Spirituality

Pulsation and Breath

Being, becoming, passing away. A tripartite concession to nothingness. What we consider being is always already an abstraction by the time it has been articulated. A kind of retrospective summary and crystallization. The statement “it is” is nothing more or less than an obituary.

Clutching at fixed patterns is a dangerous ploy. We think rigidity is a life raft in the ocean of endless chaos called existence. We can force rigidity to “work” within carefully constructed frames and conditions. That doesn’t mean that any of it adds up right. The more conditional I make my life, choices, narratives of self and other, the more illusions of control I can conjure. This might be a very dangerous thing.

So rigidity seems to afford a measure of safety from the awe and horror of having to endlessly make un- or under-informed choices. A horror and awe that is inescapable. Yet rigidity does not actually reduce the number of choices of these kinds. It merely asserts a set of pre-decided answers, then denies that other options are available or possible. The magic of habit then comes into play, and free will devolves to seeming destiny.

“why do it this way?” “Because that’s what I do.” This reasoning becomes a substitute basis for much of life. I make a choice in order to get through a dilemma, a loss, a fear, a crisis. I make the expedient call or the anxious reaction. Then I build that part of my life around this reactive, tense bodymind set. Then I call this my identity or my character. I certainly come to regard it as my truth.

On that basis I tell myself I have found my truth. Yet it seems more as though I have just constructed it, conjured my “truth” from the process of reifying reactive, short-term survival responses. Soon my anger and fear are recruited to the legitimation of my defensive posture. Thought and belief swiftly follow. “Why are you like that?” “Here are my reasons.” Yet there are no reasons. There are just ersatz invocations of safety, unacknowledged.

The lack of acknowledgement that all my carefully laid out narratives, reactions, and habits are a product of protective clutching becomes a doom. A self-fulfilling doom. I can rumor myself into smaller and smaller dead ends of selfhood. I can confuse cramped posture and cognition alike as my personality. Beneath these pinched surfaces my organismic spontaneity languishes, suppressed, choked, bound and abandoned.

This is a dissociative dilemma. I am relinquishing my internal communication and integration for the sake of the appearance of predictability, safety, and mastery. The narrative self, shorn of embodiment, uses its only tool – reification – to protect the whole. In doing so it takes over responsibility for the whole organism. There is no room for gut feel, heart guidance, or brain hemisphere integration. Just narrative cramp. Fruitless clutching at “meaning” that was scrapped together under duress and passed off as necessity.

The project of recovering spontaneity is fundamental and essential. The project of abandoning safety cramp is essential. The project of redefining responsibility and choice to embrace the unknown is essential. The more I flee from what I cannot control the more it silently shapes me. Control lies in the clutches of the random, the uncertain, the ambivalent yet resolutely playful experiment. It lies in heuristics, not linear prescriptions.

The first step in embracing uncertainty lies in shaking. Shaking the body. Letting it pulsate, tremble, quiver, tense and release over and over again. When we perceive danger we instinctively clench and tighten. The longitudinal patterns of this tensing and tightening – making them habitual and unconscious – is what we mistake for our true nature. True nature, just the hackneyed grab bag of disowned safety reactions in the body!

So we shake, and tremble, and pulsate, and breathe heavily. We make spontaneous movements that make no sense, that have no readily interpretable meaning. Not being able to interpret is important. The inchoate forces us to confront the constricting armor of our habits in a new way and perhaps to loosen them.

The breathing is particularly essential. We ignore, deny, and suppress the breath. Somewhere in my life I held my breath in the face of fear and the danger passed. So I learned that stilling the breath “brings” safety. How ironic that oxygen starvation and carbon dioxide poisoning might be associated with safety! So we have a kind of Stockholm Syndrome with the act of holding the breath.

The antidote is a practice of welcoming and generosity. Instead of clenching the breath in when we face fear, anxiety, anger, uncertainty, confusion, overwhelm, we deliberately breathe out into our fear. Into our projections about the future, the past, ourselves, others. We give something of ourselves, and behold: we empower ourselves. Giving away, we acquire.

This paradox is no accident. Paradox is a fundamental principle of this existence. Extremes become their inverses. Constantly. Duality is always unified according to the field through which it plays out. When I clench and tighten I choose “safety,” and in abandoning “risk” I lose safety, exchanging it for rigid patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting that trap me in danger responses perpetually. A poor exchange.

On the other hand, if I recognize and embrace paradox for what it is, that is to say, the primary stitch by which existence is sewed, I generate a different sort of profile as I move through the waters of life. I cease fighting inevitability. I cease insisting on an impossible level of uniformity, pattern, structure. I am no longer asking for impossibility, so I am no longer disappointed.

I no longer need to justify my existence on some basis of moral judgment, which frees me of the self-appointed burden of judging others. My existence becomes a long-cycling dance between breath and breathlessness; inhalations and exhalations. Belly expanding and contracting. Mouth and nasal passages massaged by air in motion. Lungs expanding and contracting, communing with a heart that beats in coordination. Organs can come into their own, flowing, fluid functioning.

Nervous system follows. Not just brain, whole body nervous system. Heart. Gut. Periphery. Sympathetic and parasympathetic (another great duality!). Embracing experiencing breath first, I embrace the duality of scarcity and plenty embodied in every inhale and exhale. My basis of moment to moment awareness ceases to be tectonic – always only one earthquake from total disaster – and assumes instead a tidal character, a rhythmic grace.

When I abandon rigid, protective cramp in favor of the pulsation of the breath, I gain self-mastery. Mastery not as dominion-over, but as oneness-with. Thought and flesh are restored to their original unitary flow. I am not longer enslaved to my protective cramp, that rigidity that I can so easily mistake for my character or personality.

The process of depatterning and repatterning is no easy thing. Many false starts are entailed. So be it, these two may be welcomed as necessary, even integral. There is never anything wasted. So no need to fear or resent suffering, since it too is one part of the movement of pulsation. We are made of water. Water does not resent itself, or fear itself, or try to impose an order upon itself. It is spontaneously self-organizing when we cease to intrude upon its natural and intrinsic logic.

We forget that falling in love, we must also come to terms with what we find annoying and distasteful – even downright intolerable – in the other and also in ourselves. Yet it is precisely this confrontation that leads to our greatest growth.
– Robert Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow

Johnson’s point is palpable. Like it or not, we are married to ourselves and to our being thrown into this world. I can manage the vulnerability of this marriage by constriction, fear, and armor. I can disappear or impose. I can strain, clutch, force, insist, demand. These are not behaviors of relationship. These are behaviors of control and destruction. I visit them on myself as well as the other. The more I use them on the other, the more my own spirit withers. The more my spirit withers, the more pathetic I judge my ability to thrive, and so the more I resort to imposing domination on my world.

The involuntary marriage to self cannot be redeemed through any amount of control clench. We must instead take it over. Declare “thus I willed it,” even if initially this tastes like a lie. Alternatively, perhaps we ask ourselves the question “how would I proceed if I had willed this, too?” This little act of make-believe pairs well with the long slow outbreath into each moment. The deliberate breath and the deliberate thought. Movement follows as a natural course, a water tide.

The corollary of this softening of tightening is that we must embrace even it. Sometimes the intentional recruiting of all of our resources to tightening can free us from its clutches. Sometimes the only way out is to recapitulate with intention and irony. Rather than resisting and giving in to rigidity as we so readily do. Holding my breath too could have its necessary purpose and value. When I have learned I can readily breathe I can learn to hold my breath so lightly that even constriction comes to be seen in its fullness as a natural moment in the oscillation of my flesh psyche. No need to fight constriction, no need to control the urge to control. Allow it to return to its place in the tide of ebb and flow.

If I am living true to these conjectures, it might not be particularly noticeable. There might be little observable contrast from the outside. The point is not to define some sudden, dramatic, and perplexing transmutation. This expectation still secretly mounts itself on the steed of disowned clench.

Instead, I might simply be saying yes to the iterative uncertainty of self-definition and self-recognition, where before I tried to make it be through force of will (so funny, when nothing can be made to be, only witnessed and nourished).

Witnessing and nourishing I become. I honor becoming. So this is an ethical calling also, this call to pulsation, breathing, trembling, seducing ourselves to the nonbinary and the expansive. We leave “should” tattered in our wake, not because we should, but just as a natural byproduct of “how would I proceed if I had willed this, too?” We will even our shortcomings, failures, disappointments, and inconsistencies. Are these not also precious jewels if all experience is a precious, pulsating jewel?

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Heimlich A Laguz Interviewed on Weird Web Radio

I was recently interviewed on the Weird Web Radio podcast by fellow Elhaz Ablaze book contributor Lonnie Scott. We talked about runes, occultism, mystery, Loki, ghosts, chaos magic, Odin, doubt, and the processes of healing. It is a fun, freewheeling stream of consciousness and for the most part, I think I managed to avoid embarrassing myself.

The only thing I forgot to say was that, while I make some criticisms of Edred Thorsson’s whole “you have to memorize five pages of my second-rate poetry to do the most basic magic” trip, I myself do write and memorize long and complex ritual passages, and believe that this can be a deeply worthwhile way to approach magic and devotional practice alike. I just don’t think that it is necessary to get results, and also, well, gods some of his stuff is awful. But I digress…

Part of the podcast is a subscriber-only section (it is super cheap!). If you enjoy the main interview I definitely recommend flicking a buck or two to Lonnie so you can hear the rest; I actually think that last part (which ran close to 30 minutes if I recall) was the most interesting.

http://weirdwebradio.com/episode-29-heimlich-a-laguz-talking-chaos-magic-heathenry-runes-and-spirits/

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Ancestor Worship is Not About Biology

There’s this notion among some Heathens (even, occasionally, progressive ones) whereby ancestry is reduced to biology. This is unfortunate for a few reasons.

First, it is anachronistic. There are interesting saga references by which an individual’s personal orloeg could be inherited by someone named after them – even if not related, in fact, even if the child of their enemy! So if ancestry can be determined by intentional naming, that’s much more complex and nuanced than the crass rigidity of biological reductionism, which really only emerged as a convenient way of legitimating colonial invasions in the last few hundred years.

Jettisoning biological reductionism opens up the realization that a connection to ancestry is rooted in an ongoing relationship, not mere static membership of a group based on some kind of (possibly quite arbitrary) putative genetic connection. After all, geneticists consistently find that there is more genetic variation within specified racial or ethnic groups than between different groups!

Biological reductionism implies that the work of being connected to the ancestors is done by default. This is a short step from basically ignoring the ancestral currents that might be present. If I recognize that ancestral connection is an ongoing conversation, one in which at best I am an equal partner, well that’s going to have a very different implication for what “ancestor worship” might mean to me.

When we look at traditional cultures we see an emphasis on regular personal and ritual practice aiming at maintaining and strengthening relationships with ancestral figures, be they specific individuals or more nonspecific (and that can include animal spirits, plant spirits, spirits of place, etc.). Ancestral connectedness is rooted in practice, not in labels. There is little room for the cultivation of reverence if we burden ourselves with the blinders of biological reductionism.

Secondly, biological reductionism, particularly in the context of painfully modern (and unscientific) racial categorizations, obscures the fact that ancestor worship is not about abstract categories and groupings (like “white” or “Asian” or whatever). It is about my personal, specific lineages, the specific threads of relationships that bind me to the weave of history.

So when the now openly white supremacist Stephen McNallen says he would never have had children with a Tibetan woman because he would want his descendants to “look like us,” he is missing something really obvious, namely that by having children with our hypothetical Tibetan lady, he would be melding lineages with that woman, and thus the Tibetan ‘them’ and McNallen’s white ‘us’ would be united, woven as one. His Tibetan-European children would look like “us,” because in his marital union his “us” would have expanded from what he had before.

Indeed, this applies even if two people of the same race marry, since as I noted genetic variation within groups is greater than between them. Thus, genetically speaking, McNallen might have actually promoted more uniformity in his genetic descendants precisely by marrying and procreating with someone of a different race! I am sure this nicety would be lost on someone as dim as McNallen, of course.

Thirdly, biological reductionism excludes the possibility of spiritual and philosophical ancestors. Figures such as C. G. Jung, Lao Zi, Sylvia Rivera, Milton Erickson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Peter Kropotkin, Nelson Mandela, and Marie-Louise Von Franz are all philosophical or spiritual ancestors to me, even though I am not biologically related to any of them.

Similarly, I have much deeper connection to the people I choose as family than almost all of my biological family – why should that be devalued in the name of biological reductionism? And that’s before I get to the Heathens I’ve known who are not of European descent yet who have taught me such profound lessons about the old gods and ways, and who are clearly and deeply connected to the Heathen current (much more so, in fact, than many, perhaps most, of the European-descended Heathens I have met).

And now I think about it, I have no Heathen blood relatives, so all of my experience of Heathen ritual and community has been shared with people I am unrelated to. Does our at-best distant ancestral similarity somehow undermine the very real depth and power of our relationships? I should think not.

In our book I write about how ancestor worship ultimately articulates an animistic vision of mutual symbiosis, interconnection, and relationship among all things. If I am really serious about worshipping my ancestors, it is arbitrary to say that they end at the elusive and ever-shifting boundaries of skin color or nationality.

Odin, Vili, and Ve are described as creating the first humans from trees. Those trees are ultimately formed from the remnants of Ymir’s corpse, since that is what the whole cosmos is shaped from. How can Odin be the ancestor of any human, therefore, if ancestry merely means biological relationship? Indeed, how can we call him a god when he is clearly described as being of giant stock? And yet we are assured that he is the Allfather, and the highest of the Aesir; apparently his kind of ancestrality transcends mere blood relatedness.

Thus ancestor worship, once it is freed from biological reductionism, opens an infinity of doors. But when it is burdened by biological reductionism it merely amounts to stagnation, hypocrisy, and denial. It takes fertile possibility and makes a barren waste of them.

Ultimately, reducing ancestry to biology is a move from the miser’s playbook. It’s anachronistic as far as Heathenry goes, and it stifles the free flow of the creative spirit. It reduces living relationships to empty, static formalisms. It violates both the primary sources and the philosophical foundations of Heathenry, assuming we understand the Heathen worldview to be based on a vision of wyrd as the interconnecting matrix of all.

Thus: it is really crucial that we divest the concept of ancestor worship from modern oppressive concepts of biological race. Not only for the above reasons (i.e. that biological reductionism undermines the quality of our Heathenry), but because biological reductionism threatens to reduce Heathenry and/or ancestor worship to being an excuse for hatred and bigotry. No thanks!

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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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The Forest of the Unnamed

Perhaps within you there is something that might be called the Forest of the Unnamed. You might find it waits within you on the very periphery of your awareness, hovering in anticipation of your attention. It lurks hungrily, greedily, its vast unknown waiting keenly to devour and to be devoured. It is a promise, and a gift, and a threat, a tension and obligation, a pledge of self to self.

Perhaps this Forest of the Unnamed has languished. Perhaps it has languished out of mind’s sight, forgotten, its paths abandoned, its ways lost in a haze. Perhaps you have neglected it, ignored its subtle siren calls. Perhaps you have set it aside, turned away from its invitation, permitted yourself to slide past its green embrace.

In favor of what have you declined the call of the forest? The call of pavement and smog. The call of street signs and regulations. The call of authority and order. The call to suppress spontaneity in the name of conformity. The call to deny the natural flow of the body as it is. The call to value the self only in terms of predetermined categories, the blandishments of capitalism, technocracy, reductionism, objectification.

A thing is not a thing. A thing is a door into magic. Anything can be a door into magic. Everything is a door into magic. Magic is another name for the Forest of the Unnamed that waits, forlorn yet hopeful, for your embrace. Yet this secret, hidden in plain sight, has been hidden by authorities, by judgment, by greed, by objectification, by control. Untether a human being from their inner Forest of the Unnamed and you can control them and make them think this is a good thing. You can destroy the world in their name.

The process of recovering one’s personal Forest of the Unnamed is fraught. It requires the embrace of fear, doubt, contempt, rejection, and loss. The price paid to reconnect with the magic within is set high by a world that is twisted into hierarchies of objectification and reductionism, exploitation and denial. When we are beyond the maps we have been given, there and only there can we find ourselves.

The willingness to recall the call of the Forest of the Unnamed is the beginning. It can be a mantra, to call oneself back to that Forest over and over again. Each time we touch that verdant vale of mystery, we might find some new part of self (re-)awakening. This is frightening and painful just as it is exciting and joyous. Facing one’s numbness hurts, yet it is also a gateway to exhilaration.

What do you not permit yourself to be? What thriving do you suppress? What creativity do you stifle, choke, and abandon, expelled into the deeps of the Unnamed Forest within? Will you not dare to foray there, to discover the beautiful secrets that merely wait your loving gaze and embrace?

Authoritarian objectification will say to you that there is no Forest, and if there is, that it is bad, unpredictable, untrustworthy, unruly, in need of management, in need of a rigidity that you will never be able to permanently impose once you allow that Forest to breathe in the sweet oxygen of your loving attention. Do not be fooled by this swindle. The beginning of your journey into the Forest of the Unnamed may have some false starts, mistakes, fumbles, but this is just an artifact of inexperience. The Forest will be your teacher if you but suspend disbelief long enough to allow it to be so.

There will be failure, perhaps at times disastrous. There will be illusions of self-discovery that in time are exposed as mere surface excursions into the mysteries of the deep. There will be truths terrifyingly exhilarating, intimidating like the soaring heights of great mountains. These are all necessary developments if we are to come into accord with the Forest of the Unnamed.

Yet beware the old impulse to think the Forest can be mapped, bounded, controlled. Beware the subtle seduction of the internalized authoritarian, who in the Forest’s Unnamed name would reduce it to strip malls, coal mines, corruption, predictability. Personal liberation and social liberation are parallel processes.

To truly listen to oneself is to cultivate self-empathy. Self-empathy is tending to abandoned forest paths, to learning the names of the beasts, trees, and streams. Listening to the hooting owls, buzzing bees, howling wolves, and groaning boughs within. The Forest of the Unnamed awaits you, biding its time with grace and patience. It is never too late to seek its wisdom: “Forest of the Unnamed, teach me to be your friend!” The journey begins thus.

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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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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.

*

(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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Magic is a State of Mind

Milton EricksonThe famed psychiatrist and hypnotherapist Milton Erickson had an interesting theory about what it means to lose something. Erickson would say that if he lost or mislaid something there was no need to be concerned. He trusted that his unconscious mind had arranged the whole situation to his ultimate benefit. If it were meant to be, the lost item would be found again in time. If it were better never found, then he would go with that, too.

This is an extremely attractive attitude, and very magical. Such an attitude enables one to navigate the inevitable ups and downs of life with grace, aplomb, and humor. The less resistance I inflict on the web of Wyrd, the less resistance it inflicts on me. The more lightly and playfully I dance with it, the more lightness and play I will get to enjoy.

I have had numerous synchronicitous experiences in recent days that specifically emerged out of my willingness to be playful, open, and accept what is rather than try to force it into my psychologically authoritarian urge to say, “but it SHOULD!” And others have said to me, “that’s magical;” “you’re doing magic!” And I have to say, “yes, but there is no trick: magic is just a state of mind.”

Just? Of course, the word “just” in the statement above is disingenuous. As though mind was somehow secondary, second-rate, seconded into the halls of mere trifledom? If mind is a mere empty concept then so is matter; spiritualism’s demise is also materialism’s. We were not put here to ponderously get to the bottom of things, but to romance the enigma of existence – and the enigma of existence appreciates a light touch.

So when I am told that my ability to playfully-be-in-the-right-moment-at-the-right-time (a very loose English translation of wu wei I suppose) is magical, I play along, I even denigrate myself slightly, add a pinch of irony, a twist of a smirk. Because if I can help someone start to believe in magic, in the possibility that a light touch has more impact than the heaviest pressure, well that’s lovely. Because now that person is participating in a magical mode with me, and now they too have the virus of light playful being-here-now.

Milton Erickson was not a believer in grand occult theories, bizarre mystical explanations, or obscure legends. In his spare time he made a hobby of debunking psychics and mediums. Yet when we read accounts of his approach to life, we are astounded at what a consummate magician he was. Erickson, the materialist, was more clairvoyant than most clairvoyants. The lesson is simple: it isn’t what beliefs you burden yourself with. It is whether you are willing to playfully embrace whatever may come.

While I still like to do sigil magic and try to manipulate the odd scenario here or there, I am moving much more toward a model of magic that is minimal, stripped down, spontaneous. Rather than try to force reality to wrap itself around me, I am learning how to be in the right place at the right time, with the right attitude and a hint of gratitude. Empty handed magic has been a life-long goal (who needs all that pompous drama?!), and now I wonder if empty-minded magic is even better. Empty magic. Emptiness.

Ah, but that brings us to the pleroma. It brings us to the Ginnungagap. And there, in that whirling vortex of All and None, the enigma of existence herself awaits. As the Delphic Oracle enjoined, “Give up what thou hast and then thou wilt receive.” As Erickson rejoined, “what is easiest to see is often overlooked.”

Postscript:

After I wrote this article, I saved it. Then an error screen came up. “What?” I said in a leaden tone. Then I remembered, “oh if my article just got deleted, it will be to my ultimate benefit, cool!” Then I hit refresh, and the article was still there, only now it has this postscript, which makes me more satisfied with it. Even the threat of a setback (or a setback proper) can make one happier if one has the right orientation.

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What are You Willing to Do to Make Yourself More Free?

We know there is no system of social organization that can reliably facilitate individual freedom, because systems are forged from people and people are fallible. Certainly there are better and worse systems – the farce of US ‘democracy’ being a nice example of a rapidly disintegrating system that was never that great in the first place – but the best system in the world is still fallible.

(This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t care about what system of social organization we adopt, more on that later).

Since systems are fallible it follows that I might be curious about the fallible humans that make them so. Why are we fallible? Other than the fact that there is a vicious cycle such that a bad system creates more fallible humans, who in turn make for a worse system.

Hmm – a vicious cycle. Perhaps the nature of a circle is that it matters not where we choose to puncture the circumference, so long as we do.

Two significant factors that affect the question of freedom suggest themselves: imagination and fear.

If I lack the time, space, and wit to imagine possibilities for myself I am unlikely to explore them. Tunnel vision is devastating for the possibility that I can exercise my freedom. If I have internalized a thin narrative to the effect that my possibilities are few and rigidly defined, then I again find myself in a vicious cycle. The less I can imagine possibilities, the less I am likely to explore them, the more the story of my limited nature seems compelling.

Authorities sustain their power and domination through constricting our sense of possibilities, our ability to imagine ourselves into multiplicity. To the extent that we base our sense of self on the framework of external authorities we run the risk of choking ourselves. If my self-image is little more than a tangle of (possibly malevolent, at least arbitrary) introjects, then how can I know myself? If I do not know myself, in what sense can my thoughts, feelings, or actions be considered free?

A major mechanism by which authorities impose introjects is fear. Fear that I am doing something wrong. Fear that I will be punished for some shortcoming or other. Fear chokes my capacity for spontaneity. It sets chains of judgment on the bare facts of my experiencing myself. It introduces the burden of better and worse, right and wrong, valid and invalid. These are external values shoehorned onto my experience of myself.

I have to learn how to be myself, and this is a process of identifying and discarding the introjects of control that authority has imposed upon me from birth. Every single narrative of identity needs to be discerned, evaluated, possibly discarded. I must use these constrictions as opportunities to encounter myself. Reflexivity, reflection, are the means by which internalized judgment can be held out and defanged.

Nothing is wasted and there is no need to resent authorities for their imposition of fear. The need lies rather in the process of reflection so that a less mangled relationship with self is possible. Indeed, if we waste time on resentment then we remain entangled with authoritarian, judgmental introjects (this is yet another tactic that authorities use, turning our instinct for courageous freedom against us).

My preferred mechanisms for free-making reflection are meditation and psychotherapy.

Meditation is the patient sitting with my own experience regardless of whether I like it or not. Over time I begin to build an immediate and direct knowledge of my thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations. This is a language of self-understanding that no authority can ever claim. As this deepens, a growing immunity to fear emerges. As I know myself better, I shed layers of attachment to the illusions of my palimpsest sense of self.

This is a slow process. It works. Quick fixes fade all too swiftly by comparison. A year’s worth of meditation will grant far more progress than a year’s worth of desperate, insecure, flamboyant magicking.

Psychotherapy is an opportunity to utilize a relationship as a territory for testing one’s permission to be oneself. As the connection strengthens, safety increases and the pressure to conform to the introjects of society, family, and institutions can wither away. Thus the imagination can begin to flower into a strange and savage new garden.

The process of self-transformation can facilitate increasing compassion, generosity, and sense of humor. As I begin to nourish myself through building an irreducible relationship to self (meditation), through softening the grip of fear (through meditation again), I no longer need to ape the noxious authorities that would have me believe that only through introjected judgment can I be strong or safe.

As my courage to be myself flourishes, perhaps I begin to find ways to play a role in changing or dismantling institutions of authority. If I want to change the systems for the better, and I do not in parallel work to shed my personal fear and poverty of imagination, then it is likely that the best I will do is play a role in exchanging one noxious system for another. This is perhaps part of why revolutions have often replaced one authoritarian regime with another.

Learning love for oneself is a decisive political act that provides a deep basis for, in turn, transforming systems toward permissiveness, curiosity, trust in human spontaneity. It takes courage and a Quixotic sensibility to begin the hunt for freedom. Break the seamless surface of the circle’s skin. The circumference is everywhere and nowhere.

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Psychological Anarchy

Typically the model for all personal growth is authoritarianism. We have to shape up, sharpen up, toughen up, lift that sorry, saggy self and push it into the format dictated by some source or other of ‘thus it must be.’

Authoritarianism is a noxious weed sprung from the seed of introjected self-doubt. The socially mandated authority entrenches its power, essentially, by gas-lighting us, by encouraging us to buy into a narrative of our innate hopelessness.

Yet this is a false narrative of personal growth. Any time an authority would have us think that we are fundamentally deficient, in need of adding something, removing something, we give up the power of our innate capacity for growth and healing. We allow our innate capacity to be slandered, denied, and even forgotten.

The result is linear, hackneyed scarcity thinking. So long as I allow an external authority to be the arbiter of my worth, I will always inhibit the manifestation of my worth. Worse: the best I can ever achieve is relief from the duty of self-punishment…for now. This is how those in power keep the rest in line: they teach the rest to be self-defeating.

Willpower is inadequate if one wishes to achieve growth, change, discovery. Willpower has been thoroughly subverted by authoritarian narratives, by the imposition of external standards of meaning and worth. Yet, where willpower fails to achieve in its corruption and subversion, the art of patience can succeed. Patience – the art of sticking with difficulty. Willpower is a finite quantity; patience is an attitude of stillness that flows from within.

What would it mean if you were to trust yourself radically and completely? What if you were to cultivate the ability to truly listen within? The god Heimdall sacrificed his external hearing (or perhaps an ear) in exchange for what seems like the ability to listen to himself. Odin gave up an eye for a draft of the water of memory, which might well mean dipping into a truthful relationship with his own unconscious.

What would it mean if you were to trust yourself radically and completely? Authoritarians say you will run riot, uncontrolled. You will turn into a destructive monster. You will lose all discipline, direction, sense. You will collapse into disaster.

Yet such woe is not an expression of the true will. It is the manifestation of a will that has not yet cultivated the ability to listen to itself. It is the dark chaotic threat we must face in order to discover the beautiful, idiosyncratic, natural beauty of our own unique truths. If we had the opportunity to learn how to truly heed ourselves then this authoritarian vision of chaos would just…go away.

At some point some of us, inspired to cut down to the marrow of our own meaning, begin to dare to break free from the lies of internalized authoritarianism. The moment we begin to do so, the self-doubt intensifies. The internalized gaslighting goes into overdrive. All in the service of driving us back into the arms of self-hatred and self-ignorance.

The task of finding our own unique, natural equilibrium is likely to be less obvious, less logical, less rational than we would like. Patience is what counsels us to be open to this mysterious process; at some point we may discover that maximum efficiency occurs when we abandon pre-conceived (= authoritarian) models of what a successful process ‘should’ look like.

Thus patience can save us, can grant us a capacity to trust in our yet unknown nature, our inner mystery, that to which Heimdall and Odin are willing to sacrifice so much. The patience to breathe through the agony of all our internalized self-doubt.

What lies on the other side of an authoritarian relationship to self? Psychological anarchy – the idea that I can govern myself, from myself. The idea that maybe, just maybe, there is a unique picture of self-expression that only I can manifest. And that perhaps this radical uniqueness is a profound threat to all the small-making ideologies of authoritarian control.

To be clear, we are here not talking about egotism. Egotism is still trying to turn myself into an authoritarian creature. Egotism buys into the illusory dynamics of dominance and submission, of evaluation and shallow judgment. Egotism is a fear of the well of memory that we call the unconscious, or that we call the body. The ego is a natural part of the human condition, nothing more. It does not need to be worshipped, since this is just another trap of vapid authoritarian psychology.

Psychological anarchism is a movement away from the illusion of control toward the challenge of patient trust in an unknown self, a self from which each of us is alienated by the lies of authoritarianism.

What are you willing to do today as an alternative to being controlled by your internalized ‘shoulds?’ What would it mean if you were to trust yourself radically and completely? Be patient and be brave.

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