Reconstructionism

Owls, Wasps, and Vipassana Meditation

About three and a half years ago I had a strange, early-morning encounter. It was about 7am, pitch black winter gloom, and I was walking to work. As I passed by a tree, I looked up and found two gleaming eyes looking back at me.

It was big, and white, and intense. And as the owl stared at me, as I stared at it, a word imposed itself upon my consciousness. “Minerva.”

“Oh, “ I responded, “Minerva, like Athena!”

“NO. MINERVA.”

This bit of insistence on specificity was interesting given how syncretic the Greek and Roman cults were, and given that I was receiving this message from a North American owl that surely didn’t have much of a relationship with ancient Rome.

Ok, well. We stared at each other for a bit longer (it was very close!) and then I continued on my way. Later I found out that there had been a spate of owl attacks on early morning walkers in the area, but not on me. I did spend some time after that researching Minerva, however, and discovered her to be a central goddess for the Romans, ruling over wisdom, social harmony, reflection, even healing. I was jealous of Roman reconstructionist pagans: it seemed like those Roman pagans wrote everything down.

Now. At the time I was experiencing a good bit of psychic turmoil and one day in wrestling with this turmoil it visualized itself for me as a cloud of wasps buzzing about me, stinging me with painful thoughts and feelings. “What can I do about this?” I wondered. Then, an imaginary owl came flying in. “If you do what I instruct, I will drive these wasps away from you. Deal?” Deal.

So the owl came in and swept the wasps away with flaps of her strong pinions. And thus was I obliged. I asked Odin about this odd circumstance of suddenly dealing with an ancient Roman goddess at the behest of a modern North American owl. He could have said, “well I’m an Old Norse god and you’re a modern Australian-American, so what the fuck?” Instead he said, “there is some work you need to do and she is the one to help you do it, so I am stepping back for a little while.”

The first instruction was to write a song in Minerva’s honor. I did that. It is 18 minutes long, very complex and interesting, with lyrics about healing and transformation through radical acceptance. I hope to have a good recording of it by the end of the year. It is fun to perform. People seem to like it.

The second instruction was more challenging: attend a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat as taught by S. N. Goenka. I have wanted to do this for many years, and the stars have never aligned. Now I was instructed. It was a grueling experience, and profoundly transformative. Profoundly. In ways I could never have imagined.

Goenka’s approach to lay Buddhist meditation practice could almost be called Chaos Buddhism: emphasis on traditional structure and philosophy, but only as a means to allow the individual to faithfully and safely articulate their own personal development and realization. No dogma here, just profound discipline (and a lot of physical and emotional pain, the kind that silly Westerners run away from all too readily, not realizing it is the door to healing).

I also discovered that the lyrics for my Owl Song almost exactly paraphrased teachings and technical advice offered in the course of the 10-day retreat. It was as though I had been primed to gain maximum benefit. I was also struck by the many parallels to Jung’s ideas (even though scholars dismiss Jung’s writings on Buddhism, perhaps with reason). The critical advantage of Goenka’s take on Buddhist practice over Jung’s psychology is this insight: the body is the unconscious mind.

(To be fair, I have since noticed that Jung does also say this, but he never decisively knew what to do with it. Undertake a Vipassana retreat and you will know what to do with it).

Since that time I have maintained a strong daily meditation practice. At first 2 hours a day per the course recommendation, but the realities of work, study, family, creative, community responsibilities have meant that I only do an hour a day. Even this has been profoundly beneficial. It is like clearing my path back to the Well of Wyrd each and every day.

My wasps have diminished, but more importantly, I am more indifferent to the pain they cause, yet without having to resort to denial or dissociation. With expanding powers of acceptance come expanding powers of all types. There is nothing passive about the applied technical practice of Buddhism.

Every day, no matter what else happens, I spend an hour listening to the sensations of the body. Gradually stripping more and more layers of conditioning, trauma, amnesia. This is not just “mindfulness of the present moment,” it goes much deeper (though it necessarily builds on that foundation). If you want to really understand meditation you need to go back to the Eastern sources directly. A lot of the Western adaptations, though well-intentioned, are inadequate.

I have to laugh at how I came to become a Vipassana practitioner, the unlikely confluence of influences. North American owls; Roman goddesses in some sort of alliance with Old Norse gods, all conspiring to get me to study Buddhist meditation of a specific Burmese-Indian strain. Well, ok. Chaos Heathen.

Does it work, though? It works, though. Does it distract me from loving attentiveness to the forms, traditions, and trappings of Heathenry? Not at all, it actually increases my faculties of appreciation. Is this story ridiculous or wonderful? Yes.

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My Version of the Death Posture

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The death posture, as far as I can determine, was invented by Austin Osman Spare as a tool to fire magical sigils into the Great Unknown. I first encountered it in the writings of Pete Carroll, who evokes practices such as staring at a mirror into one’s own gaze until total vacuity and trance ensue: gnosis, the spell is fired, the work is done.

Well I never really jived with any of the versions of the death posture that I encountered. Maybe I am just a difficult person, I don’t know. But the basic concept – of dying a kind of brief psychic death in order to unite a magical, sigilized intent with the currents of causality – was appealing.

Recently I retrofitted some of Carroll’s writings to come up with my own version of the death posture. It requires a minimal level of able-bodiedness but otherwise is pretty broadly applicable. It is fun, too (pretty much a prerequisite for any kind of magic worth the doing).

Here’s what I do. First, I determine my intent, the outcome I wish to achieve. Second, I allow my imagination to furnish me with runes that express the intent in sigil form. I’ve studied the runes so long, in particular from a reconstructionist perspective, that I don’t have to think very hard to get a combination that seems right. Sometimes it is one rune, sometimes several, whatever works.

Then I chant and visualize the runes. When I finish chanting them, I maintain the visualization. Standing upright, I begin to lean straight backward. Lean, lean, lean, as I get more of an angle as my back arches over. Still visualizing the rune sigil. Then suddenly I lean far enough that I fall.

Snap! In a split second the reflexes kick in and I catch myself. At that moment, total vacuity occurs and the sigil is released into the void. It is impossible to do anything else at that moment but catch oneself; there is no room for thinking. It is lightning-quick, but intense. After all, it feels a little scary – I am about to fall over and hit my head!

As soon as I catch myself I declare: does not matter, need not be, that or something better. Then I move on, because the magic is done.

Once you have this down you can set off spells very quickly and easily. I am getting a pretty good hit rate with it. It is a nice controlled way of injecting a brief moment of helpless terror into consciousness, just the ticket for releasing the magic will into motion.

Go ahead, try it! You might like it. Or hate it. Either way, it will probably trigger something interesting.

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Better Together: Chaos Magick and Reconstructionist Heathenry

I have noticed from various Heathen quarters a lot of anger about the very existences of Chaos Magic and Chaos Heathenry, and beneath that anger appears to lie fear. I thought it would be interesting to reflect on the nature of this anger and this fear.

To begin, it is important to emphasize that I am not a Chaos Magician. I am a Chaos Heathen. A number of angry/fearful Heathen responses to the concept of Chaos Heathenism have not been able to appreciate that we are not Chaos Magicians presuming to pontificate about Heathenry, any more than we are Heathens presuming to dictate to Chaos Magicians. We’re a standalone hybrid, proud to be products of crossbreeding.

The fear and the anger I have observed seem to boil down to two concerns: 1) Skepticism about belief means that ‘anything goes’ and that any opinion is as good as any other; 2) If effective technique is sufficient to produce a magical effect then contempt for the gods and divine powers follows automatically.

I want to address each of these concerns, and then to reflect on a third, implicit, factor that underlies each of them: the mistaken idea that rigid dogma can somehow substitute for or guarantee meaningful spiritual expression, be one Heathen or something else.

Anything Goes? Not Necessarily

It is true that Chaos Magic does some strange and interesting things with magical technique. At times I have rather enjoyed working with fictional characters (such as Elric) or made up deities (Gretchwen the goddess of environmentalism), and found that this gets results. The power of magic does not appear to flow from how venerable a deity, force, or spirit purports to be. Made up alphabets of desire can (not always or necessarily) be just as potent as working with a tradition such as the runes.

Does this mean that my made-up malarky is just as good as if I painstakingly researched the trappings of, say, Heathen magical practice and belief? Absolutely not. Effectiveness is only a partial basis for determining the worth of an idea; otherwise ‘pure’ scientific research without a pre-determined application would not prove to be as fruitful as it does.

Utilitarianism is only one index of worth. Beauty, love, and fascination are also important benefits of exploring the elements of tradition. Dogmatism destroys utilitarianism, beauty, love, and fascination.

When I spend hours contending with the profound culture shock that serious research into the ancient Heathen worldviews entails; when I spend hours trying to separate centuries of projection from the source material  itself; when I struggle to come to grips with, for example, the mind-bending possibility that the ancient Heathens did not have a modern understanding of the future (see Paul Bauschatz or Bil Linzie’s work) – these hours of struggle establish a profound relationship and bonding with the images, stories, and technologies of Heathen magic.

And that bonding is not easily replicated with made-up, homebrew magical systems. Even the marvelously rich systems of Dr. Dee or Aleister Crowley – life works of elaborate magical symbolism – are but the fruits of the work of inspired individuals. Whereas when one works through even the fragmentary record that remains of ancient Heathen magic, one is potentially more able to sift through the distortions of individual expression; there are more opportunities to find points of resonance, more “scurrilities of the unconscious” as Marie-Louise Von Franz would say.

The work of struggling with the historical material; with (often distortive) secondary and tertiary sources; with the ambiguity and weirdness of the ancient Heathen cultures – all of this can build a relationship, a level of deep emotional connection. This, in turn, can be activated in the performance of a magical or spiritual act, so that I am not only working with my in-the-moment gnosis, but also with the whole reservoir of my relationship to the errant fragments that remain of the Heathen cultures.

In other words, Chaos Magic proved that technical precision is necessary and sufficient, but that doesn’t mean that a totally shallow, made up set of magical metaphors is just as good as something with substance and complexity. Yes, in any individual case I can probably get equivalent magical results, but in the long run my connection to tradition can sink deep roots and I get to tap into more than just my own powers of gnosis when I work magic, so my efficiency is up and my ease with it.

When you look at what the Chaotes say, if you look at the founders of the Chaos Magic tradition, I don’t think they ever said that any frame of belief is as good as any other. What they said is that belief easily usurps the rightful role of technique, resulting in magical practice that amounts to unwitting and ineffectual self-parody. They said that we have to reflect on our thoughts and actions and be willing to step back, to have a sense of humble irony, a sense of humor: “banish with laughter!”

Now, if we are serious about applying reconstructionist principles to Heathenry then this advice is very relevant. Reconstructionism means that we have to make everything we do as Heathens provisional. We have to be willing to sacrifice cherished dogmas if our intellectual conscience demands it (for example, if we come across new information, evidence, or analysis of source material).

We also need a sense of humor for the things we took seriously but that we then discover we misunderstood. The lightness of thought this work entails is the same lightness of thought we find in the Chaos Magic approach; only the context and perhaps goals differ.

Chaos Magic = Spiritual Contempt? Naaaah

Chaos Magic wanted to cut through the ponderous layers of abstraction in which Western Magick entangled itself. It felt that magick was no longer rich with numinous delight, but rather belabored with litigious ponderousness. It surveyed a circumstance in which the magic had been lost beneath layers of rigidity, abstraction, and intellectual (sometimes literal) authoritarianism.

Chaos Magic wanted to occupy more than either armchair speculation or impotently complex ritual. Its reactive emphasis on technique, its ironic stance toward belief, has to be seen in the context of the problems Chaos Magic sought to redress.

In other words, Chaos Magic can be taken as an attempt to radically open the path for numinous delight to express itself, to cut through the choking constrictions of dogma and rigidity when they rear their ugly heads. It was reverence, not contempt, that impelled the early Chaos Magicians’ iconoclasm.

Again, this willingness to challenge received wisdom is essential for reconstructionist Heathen practice. We are so vulnerable to projecting modern assumptions onto historical lore (this seems to be particularly the case when Heathenry is used as an excuse to legitimate racism or totalitarianism). It is so tempting to declare “this material is ours,” and then fail to notice that in actuality the ancient traditions violate our contemporary mores and assumptions on a regular basis.

As such, serious reconstructionist Heathen work is about unlearning and relearning. It is a dynamic approach. The skills this approach requires are the very same skills that are cultivated by the Chaos Magic approach. Thus: Chaos Heathenry.

Dogma is Not a Guarantee of Anything

Iconoclasm goes in cycles. At its worst it is awful – witness the chaos of the Reformation, in which priceless Catholic art was destroyed by freshly-converted Protestants who thought that smashing the faces of saints would somehow get them closer to heaven. At its best, it is wonderful – Buddhist practice as taught by S. N. Goenka enables a radical, liberatory self-knowledge and fully testable propositions.

We want to preserve old works of art, and we don’t want to fool ourselves into thinking that preserving the old is the same as reforging the new. A tree that hardens and petrifies is not a living tree. All we have of the original Heathen cultures are fragments, broken pieces of petrified wood.

We cannot afford to let dogmatic attitudes impede our understanding and elaboration of these fragments. Similarly, we cannot fool ourselves into thinking that encyclopedic knowledge of these fragments is identical with the experience of living spiritual practice. We cannot confuse our subjective spiritual experiences with absolute truth. We must walk a complex and difficult tightrope; the minute we forget this we fall.

Chaos Heathenry is not perfect, finished, complete, or absolute. The minute it purports to be any of those things it will need to be overthrown. I believe the fear and anger it provokes is rooted in a mistake: the mistake of thinking that a perfect, finished, complete, absolute belief system is somehow possible or desirable.

Heathenry is doomed if we attempt to reduce it to such a system. Every time a claim to certainty is shed, a sigh of relief follows in its wake.

(I express my gratitude for good conversation with wise friends for the stimulus to write this article).

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Heathen Community Sans Belief

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

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(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

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Belief is Not Your Friend

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.

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(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

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Returning to Seething

Groa's Incantation By W.G. Collingwood (1854 - 1932)Recently I reactivated my interest in Jan Fries-style seidr – namely the induction of shaking, swaying, and trembling as a healing tool. I’d like here to discuss the background to this technique, draw some parallels with the findings of trauma psychology, and discuss my recent initial foray back into the practice.

First of all, Fries has been criticized by many Heathens for his apparently bogus connection of seidr to “seething,” and thereby to trembling as the basis of Northern trance work. Fries has actually addressed a lot of these criticisms and even pointed out that his ideas were only ever presented as playfully speculative.

I have always maintained that there is nothing wrong with speculative innovation so long as one is transparent that this is what one is doing, so that others can make their own informed choices. Fries, I do not think, has tried to pass off speculation as historical fact. For me, Fries’s notion of seething makes absolutely perfect sense. I do not believe that anyone can really claim to practice “authentic” seidr in this day and age, but seething seems to fill that function for me just marvelously. So there.

More importantly, Fries’ research on traditions of magical trembling seems to indicate that such experiences are common in a vast array of cultures, and symbolically speaking they make sense in a Heathen context too, even if the specific technology of seidr (whatever it even was exactly!) makes no reference to trembling experiences. That said, there are boiling cauldrons and ecstatic furies aplenty, and the magical power of ergi seems very nicely compatible with the flowing vulnerable liminality that trembling can produce – states of healing and sorcery.

As such, I feel confident that in going back to the testimony of my own bodymind, and connecting that to my Heathen practice, I cannot really go too far wrong. I trust the flesh to tell me what is best for it (at least if I know how to listen!). That doesn’t mean I have to sacrifice my keen interest in reconstructionism, it just means I have healthy senses of irony and humor.

In Fries’ book Seidways the theme of healing recurs in his accounts of different seething-type practices from around the world, be they San magic rituals or Mesmerism. My own experience of trembling, shaking, and swaying practices align with his accounts most marvelously; in fact, reading that book was like coming home for me, spiritually speaking. Finally someone had put words to the deep, wordless experiences that I knew and craved.

Indeed, long before I consciously realized the significance of trembling, I had already undergone several powerful healing experiences in which I spontaneously trembled, shook, swayed, or even several such behaviors at once. These movements were automatic, unguided by conscious intention. Since I started consciously seething I found out that these behaviors could move from consciously willed into automatic modes, and that the more this involuntariness suffused them, the deeper the magical effect.

Imagine, therefore, my surprise on reading research on the psychophysiology of trauma. It appears that when a mammal experiences trauma (e.g. almost getting killed by a predator) it first experiences the potent neurophysiological event of the fight-flight-freeze reaction. After the danger has passed, the animal will then tremble and shake. And this behavior releases the body of the traumatic damage done to the nervous system and organs, so that the creature can shortly return to normal life without any chronic harm from its harrowing experience.

Humans, on the other hand, do not listen to our bodies (this comment applies mostly to modern Westernized humans) and so by and large have forgotten how to allow ourselves to tremble after experiencing trauma. This in turn is the root of many chronic problems that can be caused by trauma. It is not necessarily the traumatic event itself that causes the depression or the anxiety; the culprit can also be that the body’s natural mechanism for correcting systemic imbalances (imbalances that are adaptive in the moment of danger but not long term) has been suppressed.

The parallel with seething is significant: what Fries documented in Seidways is nothing less than a catalog of the ways different cultures have sought to ensure that cultural praxis serves the biological and psychological necessity of trembling. More than this! Such practices also marshal the tremendous psychic potency of trembling and, aligned with conscious intent, make it into a powerful engine for the working of magic.

Seething, therefore, is a particularly primal kind of magic, one which activates every layer of the nervous system’s evolutionary strata and brings all that power to bear on the seether’s intent. Yet this is not something that can be mastered overnight. First much self-healing through trembling must be accomplished (meditation, particularly in the Vipassana tradition, which emphasizes the experience of the sensate body, is a valuable adjunct).

This is where I am up to – this process of self healing. It is funny that, even though I have understood the significance of seething for years, I am only now finally taking it to my deepest heart. Well, we each have our journey, our voyage onto the sea of irony and mystery.

Recently I undertook a session of seething for the first time in many years. Since that session I have been astounded at the loosening of certain very persistent and difficult psychological fetters. I find myself more able to become conscious of the ways in which unconscious, emotional forces hiddenly direct conscious thought into flights of justification, attempts to pass off as rational what are really courses of action that have been shaped by unresolved trauma in the bodymind. Deep shifts are occurring in the tectonics of my psyche. I can intuit that if I keep up with this practice, then this profound shifting will get progressively more potent.

So what does my seething practice look like? I run from Jan Fries’ directions in Seidways pretty much as written (admittedly he allows plenty of latitude for individual preference). I find low light with candles to be helpful; I put a randomized iTunes playlist of Dead Can Dance on softly in the background, and I open the rite with the invocation of runes for protection.

But most importantly – and this is a detail that in earlier years I neglected to my cost – I am sure to ask, rather than tell, the deep mind/spirits/gods/whatever for what I would like to experience. I am humble and respectful and invite its/their instruction, rather than thinking I have to be the “master magician” in control at all times. No, such an ego-centered attitude runs utterly contrary to the sympathetic and autonomic spirit of seething, which loves to undermine the illusion of the ego’s supremacy.

As I shake, sway, tremble, and seeth, I sometimes chant, moan, sing, and laugh. My mind wanders and then returns. I am sometimes vigorous in my movements, sometimes subtle. There is little about this that is intellectual, formalized, or precise. I turn again and again to accepting what the body wishes to share, seeking to cultivate trust in that deep self from which all spontaneity and magic flows.

I call out to Odin and Loki mostly, and they are helpful, though each embodies seething in a different way. My recent Loki-themed articles reflect the building unconscious anticipation that was leading me to return to seething; if Loki is the body, then seething is worshipping Loki. It is restoring to the body recognition of its innate beauty, just as it is.

I have never loved my body. I have never trusted it. I have hated it, circumscribed it, battered it, despised it, treated it with contempt. I have been learning in recent years to nourish it, to be kind to it, to embrace it. Ill health and emotional struggles forced me to do so. Now I wonder if this whole journey were not a prelude to my decision to reintroduce seething into my life.

I am ready for this now as I never have been before. I am grounded in a vigorous meditation practice, and this seems crucial. I encourage anyone reading this article to stop now, and instead get stuck into active, practical magic, in whatever way you see fit. Magic is meaningless if it is not actively practiced. Perhaps I’ll see you in one of the worlds that only the trembling seethers may enter…

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Composing Heathenry

I wrestle endlessly with the somewhat related themes of reconstructionism and cultural specificity as they pertain to Heathenry. Tonight some playful (pun unintended but welcome) analogies to music occurred to me. They might help to elucidate my thoughts on both reconstructionism and the Folkish/universalist thing. First I’ll set the scene with some comments about music, but stick with me, even if it seems tangential or obscure at first – I promise to bring my rumination to bear on the field of contemporary Heathen thinking.

As a musician I’m big on knowing theory. I can talk about double harmonic minors, and 13:8 time, and 16th note sweep picking (on a bass, whee!) all day long. And I can effortlessly apply that theory: it isn’t just words or ideas (well, ok, the 16th note bass sweeps do take a bit of effort, but I’m getting there!).

The discipline of all that structure is paradoxically freeing. When I want to do fast, complex music, my hands know what to do because my brain is so well versed. I know intuitively how different tones will combine from my theoretical understanding. I can break down compositions and assemble arrangements with both flair and rapidity. I can store a lot of information about musical structure very simply through the application of underlying rules of harmony or rhythm, which makes learning, performing, and remembering material a lot easier.

I’m far from perfect, and my music theory is very much geared towards practical usage rather than armchair reflection (I’m 100% self-trained). But nonetheless, I think the point is made.

I have even found that, being so deeply grounded in the “rules” of music, I can break them freely. I often find myself doing this with harmonic construction these days. I like the challenge of creating fresh tonal canvasses within the “rules” of conventional scales and chords, but I also find myself freely able to break up recognisable patterns and work atonally. Because I know what the “rules” of music are I can break them in interesting and enjoyable ways.

Occasionally I encounter the view that learning a lot of music theory can be a straightjacket that destroys spontaneity and the creative impulse. I know this does happen sometimes, especially for heavily drilled classical students.

Yet most people I’ve met who claim to avoid learning theory in order to preserve their freedom of expression actually have a rather limited range. They often seem to devolve to the same two or three tricks over and over again, not understanding how to develop their sound. They might be able to “hear” how to give flesh to the bones of their ideas, but lack the skill to embody their creations in a satisfying way.

In the worst cases they resort to “experimentalism” as a substitute for inspiration and ability, hiding behind provocative bungling as though it were a purposeful choice and not an inarticulate flailing.

So my point should be clear: with prudence and an adventurous attitude one can free oneself by submitting to the rigour of musical theory. One needs to avoid the reef of drudging slavery to musical form, and one needs to avoid the seemingly free – but actually inarticulate and blundering – position of being anti-theory.

Well, I see Heathenry in a similar light.

Sure, reconstructionism produces various boffins who shackle themselves to academic minutiae and end up saying the most ridiculous things. On the other hand, without the discipline of historical grounding, people cook up the most half-baked spiritual repast and, not knowing any better, think that they’re somehow creating something wonderful! Yet their efforts lack depth, grit, character (and you see this just as much among “Folkish” Heathens as among Universalists, incidentally).

The better road is to take the adventurousness of the Unsubstantiated Personal Gnosis (UPG) brigade (the anti-theory, or anti-reconstruction types), and the rigour of the reconstructionists. In this way, theory can offer a discipline which frees the creative spark to express itself with great subtlety.

For me this manifests as what I generally refer to as Psychological Reconstructionism. For example, to me understanding the worldview of the old Heathens – the importance of wyrd, time, interconnection, sacredness, hospitality, gift-giving, and reciprocity – stands over and above particular debates about exactly what clothes were worn when or the like.

And this attitude frees me to recognise the similarities between Heathenry and other traditions, even while simultaneously preserving a feel for the uniqueness of the Heathen traditions (and others). Just as music is a universal language spoken in an infinite range of nuances – so too culture. Hence, for example, when I see in Odin the archetype of (among others) the Wounded Healer, I can recognise how this connects him to many other cultures and traditions, even though I can still celebrate the manner in which he is a unique manifestation of that meme.

As a musician I’ve played in prog rock bands, death metal bands, world music outfits, experimental groups, folk ensembles, and bands that have fused various of the aforementioned influences. I’ve touched on genres as varied as black metal, hip hop, and ‘live’ dance music. I’ve played with blast beating metal drummers from hell, African percussionists, tabla masters, Middle Eastern percussionists, you name it (in some cases, I’ve played with people who’ve had mastery of several of these domains!). In all of these configurations, I’ve used the same language to find my way, bringing my particular idiom (to borrow from Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail) to bear in each case.

And I have the same attitude with culture. I bring my own spiritual idiom to the world, but I can freely interface with kindred spirits across all sorts of literal and figurative borders. My deep sense of specific identity – my interest in reconstructionism and ancestor worship – informs my spirit in ways that also enable me to interface with the Other, until I come to appreciate the ways in which seemingly hard barriers are always more porous and fascinating than first shallow glances might suggest.

Hence I am a reconstructionist who loves UPG; and I am a staunch ancestor worshipper and Europhile who embraces cross-cultural exchange and intermingling at the same time. Because to me, the latter is part of the heritage I glean from the former. Just as I am a theory-based musician who thinks nothing of violating every harmonic law in the book if it creates the effect I want (and indeed, I use my knowledge of the ‘rules’ of music and spirituality to break themselves in creative and appealing ways).

The fundamental question is this: are the forms of tradition (be it musical or spiritual or whatever) there to serve us, or are we to serve them? Or is it a bit of both? If we respect them we recognise that they were born from the inspiration of our predecessors, and hence to truly be “reconstructionist” (which, I should mention, is NOT at all necessarily synonymous with being Folkish or Universalist or any other -ism, as these comments on the whole imply) one might have to break the rules of reconstructionism now and again.

In my personal microcosmos Elric and Odin and alchemical Mercury are deeply related (yet naturally distinct); and for me the profound obsession with memory in Heathenry seems uncannily like the same obsession in Sufism (yet I at least cannot seem to effect a straightforward, simple fusion of the two). Things can be different yet the same; in fact this is what the symbol of Yggdrasill is all about: reminding us of the simultaneous oneness and difference of all things, and reminding us of the necessary interdependence that binds the archetypes of  isolation and dissolution.

Blur the lines and we see things as they are; blur the lines and we begin to shed abstraction and embrace the endless mystery from which our world is woven. The closer you examine any boundary, the less distinct it becomes – that might not make it less real, but it forces us to recognise that our specific, localised uniqueness is not dependent on rigid separation, nor necessarily threatened by absence of the same.

What counts is our integrity and our vulnerable imagination. Rigidly clinging to rules about either isolated specificity or generalised universality amounts to underutilising our human faculties and potential. As always, George Orwell had it right to blame the ills of the world on the gramophone mind and not on the particular records being played at any given time.

For like it or not, we are all hedgewalkers like Odin (another reason to call him Allfather), whether it comes to musical expression or spiritual inspiration. The point of being strict…is so that we can become free of all restriction.

All only in my humble, internally contradictory, and frighteningly arbitrary opinion, of course.

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Honor Your Ancestors

A fundamental tenet of Reconstructionist Heathenism is that we should honor our ancestors and practice traditions in line with our genetic heritage.

On the face of it, this seems a fairly reasonable suggestion. What’s always confused me, though, is why so many people then proceed to focus on just one aspect of their own ancestry, and one short period of history at that. And while we’re at it, why is this so often treated as a commandment and not just a helpful suggestion?

When I think of “my heritage” there are many different periods that come to mind. My immediate ancestors were Australian for several generations on both sides and my Australianness is something that I, predictably, feel much more connected to since having left that great land. Beyond that, there is much  of history that I cannot help but find fascinating.

The Viking age has always caught my attention, for sure, but then so has the Renaissance. So has the stuff that came before the Viking age. More recently I find myself returning, again and again, to the period that came before iron, before bronze even before agriculture.

Honor your ancestors? Absolutely. Why not? But honor all of them, all the way back, from those within memory to the beginning of time.

This gives us a lot more tradition to play with.

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