Fourthly, consider the probabilities of different outcomes. Sometimes it is better to enchant for your second best(but more likely) outcome and succeed than to enchant for your first, but verging on impossible, preference.

Relevant:

Is the goal of my magic actually the top priority right now? What is most pressing or urgent for me? Are there steps toward a goal, and should I break the goal into smaller steps, each with its own statement of intent and sigil? Is the magic consistent with my needs (i.e. do I know how to listen to myself)? And frankly, am I the right person to be asking for a given outcome or am I meddling in other people’s business?

Timely:

In my above example of specificity I set a deadline for my sigil. This can be helpful for framing the magic and determining success. If I need a spell to take effect within the next month, but I don’t ask for it to do so within that time frame, it may well wait for a decade via the law of the path of least resistance…an outcome that would be less than optimal.

Also, you can use knowledge of correspondences to fire your sigil at an auspicious time. Seasons, lunar cycles, and personally or spiritually meaningful dates and times are all relevant here.

Get SMART

Apply these 5 criteria when framing up your intention for working sigil magic and you might just find yourself getting better results. I would love to hear how you go at applying these ideas…

Heathen Community Sans Belief

April 20, 2018March 9, 2018 by Heimlich A. Laguz

How on earth can a Heathen group function if it is not built on the basis of shared belief? Sounds insane, right? Let me tell you two stories.

Nightmare Heathen Group Experience

When I was a mere sapling I joined my first Heathen group. It felt thrilling and exciting, like we were creating something magical and important. Gradually, however, it went sour. Unspoken rules began to creep in. There were accepted and non-accepted beliefs and outlooks. The wrong thoughts were verboten. If you didn’t agree with the party line about what theory of the gods was right, or what the meaning of this or that symbol was, or whatever – well, that was trouble. It was a moral failing, a reason to be ashamed.

There was no room for disagreement, or even for variety of opinions. In-group dynamics started to flare up, and a race began: who could be the ‘most right,’ the ‘most TRU?’ As the tension mounted, people started leaving. Paranoia set in – perhaps there were secret traitors trying to break the group down? Individuals started sowing dissent between others: “don’t tell anyone but so-and-so said this about you and can you believe he would do that?”

The final climax? In the rush to achieve a perfected group ideology, racist politics started to creep in, along with vicious, dogmatic attacks on anyone who unwittingly said the wrong thing or expressed the wrong opinion (be it related to politics, history, religion, ritual, whatever). Everyone had to start spying on each other, so our fearless leaders said, to be vigilant that there was a uniform opinion on any and everything.

I left the group, and it took a long time to recover from the trauma of the experience. I heard the whole thing fell apart a few months later. It was very sad.

There were a lot of toxic things going on in that group, to be sure. Something that facilitated, fueled, and legitimated them was the insistence on a party line. That is to say, group orthodoxy was strongly emphasized. The group was also very practical and did a lot of activities, but they were always conditioned by the obsession with right belief. And actually, I haven’t shared the half of what went on, but we honestly just don’t need to go there.

Wonderful Heathen Group Experience

Many years later, my other half and I knew a couple of local people who were into Heathenry, and we wanted to have a group where we could enjoy sharing mutual love for things Heathenish. We both also had prior traumatizing group experiences (like the account I provided above), and we were cagey.

We talked a lot before we made the initial plunge to start a group. We weren’t sure whether there was enough sense of shared beliefs among the people we wanted to start the group with. Then we realized that belief was a poor basis for group cohesion. So we got everyone together and we said: let’s start a group with the following principles:

No particular beliefs or points of faith are required of group members. Each person is free to have their own personal interpretation of the gods, the myths, whatever.
We agreed to have no formalized group structure as such, but rather to run things on a volunteer basis, that is, if you want to see something happen it is up to you to make it happen.
Group to be based on engaging in shared activities, whether explicitly spiritual or not, with the understanding that spiritual practices will focus specifically on Heathen myth and practice, i.e., generally avoiding syncretism.

You can see how these three principles de-emphasize orthodoxy and operationalize orthopraxy. We discovered that this worked really well, and in fact our group continues to be a lovely thing indeed. We don’t meet up these days as often as we’d like, and we have lost some people and had some new people join us, but the group is basically solid. And wonderful, nourishing, joyous, flowing.

There has never been any group conflict around opinions, ideology, or ‘correct’ interpretation of the lore. Some members of the group believe in the gods as literal beings, some as metaphors for natural forces; some members see the group as primarily meeting their spiritual needs, others their social and community needs; some members of the group see Heathenry as their primary and fundamental path; others see it as being part of a larger tapestry. We’ve been lucky to avoid any shitty politics.

Some of the best conversations we have had were supporting group members to get comfortable with the realization that they would not be criticized for being, say, agnostic. We just didn’t waste time on all that sort of thing. Love for Heathen myth and ritual doesn’t always correlate to faith in the metaphysical. Everyone participates in a sincere and joyous way and we have woven a rich web of mutual care and love around the Irminsul of Heathen praxis.

Sometimes we realize that there’s better historical evidence on which to base our rituals, and because we have no attachment to ‘right belief’ we readily just shift our language or practice, and it always feels deeper and more special with those shifts. Occasionally someone brings in a new idea, and we feel it out together, both practically and in terms of lore-coherent symbolism.

It remains important for group structure to keep our focus on Heathen spirituality, even though some of us might have other interests too (alchemy, ceremonial magic, chaos magic, whatever, we don’t care, we just try to keep clarity around our practice as being Heathen). And at the same time, on the very rare occasion when it has been personally important for someone to acknowledge, say, a Greek god, they have been able to do so and we’ve been able to make space for that. Pantheons crossed over between cultures in the old days, too…

Because there is no pressure for any kind of orthodoxy, there is room for group members to grow, to question, to revise their spiritual concepts. This freedom to learn and to change and to expand is very nourishing.

In more recent times we invited our next door neighbor to attend our Heathen gatherings. Is he Heathen? Nope. Is he an important part of our immediate community? Yep. So should he be a part of our gatherings if he would like? Definitely! He typically avoids the more formal ritual activities, but as far as we are concerned he is part of the group because relationships should be privileged over professions of orthodoxy. And you know, he fits right in.

We are generally very slow to bring new members into the group. We might really like someone and they might be an amazing fit for the group but we keep it glacial. We do try to make sure that everyone is ok with us not needing rules about ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ spiritual belief. Sometimes it is hard because we don’t want to introduce someone to the group until everyone already in the group has had a chance to get to know them, which can be logistically difficult. Sometimes that just doesn’t ever work out practically, but we do our best. A larger group is not necessarily a better group, and we could never fit all the people we like anyway (plus geographical distance is tricky, etc.).

After the trauma of my first Heathen group experience I never thought I could have a positive experience of Heathen community. By keeping our focus away from controversies of belief and firmly focused on practice and relationships, we have created a group with no ridiculous power politics (when the stakes are low the politics are vicious, as they say!). We’ve been doing ritual together for so long that now we have deep unspoken bonds and a creative joy that infuses every part of the process.

Writing about these experiences makes me realize how much I look forward to stepping our group up a little more in terms of regularity of gathering. It also makes me realize how much group safety is created when you set belief aside as a criterion of participation and focus on a) fellow-feeling; b) praxis. Unlike a pre-modern tribal community we are not interdependent for material survival, but if we were I imagine that would provide an even more compelling alternative to obsession with dogma or uniformity of thought.

Is this orthopraxic orientation a magic bullet for all the possible problems a Heathen group could encounter? Absolutely not. Has it been an important part of facilitating a lovely group culture for us? Absolutely yes.

But wait…isn’t there some kind of sleight of hand going on here? Isn’t it a shared belief that it is better not to obsess about shared belief?

Well yes, but the point of having a critical stance on belief isn’t to pretend that belief isn’t a ubiquitous part of human life. It is just to be able to step back and have a sense of productive irony about it. The minute I mistake my words about reality for reality, I am lost, and so is my community. Premodern paganisms don’t seem to have made that kind of mistake, but in modernity we do all the time, and that’s a major obstacle to building a healthy modern Heathenry. Thankfully it is also avoidable with an orthopraxic orientation.

(Don’t forget, our first ever book is out and available!)
Print edition available at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0692984712
Ebook edition available at: https://www.amazon.com/Elhaz-Ablaze-Compendium-Chaos-Heathenry-ebook/dp/B079WCH3RK

Belief is Not Your Friend

April 20, 2018March 7, 2018 by Heimlich A. Laguz

Why Chaos Magic and Heathenism fused together? The guiding thread is skepticism about the importance of belief.

Christianity ushered into prominence the notion that right belief (orthodoxy) is fundamental to religious or spiritual life. This notion has profoundly shaped how most modern Westerners understand spirituality and religion. However it is not a notion that is particularly relevant to ancient paganisms.

Therefore it is important for anyone who wants to explore Heathenry or other reconstructed spiritual approaches to develop a sense of irony about the importance of belief that modern Western culture still seems fettered by. Otherwise any attempt to re-enter old spiritual-historical currents will be hiddenly and thoroughly warped by the ubiquitous notion that spirituality entails the holding of beliefs.

One of the reasons that Christianity jived so poorly with Roman paganism is that the latter didn’t place much emphasis on belief. Individuals were able to have whatever theories about the metaphysics of divinity that they wanted. The important thing was not right thinking, it was participation. It was knowing the right way to make spiritual (and cultural) contributions and observations.

This is a really, really radical idea for anyone in the modern Western world. Spirituality for pagan peoples had little, perhaps nothing, to do with right belief and everything to do with what we might term ‘right participation.’

One consequence of this attitude is that syncretism was a common religious phenomenon in ancient times. Everywhere one looks, one finds cross-cultural hybrid deities. Apparently no one thought this to be problematic, perhaps because they had a sense of irony about belief and recognized that praxis was the more important thing.

(Or maybe they had no sense of irony about belief at all and never even pondered the vexing, burdensome dilemmas of early Christian moral philosophy, where for example the thought is as ‘bad’ as the deed, and the abstraction of ‘purity’ is elevated above all else).

When we review Havamal there is a section that appears to be referring to magical or spiritual (perhaps runic?) practice, here is what it says (Hollander translation):

Know’st how to write,                   know’st know to read,
know’st how to stain,                    how to understand,
know’st how to ask,                       how’st to offer,
knows’st how to supplicate,       know’st how to sacrifice?

Observe that the knowledges here referenced are not about dogma or belief, but rather about the practical dimensions of spiritual or magical activity. It might shock many modern Heathens, but there is no rider along the lines of “and if you don’t believe that Loki is anathema then I’ll never let your magic work!” It seems like anyone with the technical knowledge could participate. Right belief? Whatever, pal.

Ok, so this brings us to Chaos Magic because the stanza quoted above could be straight out of a modern Chaos Magic grimoire. Chaos Magic is the first Western occult or spiritual tradition in many centuries to openly express contempt for right belief in favor of a focus on correct technical practice. Chaos Magic is ridiculed for inventing deities or using pop culture figures as spirits, yet its methods are effective, and they are effective for the same reason that ancient pagan religions were satisfying to their adherents – the emphasis is on praxis, not belief.

Modern Heathenry is so bound up in obsession with orthodoxy. I do not believe Heathenry could be used to justify racism and other bigotries if it were not polluted by the Christian obsession with ‘pure,’ binary thought processes. The more we look at ancient paganisms, the more we find they had their moments of outrageous free-for-all. Even the runes, supposedly the unique spiritual DNA of the Germanic peoples, appear to have been cribbed almost wholesale from the Etruscans (or Romans, depending on your biases).

Chaos Magic offers a useful model (the map is not the territory!), a way out of unconscious adherence to orthodoxic thinking. Combined with the grounding of a Heathen perspective that takes reconstructionism seriously yet playfully, the yield is a model of Heathen spirituality that has at least a small chance of recapturing the character of the ancient ways (which is about as good an outcome as is likely possible, given the gulf of time and the lack of information).

It won’t be perfect, and many mistakes will be made, but that’s why we have to keep trying to keep up with the academics and the archaeologists, a problem that all Heathens, whether they have achieved a sense of irony about belief or not, must face. Better to be honest with ourselves than boxing with our own shadows.

Naturally, Chaos Heathenry is subject to any number of uninformed criticisms, often based on the notion that it professes or promotes false beliefs. Oops. We can only say that we never claimed to be anything other than what we claimed to be. There’s no shame in syncretism when it is embraced consciously, in an informed way. That’s what the ancients did, and we are reconstructing that.

This statement should not be understood as an attempt to excuse sloppy thinking or new agism. We have our own particular kind of discipline, and Loki is only as subversive as the dominant culture is repressive. Belief is in various respects an epiphenomenon, the cart put before the horse. Let’s set it back into its appropriate place, and restore playful, open-minded, and fumbling-toward-rigor praxis to its rightful role.