Spirituality

You Are Not Elite

This is an open letter to all the pompous fools in the Heathen and occult scenes who insist on clogging the airwaves with fatuous rubbish, thus preventing themselves and everyone else from benefiting from the riches of these worlds.

2,500 years ago Socrates established that he was the wisest man in Athens. How did he know? Because whereas everyone else claimed to have some knowledge of the world – yet in the face of his questions proved to be thoroughly confused and ignorant – Socrates made no such claims. He might have only known one thing – his own lack of knowledge – but this modest achievement was nevertheless more than anything that anyone else had managed.

Nothing has changed in 2,500 years. People insist on spouting off on all manner of subjects they are utterly ignorant about. You can pretty much apply the following formula: as stridence and certainty increases, intelligence and knowledge decreases.

For example currently doing the rounds of the Heathen presence on Facebook is a healthy done of Islamophobia. How can people whose religion suffered near destruction at the hands of religious intolerance proceed to adopt exactly the same kind of intolerance?! Invariably the characters involved reveal their utter ignorance of Islam as a historical, cultural, or religious force. If this is really such an evil religion, how come hundreds of millions of Muslims all over the world manage to live perfectly peaceful, sedate lives? Are you really telling me that it wasn’t ok for the Christians to burn down the Heathen groves and temples, but that it is ok for you to want to burn copies of the Koran?

Of course any major organised religion, Islam included, is riddled with tremendous flaws, but that isn’t the point I’m debating here. The point is that these sorts of ignorant people, by indulging in shallow stereotypes and self-congratulatory hubris, have found a fantastic way to make themselves feel elite without having to lift a single finger or make the slightest effort. In fact, the more stupid, shallow, and pathetic they make themselves, the more elite they feel. What a perversely brilliant achievement.

On the other hand there are the spiritual demagogues who claim to be elitists, to be above the herd. Jung dismissed such silliness as an “inflation” – the sign of an ego that doesn’t have the maturity to handle cosmic forces. Invariably, however, such characters are of staggeringly modest achievements. Scratching at the fringes of society, looking over the threshold with envious resentment, these characters tend to become pickled in their own vile spite.

Or worse, they manage to fool enough hangers on that they get a reputation as some kind of guru. Their modest abilities and powers are diverted almost entirely into grandstanding, self-promotion, and self-congratulation. Either way, it’s an easy way to make yourself feel elite without having to make any kind of real effort…let alone actually be elite.

Well, to all these sorts of people, I am here to say: You Are Not Elite.

Want to know how I know? Cause the truly elite people don’t need to project all their hatred and fear onto an absent Other in a welter of hypocrisy and wilful ignorance. Cause the truly elite people don’t go on and on about how wonderful they are, don’t complain about how the world is out to get them, and don’t bother trying to attract slavish followers.

So the next time you feel the slightest bit of a delusion of bigotry or grandeur coming on, I invite you to reflect on the following examples of what “elite” actually means.

Carl Jung had a major hand in inventing modern psychotherapy. He healed thousands of lives personally, and maybe millions through his art and writing. He wrote 20+ HUGE volumes of earth-shatteringly profound writing, and was an insanely gifted painter. He opened the modern world to the question of spiritual life amid the mechanised horrors of two world wars. Carl Jung was elite.

Milton Erickson overcame the paralysis of childhood polio to become one of the most important figures in the history of psychiatry. Resurrecting hypnosis from the junk yard of stage show chicanery, he pioneered therapeutic techniques of such power, humanity, and sheer joy that it is hard to imagine his equal. Erickson could cure stroke-induced paralysis with a few minutes of (very intense) conversation. He could, while giving a speech, hypnotise just one person in the audience and give them a post-hypnotic suggestion and no one else in the room would even know. Erickson’s work and writing has transformed and healed potentially millions of lives, not least because other cool stuff like NLP evolved from his work. Milton Erickson was elite.

Beethoven composed the Ode to Joy when he was stone deaf. Carl Lewis won eight Olympic gold medals. Mozart wrote more music in his scant decades than most people could in a thousand lifetimes. Eugen Sandow was so strong he could wrap himself in chains and then shatter them just by flexing his torso. And 2,500 years later Socrates’ afore-mentioned analysis of the human predicament is still 100% accurate.

Get the picture? Unless you have these kinds of personal, professional, artistic, and spiritual accomplishments under your belt to back up your talk, you are not elite. You are just gas bagging. And the more empty bullsh*t you spout in the public spaces of the spiritual communities you inhabit, the more you prevent the actual magic and beauty of this vast and brilliant cosmos from manifesting in those communities, thus utterly defeating their purpose.

I am not elite either. But I am like Socrates: I know that I am not elite, and therefore instead of resting on self-satisfied, idiotic laurels, I strive to improve myself. Everything I do, whether I succeed or not, is aimed towards healing, growing, evolving, creating. I am no “better” than the morons I am here criticising: I will fall vastly short of the example of people like Jung or Erickson. And yet by acknowledging my limitations I will fly so much higher, humbly inspired by their example.

The next time you feel tempted to ignorantly attack an absent, excluded Other; or puff yourself up with a lot of victim talk or arrogant strutting, please instead come and read this little article. Think about what the people you admire (really admire, not just sort of admire) did with their lives.

And never forget: you are not elite. Keep that in mind and you, ironically, might give yourself a better chance of becoming so.

Transmission complete.

Harigast out.

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Death is not an end

This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing, and the joy of dissolution all. (AL I, 30)  The Perfect and the Perfect are one Perfect and not two; nay, are none!  Nothing is a secret key of this law. (AL I, 45 – 46)

In the centre of the cosmos there is no throne, but the sound of thunder! (Hubert Veðrfölnir)

Life behaves as if it were going on. The universe behaves as if Gods exist. The Psyche is not bound by the laws of time and space…

“I begin with nothingness. Nothingness is the same as fullness. In infinity full is no better than empty. Nothingness is both empty and full. As well might ye say anything else of nothingness, as for instance, white is it, or black, or again, it is not, or it is. A thing that is infinite and eternal hath no qualities, since it hath all qualities.

This nothingness or fullness we name the PLEROMA. Therein both thinking and being cease, since the eternal and infinite possess no qualities. In it no being is, for he then would be distinct from the pleroma, and would possess qualities which would distinguish him as something distinct from the pleroma.

In the pleroma there is nothing and everything. It is quite fruitless to think about the pleroma, for this would mean self-dissolution.

CREATURA is not in the pleroma, but in itself. The pleroma is both beginning and end of the created beings. It pervadeth them, as the light of the sun everywhere pervadeth the air. Although the pleroma pervadeth altogether, yet hath created being no share thereof, just as a wholly transparent body becometh neither light nor dark through the light which pervadeth it. We are, however, the pleroma itself, for we are a part of the eternal and the infinite. But we have no share thereof, as we are from the pleroma infinitely removed; not spiritually or temporally, but essentially, since we are distinguished from the pleroma in our essence as creatura, which is confined within time and space.

Yet because we are parts of the pleroma, the pleroma is also in us. Even in the smallest point is the pleroma endless, eternal, and entire, since small and great are qualities which are contained in it. It is that nothingness which is everywhere whole and continuous. Only figuratively, therefore, do I speak of created being as part of the pleroma. Because, actually, the pleroma is nowhere divided, since it is nothingness. We are also the whole pleroma, because, figuratively, the pleroma is the smallest point (assumed only, not existing) in us and the boundless firmanent about us. But wherefore, then, do we speak of the pleroma at all, since it is thus everything and nothing?

I speak of it to make a beginning somewhere, and also to free you from the delusion that somewhere, either without or within, there standeth something fixed, or in some way established, from the beginning. Every so-called fixed and certain thing is only relative. That alone is fixed and certain which is subject to change.

What is changeable, however, is creatura. Therefore is it the one thing which is fixed and certain; because it hath qualities: it is even quality itself.

The question ariseth: How did creatura originate? Created beings came to pass, not creatura: since created being is the very quality of the pleroma, as much as non-creation which is the eternal death. In all times and places is creation, in all times and places is death. The pleroma hath all, distinctiveness and non-distinctiveness.

Distinctiveness is creatura. It is distinct. Distinctivness is its essence, and therefore it distinguisheth. Wherefore also he distinguished qualities of the pleroma which are not. He distinguisheth them out of his own nature. Therefore he must speak of qualities of the pleroma which are not.

What use, say ye, to speak of it? Saidst thou not thyself, there is no profit in thinking upon the pleroma?

That said I unto you, to free you from the delusion that we are able to think about the pleroma. When we distinguish qualities of the pleroma, we are speaking from the ground of our own distinctiveness and concerning our own distinctiveness. But we have said nothing concerning the pleroma. Concerning our own distinctiveness, however, it is needful to speak, whereby we may distinguish ourselves enough. Our very nature is distinctiveness. If we are not true to this nature we do not distinguish ourselves enough. Therefore must we make distinctions of qualities.

What is the harm, ye ask, in not distinguishing oneself? If we do not distinguish, we get beyond our own nature, away from creatura. We fall into indistinctiveness, which is the other quality of the pleroma. We fall into the pleroma itself and cease to be creatures. We are given over to dissolution in nothingness. This is the death of the creature. Therefore we die in such measure as we do not distinguish. Hence the natural striving of the creature goeth towards distinctiveness, fighteth against primeval, perilous sameness. This is called the PRINCIPIUM INDIVIDUATIONIS. This principle is the essence of the creature. From this you can see why indistictiveness and non-distinction are a great danger for the creature.

We must, therefore, distinguish the qualities of the pleroma. The qualities are PAIRS OF OPPOSITES, such as:

The Effective and the ineffective.
Fullness and Emptiness.
Living and Dead.
Difference and Sameness.
Light and Darkness.
The Hot and the Cold.
Force and Matter.
Time and Space.
Good and Evil.
Beauty and Ugliness.
The One and the Many.

The pairs of opposites are qualities of the pleroma which are not, because each balanceth each. As we are the pleroma itself, we also have all these qualities in us. Because the very ground of our nature is distinctiveness, which meaneth:

  1. These qualities are distinct and separate in us one from the other; therefore they are not balanced and void, but are effective. Thus are we the victims of the pairs of opposites. The pleroma is rent in us.
  1. The qualities belong to the pleroma, and only in the name and sign of distinctiveness can and must we possess and live them. We must distinguish ourselves from qualities. In the pleroma they are balanced and void; in us not. Being distinguished from them delivereth us.

When we strive after the good or the beautiful, we thereby forget our own nature, which is disinctiveness, and we are delivered over to the qualities of the pleroma, which are pairs of opposites. We labor to attain the good and the beautiful, yet at the same time we also lay hold of the evil and the ugly, since in the pleroma these are one with the good and the beautiful. When, however, we remain true to our own nature, which is distinctiveness, we distinguish ourselves from the good and the beautiful, therefore, at the same time, from the evil and ugly. And thus we fall not into the pleroma, namely, into nothingness and dissolution.

Thou sayest, ye object, that difference and sameness are also qualities of the pleroma. How would it be, then, if we strive after difference? Are we, in so doing, not true to our own nature? And must we none the less be given over to the sameness when we strive after difference?

Ye must not forget that the pleroma hath no qualities. We create them through thinking. If, therefore, ye strive after difference or sameness, or any qualities whatsoever, ye pursue thoughts which flow to you out of the pleroma: thoughts, namely, concerning non-existing qualities of the pleroma. Inasmuch as ye run after these thoughts, ye fall again into the pleroma, and reach difference and sameness at the same time. Not your thinking, but your being, is distinctiveness. Therefore not after difference, ye think it, must ye strive; but after YOUR OWN BEING. At bottom, therefore, there is only one striving, namely, the striving after your own being. If ye had this striving ye would not need to know anything about the pleroma and its qualities, and yet would ye come to your right goal by virtue of your own being. Since, however, thought estrangeth from being, that knowledge must I teach you wherewith ye may be able to hold your thought in leash. … God is not dead; he is as much alive as ever. God is the created world, inasmuch as he is something definite and therefore he is differentiated from the Pleroma. God is a quality of the Pleroma and everything that I have stated in reference to the created world is equally true of him.

God is distinguished from the created world, however, inasmuch as he is less definite and less definable than the created world in general. He is less differentiated than the created world, because the ground of his being is effective fullness; and only to the extent that he is definite and differentiated is he identical with the created world; and thus he is the manifestation of the effective fullness of the Pleroma.

Everything that we do not differentiate falls into the Pleroma and is cancelled out along with its opposite. Therefore if we do not discern God, then the effective fullness is cancelled out for us. God also is himself the Pleroma, even as every smallest point within the created world, as well as within the uncreated realm, is itself of the Pleroma.

The effective emptiness is the being of the Devil. God and Devil are the first manifestations of the nothingness, which we call the Pleroma. It does not matter whether the Pleroma is or is not, for it cancels itself out in all things. The created world, however, is different. Inasmuch as God and Devil are created beings, they do not cancel each other out, rather they stand against each other as active opposites. We need no proof of their being ; it is sufficient that we must always speak about them. Even if they did not exist, the created being would forever (because of its own differentiated nature) bring them for out of the Pleroma.

All things which are brought forth from the Pleroma by differentiation are pairs of opposites; therefore God always has with him the Devil.

This interrelationship is so close, as you have learned, it is so indissoluble in your own lives, that it is even as the Pleroma itself. The reason for this is that these two stand very close to the Pleroma, in which all opposites are cancelled out and unified.” (C. G. Jung 1916: The Seven Sermons to the Dead)

Listen to the message of a modern prophet: Carl Gustav Jung.

There can be many reasons and triggers that can wake you up — wake you up to that kind of awareness, where the higher and hidden levels of the spectrum of human consciousness are experienced. I can remember a week some years ago, when I fasted for five days (no food at all, but much water and juice) and I meditated a lot and did other spiritual excercises from Crowley’s curriculum. And in one moment I realized my mind was so clear that I thought to myself: “How can life be any different again? It’s so easy to attain such a clear mind. I will never loose it again.” Believe me, it’s easier to fall asleep than to wake up again. The mind is such a tricky and sneaky thing! I guess nothing is easier than to travel the road of life asleep until one dies. Hence the need for a spiritual discipline. Nothing else helps. I tried it. Pills, thrills, drills and stuff that kills. But only slow and steady wins the race. Not the extreme and radical, but the golden middle. Neither this master nor that teaching, neither this order nor that secret ritual, neither this drug nor that technique. All that is needed is Here, all the that you have is the Now, the only one who can do the Work is you. “Who is the Great Master that makes the grass green?” You, the silent Watcher, you, the Ultimate Observer.

However, some times are special, when we feel that Wyrd leads us and just everything falls into place. Such times are often characterized by unusual events, books you find or get, people you meet, things you discover, music you hear and all kinds of weird / wyrd synchronicities.

There are many songs I remember that influenced me during that time of sheer beauty and madness. (Literally one friend of mine later had a psychosis, because the things we were experiencing and ‘consuming’ were just too much and too heavy.) Two songs I remember vividly and still love are Fokstua Hall and Svartálfar by Fire + Ice (like many other songs by this magical band) and now I found out that Sweyn has written these two songs! Things like that are magical, meaningful and empowering on a personal level, because it gives one’s life a direction and purpose. They confirm on a personal level that you were and are on the right track.

The Inmost Light and This Shining Shining World (read the text below) are my favourite songs by the band Current 93, a band that was also very important on my path for some time. This Shining Shining World kind of ‘converted’ me with the help of magic mushrooms and the Tibetan Book of the Dead from nihilism to the beauty and awe of Mystery. And thus I broke on through to the other side that greeted me behind the dead end of existentialism, which I thought (in my youthful arrogance and ignorance at age 15) was the last answer to all questions. But since I could gaze at the spinning of the Wyrd Sisters on “the other side” (or behind the curtain and beneath the obvious) I decided to open up to the possibility of magic and pantheism. To put it rather roughly: I concluded that we may be — maybe — more than a chunk of meat. Since then my interest for mysticism and the Occult became a vital part of my life. I came to know, rather than to believe (like Mr. Jung, listen to his words above), that we are more than we seem. The idea that there are secrets which are eternal mysteries — that is what I am interested in. And I am still going. Still seeking…

(In this process after having been a member of a rather known occult franternity I came to be opposed to so-called occultism, because the occultists assert that there are secrets, but what they think of as mysteries are rather conventional things that I now put in my pocket. These people just make any arbitrary thing a secret and simply conceal it from you for the sake of keeping it a secret to manipulate people or to simply create a commodity and they will tell you that these “secrets” can only be revealed to you if you become a member of this group, read this book or do something along those lines. This is utter nonsense. True mystery does not belong to anyone nor can it be taught, shown, revealed or attained.)

However, since then I was touched by the Ansuz flame. And I remember that when I had my second trip and looked through the Looking-Glass I did my first Staða of Dagaz — my absolutely most beloved Rune and the central mystery of a certain God, who is said to be a great Poet, Magician and Master of ecstatic Consciousness.

“But to love me is better than all things: if under the night-stars in the desert thou presently burnest mine incense before me, invoking me with a pure heart, and the Serpent flame therein, thou shalt come a little to lie in my bosom. For one kiss wilt thou then be willing to give all; but whoso gives one particle of dust shall lose all in that hour. … Put on the wings, and arouse the coiled splendour within you: come unto me!” (AL I, 61).

Since then I had only one sincere wish: to seek for spiritual liberation. Sounds naive, probably. But who doesn’t want to be free? Free from what, one is inclined to ask? Freedom is a myth, the Buddhist Master and Tantric teacher of “Crazy Wisdom”, Chögyam Trungpa, once said (in: Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism). By showing, in true Buddhist fashion, the interdependence of everything that exists, the dependence of any thing on some other thing is demonstrated (pratītyasamutpāda = „dependent origination“), including the ego, resulting in the realization that all things are ‘void’ or empty of any characteristic. So freedom in the way the usual Westerner imagines it doesn’t exist according to the philosophy of Shunyata (“Emptiness”), invented by the Buddhist scholar Nagarjuna (c. 150 – 250 CE). Though I’ve always been humbled and fascinated by Buddhist philosophy (not knowing a lot about it), I reject its world- and life-denying implications. That’s why I’m mostly interested in the Left-Hand Path manifestations of Tantric Buddhism and of the manifold sects (used here in a positive sense) of the complex religious phenomenon in India that the British colonials called rather unimaginatively “Hinduism”. Already Crowley observed:

“The essence of the Tantric cults is that by performance of certain rites of Magick, one does not only escape disaster, but obtains positive benediction. The Tantric is not obsessed with the will-to die. … [H]e implicitly denies the proposition that existence is sorrow and he formulates the postulate … that means exist by which the universal sorrow … may be unmasked.” (Crowley, in: Grant 1991 [1971]: The Magical Revival)

So freedom for an orthodox Buddhist or a Gnostic was reached when they were freed in a state of bliss (Nirvana or Heaven), delivered “from the body of Death” (Saint Paul). For a Tantric (spiritual) freedom was already here, for those who were strong, determined and courageous enough to grasp it. It is reached by developing what the chaos magician Julian Wilde once called Vajra Awareness. My brother and me had lastly a conversation and we were talking about god(s), the world(s) and all that stuff and then I misheard what he said, when a car drove by. And what I heard was: “In the centre of the cosmos there is no throne, but the sound of thunder!” Kaos Keraunos Kybernetosthe: The Chaos Thunderbolt Steers All Things. To hear the thunder and the silence at once, to see with the all-pentrating eye of the true nature of the mind, it is necessary to reach vajra awareness:


“The first necessary (and much misunderstood) stance is the need to remain ‘centred’, self-aware, to retain one’s ‘spirit’, … to seek an uninterrupted stream of consciousness/awareness whatever may happen, be it calamity, death or rebirth/becomings. It is a channelling process/tendency, an identification of the self as separate/disengaged from the rest of the universe.

The second is the need to transcend the human view-point, to realise the narrowness, arrogance and ultimate impotence of one’s present perception and to seek a re-alignment of one’s will/vision to that of the universe/void/chaos flow. It is a diffusing process, an identification with something larger than the human perspective (that can, unchecked or abused, lead to false bliss, a nirvanic torpor, a capitulation of drive/energy).

Held/practised together these two polar opposites create a third, highest stance. As usual the tantrists have a word for it. The word ‘vajra’ or ‘dorje’ can either mean a diamond ie- that which is compact/focused, symmetrical/crystalised, unbreakable, immutable, untarnishable (part of the drive to eros/control, order, possession) or a thunderbolt ie- that which is frightening, all-powerful, ego-destructive, disintegrating (part of the drive to thanatos/disorder, ego-death). ‘Vajra’ therefore may also be held to mean both stances (diamond-eros and thunderbolt-thanatos) together/simultaneously. This captures nicely the feel of the third stance so let us call it the vajra-awareness. As a bolt of lightning (the thunderbolt) strikes the earth, swift, random, brilliant (ILLUMINATING!), so too must the vajra-awareness be instantly in response, cultivated to be active/reactive to changing emotional states, rebirths, disasters and environments, being one with the lightning, being the lightning, flowing at one with all but retaining the diamond-hard yet infinitely flexible self-ness in the midst of conditions, manifestaions and becomings. The vajra-awareness is what it touches yet it retains its self-ness, wherever it alights there is totality and purity, where it is not are ignorance and eventual suffering.

The vajra-awareness, then is a conscious integration/inter-action with all that is – an eternal balance between self-knowing/posession and immersion in the ceaseless flux of the universe.“ (Julian Wilde 1999: The Grimoire of Chaos Magick)

This is what has to be done. One of the most important tasks of that Great Work is the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. In terms of Germanic Soul-Lore this part of the Magician’s Psyche is called the Fylgja or Fetch. It can be contacted by certain methodologies like this one. The relationship to that entity (HGA, Augoides, Dæmon, Genius, “Totem”, Deep Mind or Fylgja) is a vital part of one’s initiatory process. The HGA / Fylgja is often thought of as a non-human intelligence or a seperate being that carries in it all the ancestors’ pasts and holds the individual’s fate.

“As to why such a relationship is vital to cultivate, even in early stages of one’s Rune Work, that’s perhaps easier.  I’d say that the idea of the complex, multifaceted Self — the plural Soul — is one that is absolutely key to deep understanding of and practical work with the Northern Mysteries (and Indo-European mysticism in general). It’s also one of the ideas that has been most thoroughly abolished from the modern, materialist concept of the self.  We clearly yearn for it though, and it consistently emerges in pop culture and fantasy literature (think of the daemons in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, and I’m sure other examples will come to light).  It is a very difficult task to learn to think of ‘One’s Selves’ rather than ‘Oneself,’ but when we can do so, we come to know, rather than to believe, that we are more than we seem.  And we move farther and faster along the road of personal transformation in the Germanic Tradition.” (Ristandi)

Such a transpersonal guide is hidden in the soul-complex and to be discovered by those who travel along the Runic pathways that lead down, around and up the Tree. This part of the Soul is non-local in the sense of quantum mind. To say it more accurately: it’s here in Midgard and there in Asgard simultaneously — the ‘Realm’ of Awakened Consciousness that might be (according to “metaphysics of ‘substance'”) / do (according to “all things flow”-process philosophy) in non-local ‘hyper-space’ beyond time, connected with the other eight worlds of the map of the multiverse, f.e. as represented by the Chaos Star (the multi-directional expansion of consciousness from a central still-point). Um mik ok í mér Ásgarðr ok Miðgarðr! From the point of view of the Germanic Soul-Lore, that C. G. Jung helped to dig up, this entity, the Fylgja, does not die because it already exists in an eternal dimension not bound by the laws of time and space, like Jung already suggested. And, apparently, most cosmological and psychological maps, especially those influenced by shamanic lore, implied something along those lines. Michael Kelly, who worked a lot with the Celtic soul model, says:

“We may now gain a perspective on what may cause an active shade or ghost to linger, if an attachment is still felt toward a loved one who embodied the deceased’s Other on the physical plane. But as I considered the soul in the context of Desire, I realised that the féin does not pass from this world into the magical realms upon physical death. Why not? Because it is already there and it always has been. The sense of Self is not and has never been bound to the physical body. Even in the most dull and unimaginative of people, it indulges in daydreams, it dreams while the body sleeps and it creates new worlds within the imagination. The féin resides permanently in the magical realms and it interfaces with the physical body through the other parts of the soul that we have described. Upon death, it draws several of those parts back to itself to one degree or another.”(Michael Kelly 2009: Apophis)

In Sweyn Plowright’s book True Helm Ian Read puts forth the idea (in the foreword) that upon following the guidelines in this book “you may create such a strong being (that we call hamingja) and may even, upon death, join those greatest warriors … in Valhalla.”  Ultimately, I come to understand it in such a way that the Hamingja — the life force and soul power of the magician — may become so strong in the process of individuation that even upon death it will survive.

“But exceed! exceed! Strive ever to more! and if thou art truly mine — and doubt it not, and if thou art ever joyous! — death is the crown of all. Ah! Ah! Death! Death! thou shalt long for death. Death is forbidden, o man, unto thee. The length of thy longing shall be the strength of its glory. He that lives long & desires death much is ever the King among the Kings.” (AL II, 71 – 74)

So, from a Germanic point of view, the Fylgja (unique to an individual, but nevertheless completely independent of him / her) and the Hamingja (later to become associated with one’s indwelling luck) are (semi-)autonomous ‘entities’ and yet portions of the individual’s psyche that are immune to physical death. What happens to the Self? Can it unite with the Fylgja and Hamingja? Does it continue to exist after death, like Kelly suggests in his Celtic soul model? Or is it rather an illusion as suggested in the teachings of Nagarjuna and as expressed in the idea of pratītyasamutpāda (dependent origination)? I don’t know, fellow traveler. It’a Mystery hidden in your Soul. Seek it!

“Consider the lillies of the field…” (Matt. 6: 28)
Consider the carnage and massacre
Consider the love and embraces
Consider the hangingred skies
Consider the pain of your enemy
Consider the hatred of your friend
There, oh there, there is the land
All the musics shall combine
All the daughters are no longer brought low
They are araised
In brightfiregodgiven they rejoice
And those who deny this world
Is the soul of the unbroken one
Lie
This is indeed Paradise
(Come I shall show you where
The stars give birth and sleep)
And all around you is the warm bluegreen breath of heavens
Do not fear
Around you is the vast blueblack space of stars
Do not fear
This is the great ocean
On which the endless waves crash down
God is not dead
There is no death I say
(Come I shall show you where
Dreams go to when they die)
Hurry now; the sun is descending
The shadows wait to play

Current 93, Of Ruine Or Some Blazing Starre — The Broken Heart Of Man (1994)

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Thor Says: Invoke With Laughter

Donovan and I celebrated a truly marvellous Thorrablot yesterday. One of the most brilliant ritual experiences I’ve ever had – we’re on such a strong shared wavelength and what an honour it is to know him.

I arose early. I packed a delicious organic lunch of red beans in pasta/tomato sauce, chopped carrot, almonds, and sauerkraut. We ended up mixing these together with surprisingly delicious results when lunch time arrived.

I drove out to Donovan’s place. That morning, suddenly inspired, he had made a beautifully carved Mjolnir from wood, a hefty hammer, an offering for us to give. Armed with mead and drinking horn, we drove to a National Park by the sea.

We spent the drive talking about our hopes, desires, lives, people we know; about our creative, health, spiritual, hobby, and financial goals.

We walked for an hour or more through exquisite forest, over dizzying ocean cliffs, the sea vast and majestic, the trees all wise and all wit.

We came to our secret location, a gigantic flat rock which perches, secluded and stolidly precarious, on the cliff face, overlooking vast ocean vistas. How to find this rock? The almost-hidden trail is marked from the main path by two trees which, if seen from the correct angle, one behind the other, form an Elhaz stave shape. Elhaz: perhaps it invokes the sacred space which is open and closed all at once.

We meditated, bare feet; let the distant, epic sea song wash away our petty conscious thoughts. We knew what we wanted this ritual to be from our conversations in car and forest. To invite Thor to help us renew the momentum of spirit in our lives, to drive out the frosty barbs of negativity and boredom and renew the membrane of magic. We let this hope flow through our beings, through the rocks, the trees, the clouds, the sea.

When it felt right the ritual began, in such a way that we scarcely even noticed that we were in it. We joked and played, laughing (with compassion) about the stiffness and artificiality that some folk fall into on ceremonial occasions – so anxious to get it “right” that they cramp up and lose the spirit of the thing. Not us; we called and hollered, half serious, half in parody, but we could feel that our deities were warmly inclined to our spirit of joy.

I sang and screeched and howled and Donovan roared. We told snappy tales about Thor’s many fine qualities, of his travelling companions, of our desire to uncover the magic in our lives that makes us joyous even amid the imperfect drudgery that seems always ready to swamp our days.

Three brilliant phrases emerged as we seethed and celebrated.

Wyrd trumps Will

This gem came to me in my meditation. I have in the past (and well after I should have known better) had this idea that if I fill myself with enough magic then with my power-bloated ego I can blast the hard things in my life into halcyon dream-perfection. Clearly a notion that can lead to disappointment!

What crystallised as I meditated was something I’ve explored several times recently with brilliant people in my life – that we don’t get to live a richly magical, spirited life only after we’ve cleared away all the sources of drudge and struggle.

No, the best way is to call on the magic in the midst of life’s hard work, to have the courage and creativity and humour to find magic even amidst the awesome mundanity of dealing with the ignorant, foolish, and petty (at some level that means all of us); in dealing with the unrelenting challenges of work and money and stale repetition and I-never-have-enough-time.

So go with wyrd, don’t try to fill your will up with numinous force, you’ll just waste it in exhausting struggle. Instead work with wind, tide, and wit. Cut with the grain, dance when you are tempted to stomp grumpily. Empty yourself and you cannot be drained – be a conduit, there’s an endless supply of magic that just desperately wants to be tapped into idiosyncratic human channels. It might or might not produce what you think you need, but there is a good chance it will produce what you actually need. Let yourself be curious. Radically curious. Let yourself be bewildered and surprised.

Then in our ritual playfulness a second phrase emerged.

Invoke with Laughter

Chaos magicians tend to think that laughter is the best way to banish magical moments, spirits, spells, states of mind, anything. Yet in certain senses (not all) this could actually be a very dry, grey, boring, ugly idea. Could it potentially imply that magic has to be pompous, serious, over-stuffed, strained, redundantly effortful – in a word, insincere, in a word, dishonest – in order to be summoned? What an awful notion seems to potentially coil implicit in the notion of banish with laughter!

We, on the other hand, we invoked with laughter. We joked about ourselves, people we know, about our gods, and they joked with us and on us, and it was exquisite. Cascading joy flooded the mounting force of our ritual, which had no distinct beginning but just came into tide when it wanted, as we gave it space to do so (a nice example of wyrd trumps will in action). And Thor is one of the most mirthful figures I can think of, a truly joyous force in the world: who better to call with hilarity?

We talked about Thurisaz, its recent recurring wyrd appearances in Donovan’s life. We agreed that we like this rune, with its scary reputation and its heart of gold. Thurisaz is like Hagalaz or Nauthiz – it invites a reality check and people are afraid of that and avoid – to their cost, or more accurately, to their loss.

And Laguz kept appearing in syncronicitous ways throughout the day, the sea rune, the rune of hidden riches and mystery! Of terror, and fury, and utter confusion, and yet also of “silk and gold and reveries of graciousness” (Nietzsche).

And goats! Thor has a close connection to goats. We celebrated how knowing, collected, assured, adaptable, tricky, durable, flexible, and just plain weird goats are. Nobody messes with Goat. Goat is low key. Goat doesn’t gab his mouth when he should be silent. Goat doesn’t give away his full abilities, doesn’t show his hand out of narcissism or insecurity. Goat keeps it real. Goat is permanently, impeccably unflappable. Goat keeps the magic of its membrane in flourishing order. Goat knows that horns are to be worn, not goofily tooted. What a truly awesome role model.

Ritual, not Routine

Then the third phrase came, and it was a verbal crack of thunder as it sprang from Donovan’s lips: Ritual, not Routine. Yes! Let’s not have lives of routine: numb, stupid, clanking, ornery, dogmatic. Repetition can also be playful, flowing, artful, even creative. It can have rhythm and flow and wit. We can move through all the “must do this” tasks of life with hang-dog heads, or with halos of fire and supple limbs (in a casual/subtle/low key way if you want of course).

It’s all in how you let yourself attach meaning to the things that unfold. Change the meaning, change yourself…well, who knows what sort of brilliant consequences that might have (you might not even notice them)?

Ritual, not Routine applies literally to the art of doing ritual observance – and we were doing ritual, not empty rote motions! It was sacred play. And this goes beyond into all of life. The whole of life is potentially a ritual: improvised, filled with joy, serendipity, learning, healing, growth, courage, and patience in the face of challenge. We forget this at our peril, falling into the factory farm of our own dullness. Yet it takes so little to stay – in the dance, in the joyous.

“Love life” is not an item to be checked off on some to-do list, some roster of accomplishments. And it has nothing to do with the arbitrary turning of events. In this we aligned ourselves with a tradition that stretches from Lao Tzu (and earlier) to Cicero and even to Nietzsche, yet without any self-consciousness or reflective pomposity: that to love this life is wonder, is its own reward, is nourishment complete. That we find love for life when we give love, not when we churlishly try to force life into the shape that we ignorantly think is best for us. After all, in an infinitely complex universe, who can really be sure of what is best for them anyway?

And to those who disapprove of our light feet: perhaps you need a dose of Nietzsche’s fröhliche wissenschaft, his gay science, his dancing seriousness and courageous frivolity. Being ponderous and heavy has nothing to do with being profound. Let yourself embrace the vulnerability and power of dedication and play admixed!

We drank toasts of delicious mead, charged with lashings of chanted Thurisaz runes. We laughed and prayed and affirmed and quaffed. We drenched the hammer and offered it up, our sacrifice. We splashed mead on rock, tree, sky, sea, cloud, every hidden delight of that sacred place. We offered our gratitude liberally.

We ate our lunch happily. We talked to spirits of stone and wood on our walk back through the forest, the mead sending us into buoyant clairvoyance and exuberant inspiration.

We talked and ate into the night, and sang, and played music, and warmed ourselves in the glow of family and dogs and the full moon, and laughed at the limp literalism that sometimes haunts folk that call themselves Heathens, and marvelled at the privilege we’ve been given to flow so easily into the spirit of things (and vice versa).

And I have to re-emphasise – nothing said here takes away the reality of the challenge and difficulty that life presents. If we try to force spirituality into being a magic bullet for the ease of our burdens then chances are good it will not long tolerate our presumptuousness, our pandering to our ego’s fear of suffering (which is not a trivial thing, but nonetheless which need not be made the maxim of our actions).

The trick might be to get beyond the mole-vision of bean-counting one’s entire life into allotments of effort (lots) and ease (never enough). There is no guarantee that any of us will see out our journey in the way we’d consciously most prefer, but with our eyes fixed on the horizon (and not on our feet) our chances are that much improved, and the toil of the path might be somewhat lessened (and if not then so be it – we are here to learn, so let’s not miss whatever opportunities we are given).

All such caveats aside, I want to express my profound gratitude for these fine gifts, these three principles of religious/magical/cultural practice…and for living life, too:

Wyrd trumps Will
Invoke with Laughter
Ritual, not Routine

I pray I remember, and keep living out my remembrance, of these terrible, wonderful thoughts.

Hail Thor!

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Become What You Are

One of the central elements of spiritual living is the pursuit of self-improvement. Even if one’s goal is simply to be able to accept things precisely as they are, this already constitutes some kind of improvement of oneself.

Why? Why should spiritual pursuits encompass the nebulous idea of “self-improvement.” Why does spirituality often imply a journey, a transformative adventure? How can this be distinguished from simple greed for power or the shallow acquisitive lust that is celebrated in mainstream culture? I wouldn’t dare to hazard an answer – all the obvious and/or usual ones are far too glib to be acceptable.

Instead I’d like to present three fragmentary sketches of the spiritual journey of this life. There might be others, but these three seem to be reasonably common, and one person can be living out several of these stories simultaneously, though for most people one main theme will dominate at any one time (I suspect). Many of us get stuck somewhere along the way; impotent self-congratulation tends to follow in short order.

1) Spirituality as Building Oneself Up

First we have the notion that, from humble origins, one must create oneself, must set high ideals and then orchestrate one’s own evolution in order to achieve them. This is a very ego driven, (personal) will driven process. It assumes that one can know what is best for one; it assumes that the path will be more or less logical.

When I was younger and lacked trust in my basic capacities – since I had not felt myself to be proved in the world – this approach appealed to me. It made me feel good about myself because it enabled me to think that my life was in my control, that my spiritual and worldly destiny was mine to create. These were comforting illusions for someone who was relatively powerless. Indeed, they comfort even the most seemingly powerful.

Over time it became apparent to me that this model of spiritual development was inadequate. It tended to occlude my imagination, and to me imagination is one of the pillars of personal evolution.

I also found that it did not work very well. The effort of ego-will required to make changes leads to strain in the personality and the body itself. This straining and heaving makes progress difficult – it is as though one forges forward and resists oneself at the same time. Feeling constantly caught in this state, I began to question the whole model of “building oneself up” as a spiritual mode.

Ultimately I began to find that while going through the disciplined process of a regimented “magical curriculum” put out by a popular organisation I was not learning much from my “building myself up” work. Rather, what was educating me was a wildfire of spiritual experience, transforming me spontaneously and unpredictably and quite independently of my supposedly spiritual “training.”

When I was younger I struggled a lot with depression and anxiety and careened from crisis to crisis (many of which solely existed in my own mind). I began to realise that really I had no ability to fathom the true depths of the world’s mysteries. Consequently, the simple “build yourself up” model came to seem both superficial and moronic.

To achieve deep spiritual shifts it might be helpful to live a disciplined life, but on the other hand the discipline is not the source of the growth one seeks – at best it merely makes one more able to survive and integrate the mysteries of spontaneity when they strike.

Oh, and too much of that ego/will driven stuff will occlude one’s openness to mystery, and many proponents of this model of spirituality that I have met have turned out to be spiritually constipated, if not mentally deranged, by the disjointed artifice of their attempts at spiritual expression.

2) Spirituality as Passive Acceptance

Disillusioned with the Build Yourself Up model, I drifted in the clutches of my depression, my sense of alienation, my struggle to feel I could even exist in this unhomely world at all. I felt as though there was nothing else for me, for even with the periodic and intense lessons in personal gnosis that I underwent, I simply did not have the wherewithal to find my way.

Or so I thought. With hindsight I believe that I was instinctively walking the right path in my alienated disillusion, my mournful and directionless gloom. Despair, loss, and fear are all potent teachers if one is able to transmute them, or perhaps more accurately, if one is able to clear out of the way so that they can use one as a vessel for their own spontaneous transmutation.

Somewhere out of my sense of living defeat – punctuated by futile regression into trying to Build Myself Up – a rich spiritual vein opened in my life: reverence.

Reverence had always been a part of my life. I define it as admiration of the sheer majesty of existence. Of its unfathomable mystery. Of its vast complexity and simultaneous terrifying simplicity. Its shining brutality and its unending compassion.

From reverence I recovered something I had always known, yet often forgotten: that all is one, even though each thing is unique. The sacred oneness and difference of all thing(s) is a tricky mystery, and few are able to make sense of it, wanting to either dissolve the universe into a shallow unity or else pretend that it is utterly fragmented and compartmentalised.

And from this sense I found my gradual discovery that striving and achieving does not necessarily mean anything. That it can easily reduce one into a caricature of a human being.

When we think we can conquer ourselves and the reality in which we find ourselves, we no longer give ourselves the chance to let the beauty of Being sing for itself. We are so untrusting of the magic that binds reality together that we risk shutting ourselves from it. We get “cramp” as Jan Fries put it. As Princess Leia put it in Star Wars: “the more you tighten your fist, the more planets will slip through your fingers.”

So while I felt utterly defeated and barely clung to this existence, I was at least learning the full reality of just how infertile a field “Build Yourself Up” is.

Yet nothing is static, and gradually a new way opened for me. It is the way that I still wander, and I suspect that it is going to be the Way of the rest of my life.

3) Spirituality as Becoming What You Are

I discovered that when I am vulnerable and open and curious and willing to be surprised – well at those moments I discover I am capable of far more than I could have ever consciously believed.

For example when I was first playing in Sword Toward Self, learning the material, I constantly exceeded my self belief. Again and again I’d be presented with some ridiculously technical material to perform and again and again I’d find that I could play it immediately, even though I would not be able to believe my own ears as my fingers found their way across the fretboard of my bass.

It seems that perhaps the way to growth is not to build myself up, but to get out of my own way. My conscious expectations, even at their loftiest, where pathetic compared to what my unrehearsed spontaneity could invite. I began to realise how shallow and irrelevant the conscious thinking ego mind is. So much of its place is to offer distraction and chatter. The quieter this noise becomes, the more the gates open, the more the flow of the waters of life is free to gush through my being.

The tension and struggle of the ego magician is a product of wasted effort. It is possible to act without effort, but one needs to unlearn the habit of tension and striving. We move swiftest by aligning ourselves with the tides or the winds of wyrd: at full sail the ship of my soul will outrun any ego-galley’s oar-chained slave crew.

Of course, this impels us to have to learn how to trust. We have to trust mystery, uncertainty, the endless not-knowing. We have to know when to bide our time, to recognise the difference between prudent hesitation and cowardice or self-deception.

The more I strip away the false layers of my being, the more I am able to do this. Rather than waste endless energy trying to control the infinite unpredictability of the cosmos, I would prefer to embrace my personal oneness and separateness within the matrix of the universe.

I have learned that my Deep Mind is far wiser, more creative, and more spontaneous than my conscious mind will ever be. So I seek to turn myself over to its wisdom, to the wisdom of my heart and guts. And strangely, this seems in turn to produce the kinds of successes that my old attempts to build myself up sought and achieved only superficially (if at all).

In light of these reflections, Odin hanging on the tree as an image of spiritual transfiguration is a powerful refutation of the “build yourself up” mentality. It is good to have goals, to have discipline, to seek out and create a vision of the future. But if one is not rooted in oneself as a conduit of the flow of wyrd then one risks being little more than a vortex of wasted breath.

Discipline is best used not as a tool to build up but rather to dismantle the tyranny of conscious prejudice so that the true will, the rich and heady sap of the world tree which gives life to all, may flow through freely and without end. When we unlearn the ego’s addiction to strain we free our strength for creation, action, and reflection.

None of these reflections are original, even though it seems such sentiments need to be repeated endlessly for the sake of those who need them. In presenting them I can only do so as one who is a “work in progress.” Yet are we not all in such a predicament? The one who lays claim to any kind of perfection is a buffoon.

Becoming What You Are is not an easy task. You must sacrifice all your comforting illusions about who you think you should be. You have to cease imposing artbitrary standards of judgement and instead carefully uncover the deep logic of your life. You are a rock which does not require gaudy decoration (and hence be lost in an ocean of bad taste and stupidity). No: you need only let the tides of your life polish you into your innate beauty. It takes courage to bare oneself in this way, far more courage than anything else I can imagine.

Ass usual, Uncle Al was perhaps the most articulate of all who have touched on these themes:

“The Hawk and the Blindworm

This book would translate Beyond-Reason into the words of Reason.
Explain thou snow to them of Andaman.
The slaves of reason call this book Abuse-of-Language: they are right.
Language was made for men to eat and drink, make love, do barter, die.  The wealth of a language consists in its Abstracts; the poorest tongues have a wealth of Concretes.
Therefore have Adepts praised silence; at least it does not mislead as speech does.
Also, Speech is a symptom of Thought.
Yet, silence is but the negative side of Truth; the positive side is beyond even silence.
Nevertheless, One True God crieth hriliu!
And the laughter of the Death-rattle is akin.”

“The Sorcerer

A Sorcerer by the power of his magick had subdued all things to himself.
Would he travel? He could fly through space more swiftly than the stars.
Would he eat, drink, and take his pleasure?  There was none that did not instantly obey his bidding.
In the whole system of ten million times ten million spheres upon the two and twenty million planes he had his desire.
And with all this he was but himself.
Alas!”

“The Mountaineer

Consciousness is a symptom of disease.
All that moves well moves without will.
All skilfulness, all strain, all intention is contrary to ease.
Practice a thousand times, and it becomes difficult; a thousand thousand, and it becomes easy; a thousand thousand times a thousand thousand, and it is no longer Thou that doeth it, but It that doeth itself through thee.  Not until then is that which is done well done.
Thus spoke FRATER PERDURABO as he leapt from rock to rock of the moraine without ever casting his eyes upon the ground.”

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The Mystical ‘Not’

“Not [the word as such], in this case, represents Crowley’s Qabalistic Zero, defined as 0=2. It is the Fool of the Tarot. It is a condition of Being unbound and unfettered, utterly outside of time and space. Thus it is not part of the Universe as we Understand it, it is the Absolute … It can be given no coherent definition, hence it is No-Thing, Nothing. It is every potential and possibility which we have within ourselves but have not yet made manifest. Thus it is all that … implies the omnijective perspective. … [W]e ourselves contain this Absolute and are Nothing, for we our Essence is not bound by the Universe.

‘There Is Never A Moment Which You Are Not’ — The declaration taken as a whole has two meanings, one obvious and one esoteric:

1. All of time and space, i.e. eternity and infinity, is imprinted with your presence and influence.

2. There exists a timeless Void in which you are All-Potential.”

(Michael Kelly 2009: Apophis, p.172/3)

 


“And if all things come from One Thing, then send your prayers to the Sun.” Boyd Rice


Everything is one, when 0=2, I pondered once, when I first grasped Crowley’s idea of the mystical Nothing, Zero or the Tarot trump The Fool. I remember that realization very vividly. My friend Henrik and me were on a trip, on shroooms, in the woods and he quoted a sentence from a Current 93 song: “Nothing shall fresh spring again.” And I said: “Isn’t that rather heavily pessimistic?” And he went: “No, don’t you get it? It’s about Nothing of which All springs.” Well, I’m quiet sure that the band was talking about apocalyptic visions and meant literally what they said. But with an overdose of Crowley and magic mushrooms things can connect quiet differently in your brain. However, it’s also encoded in the Qabalistic Ain and I think it’s behind the Germanic idea of the “magically charged Void”, Ginnungagap. The equation of the mystic then might be 2=0, changing duality into No-Thing, uniting duality, transcending the whole show (of duality and thus illusion), as it were, by returning to the source of all, to the primordial state of being (or non-being?). God to some (monists and monotheists), shunyata (’emptiness’) to others (Buddhists). In Qabalistic terms it means to return to the Abode of the Nous, the higher triad of the Tree of Life (‘City of the Pyramids’), where the spiritual world, the Real, which is ideal, is seperated from the material one, the Unreal, which is actual (in neo-platonic thought). Hence the world-denying tendency in mystical currents (not all currents). The magician, in turn, plays with duality, with Maya, with Ginnung, or Chaos — an undifferentiated ether that longs to be formed into substance by the will of the magician. (Of course, this division between the mystic and the magician is arbitrary and unnecessary.)

“Ginnung or Ginning becomes a word for ‘delusion’ at a certain point in Old Norse. One of the sections of the Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson is called the Gylfa-ginning, usually translated Gylfi’s Delusion. But in the Rig Veda we see that Maya is the creative power wielded by Varuna, who with his pashas [bonds] can bind or loosen, destroy or create anything he can imagine. In both cases what we are dealing with is the idea that this is ‘powerful stuff — and power can equal mortal danger. In essence Ginnung is the undifferentiated energy/matter which preexists creation, and which underlies the forms of all phenomena. What had been ‘magical power’ to the trained elite, became ‘bad ju-ju’ as its practices drifted down to the masses. The amount of training and discipline necessary to wield Ginnung in a reliable way is so great that the vast majority of humanity, when they try to ‘use’ it, simply end up confusing themselves and devolving into a morass of illusion. Hence the use of the substance becomes more or less taboo.” (Edred Thorsson)

This is an interesting explanation of what this ‘stuff of Chaos’, this Ether, Maya or Ginning might be. Anyway, when I began to write this article today I thought of writing a short persiflage of the Lord’s Prayer, using the image of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but my poem, including the whole article, turned into something completely different and took a strange direction in the last few hours. It’s rather weird to write poetry in your non-native language, similar to playing an instrument you can’t play. But also, it opens new angles and one can use words differently, create word-plays that don’t exist in one’s own language and new meanings emerge. That’s one of the many reasons why learning Old Norse will be very rewarding to any true Runer, I guess. And why learning new languages in general is a rewarding activity. “To learn another language is to possess another soul”, said Karl the Frank. After the poem I quote one of my absolute favourite passages from Hakim Bey’s famous Temporary Autonomous Zone that puts his idea of ontological anarchism across. He was also, like some of our contributors, inspired by Sufism.


The Mystical (K)Not

Primal Chaos — permeating Heaven and Hell,
Shape wisdom erupting from Urðr‘s Well,
As above, so below,
Eternal Mystery I strive to know.

Eagle King, spread thy wings,
Thou art the Shaper of all things,
Thou who art No-Thing and have no Name,
Inventor and Player of the Master Game,
Thy Intelligence come, thy Word be done,
I am thy Son of the the Black Sun.

Let feverish dreams rain down from the skies,
Teaching false truths and true lies,
Give us frenzy, make us divine or insane,
Push us to change ourSelves and to unchain
us from false divisions and Single Vision.

Lead us into temptation with Her — Runa,
I came to court Her, She’s my Fortuna.
And deliver us from mere Beliefs,
They are for priests and other thieves.

Death is the Warrior’s Wife and ultimate Bliss
The bloody Knife and the Valkyrie’s kiss,
And Life is Power, Beauty and Desire
We are the Dragon’s Eye, arosen from Fire.

For thine is Intelligent Chaos and Noetic Gnosis,
I don’t care, if you teach by thorns or by roses,
Thou art God’s Golden Shower
Magic is Love and Will to Power,
Thy Glory is the Cosmos’ Story
Of the Eternal Copulation of Kia and Zos,
Pulsating in Dagaz and the Elhaz Cross!

Blessed be their Child that dances and sees
Eternal Forms ascending in Ecstasies.
With formless Fire I create from mud,
I know I’m drunk on Kvasir’s blood.
Thou exhaled wisdom and divinity,
Now I bathe in thy Eternity,
For what is Thine is also Mine,
I Am as Thee and thou Art as Me.

Thou gave me Life-Breath, thou gave me Form,
Holy Madness pours from thy Horm,
Thou art the violent, upcoming storm
That tears all apart to again be reborn.

And to grow and to dance and to love and to fight
To rise in thy Might, seek for Darkness and Light
Is to love Mystery and to wear Her Sign
Man’s  incomplete, but man is Divine,
Do not fear, Eternity is here,
The only crime is not to notice Her,
And I think to myself, lying dead on the floor
Oh Life, oh Death, you are but one Door
Man cannot cut this Gordion Knot
There Is Never A Moment Which You Are Not


Hakim Bey, ontological anarchist and prophet of Chaos

“CHAOS NEVER DIED. Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology (like the shadows before Babylon), the original undifferentiated oneness-of-being still radiates serene as the black pennants of Assassins, random & perpetually intoxicated. Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it’s neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds.

Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard.

No, listen, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions.

There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you’re the monarch of your own skin–your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.

To shed all the illusory rights & hesitations of history demands the economy of some legendary Stone Age–shamans not priests, bards not lords, hunters not police, gatherers of paleolithic laziness, gentle as blood, going naked for a sign or painted as birds, poised on the wave of explicit presence, the clockless nowever.

Agents of chaos cast burning glances at anything or anyone capable of bearing witness to their condition, their fever of lux et voluptas. I am awake only in what I love & desire to the point of terror–everything else is just shrouded furniture, quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains, sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal censorship & useless pain.

Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou, neither selfless nor selfish, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obsessions, unemployed, sensually deranged, wolfangels, mirrors for contemplation, eyes like flowers, pirates of all signs & meanings.

Here we are crawling the cracks between walls of church state school & factory, all the paranoid monoliths. Cut off from the tribe by feral nostalgia we tunnel after lost words, imaginary bombs.

The last possible deed is that which defines perception itself, an invisible golden cord that connects us: illegal dancing in the courthouse corridors. If I were to kiss you here they’d call it an act of terrorism–so let’s take our pistols to bed & wake up the city at midnight like drunken bandits celebrating with a fusillade, the message of the taste of chaos.”

Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.


 

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Believing In…

I have always found the term “to believe in” rather annoying. I will try to analyse why.

Firstly, there are so many ways this term is generally understood. To believe in a principle or cause, is to have confidence in its value to society. To believe in an individual, is to have confidence in their ability to be successful in some way. To believe in X, is to have confidence that X is literally true or real, no matter what the evidence may indicate. It is this last sense that is most troubling, although many religious folk define religion by all three.

But is religion really about “believing in”? Certainly for Christianity, and Islam, this is the case. In our long domination by this influence, most Westerners define religion as something you believe in. More than that, it requires the third mode of belief, as faith in the literal truth of unprovable statements. I would contend that this view of religion is highly limiting, not at all universal, and somewhat dangerous.

For the majority of religions, belief has always been secondary. Individuals within a society tend to share similar beliefs, but it was never an explicit requirement for participants in most religions to believe in particular unprovable things. Most religions are more about celebration, symbolism, and social cohesion. The Abrahamic religions are unusual in requiring a belief in the unprovable. This view of religion as belief has unfortunately influenced many other religions that have, over time, become more inclined to place more importance on belief.

The negative consequences of belief-based religion are manifest. The requirement to “believe in” unprovable propositions opens the door to interpretations of those propositions, and the concepts of heresy, and blasphemy. These are essentially “thought crimes” historically, and in some countries still, punishable by death. Even where there are no longer official punishments, the questioning of orthodoxy is often met with social sanctions and even physical abuse.

Less extreme, but perhaps more destructive in the long run, is the tendency of those reliant upon revealed belief to ignore evidence-based knowledge. Denial is the most common position of religious and political groups who find some truths inconvenient to their cherished beliefs. Climate change denial, evolution denial, and holocaust denial, are just a few examples. These groups are not skeptics in the sense of being undecided and requiring more evidence. They have a predefined position, and are selective in their acceptance only of evidence that seems to support their beliefs. They create and exploit public confusion, delaying urgent action, or casting doubt and suspicion on the legitimate pursuit of knowledge.

A more insidious consequence of stressing belief in the unprovable, is that it is a short step to enforcing belief in the demonstrably false. Fundamentalist Christian, Muslim, and other religious cults discovered the power of coercive psychological techniques long before they were adopted by communist re-educators, or described in George Orwell’s “1984”. By immersing people in an environment where unquestioning belief and obedience are required, individual conscience and rationality can be suppressed. Cult survivors are often horrified at how easily they were lead into actions and ideas that were totally out of character.

It may be useful here to define the difference between a sect and a cult. A sect is merely a subgroup of a religion that may have unusual ideas, and may have intense hostility toward other sects, but is not necessarily a cult. A cult is a group, religious or otherwise, that uses coercive psychological techniques to control its members’ actions and beliefs.

The signs of cult behaviour in a group usually include; an authoritarian leadership, often with outlandishly grandiose titles, a hierarchical structure where promotion and status are rewards for adherence to the dictates of the leadership, psychological isolation of members from the wider world, often reinforced with physical isolation and a degree of paranoia, the insistence that members are special or better than the outside community, and particularly the enforcement of belief in unprovable dogmas involving punishments for doubt or questioning.

The key to getting a cult to work is the control of belief. This is most easily achieved if it is done in stages. Once the members have modified their beliefs sufficiently far from reality, they lose their ability to discern the difference between truth and fiction, or between what they would previously have seen intuitively as right or wrong. The process can produce profound changes in an individual’s behaviour, and lasting psychological damage.

By overstating the importance of “believing in” things, Western culture has really set itself up for the proliferation of cults. In the Islamic world religious cults are less tolerated, but belief can still be politicised and turned toward extremism.

The only antidote to our susceptibility to cults, is to stop defining religion as “believing in..”. Define it as a practice, a philosophy of life, a way of communing with the Universe, a tradition. Once we are free from the tyranny of “believing in”, we are able to accept evidence-based knowledge, or reject misinformation, without fear or guilt.

The problem of belief seems to have polarised society, with rationalist atheists on one side, and superstitious religionists on the other. In reality, there is a silent majority of rational and quietly religious folk, as there always has been. Many of the divisions and problems of religion and society would vanish if we just stopped “believing in …”.

Recommended Reading

Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China by Robert Jay Lifton

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris

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Interview with Diana Paxson

I want to say that Diana was extremely friendly and kind. She leads the Hrafnr Community in California. I must thank her very much! For books by Diana Paxson check out our Elhaz Ablaze Bookshop.

Interview with Diana Paxson

This interview is part of an academic investigation of the practices of Seidhr in the postmodern world. Could you tell me a little bit about your background in the area of magic(k) and/or Neo-Paganism and how you came to practice Seidhr?

My first magical training was in a ceremonial tradition based on the work of Dion Fortune. After several years, I felt that I needed to balance that with a more energetic and ecstatic practice, so I began to work with the techniques in Michael Harner’s book on shamanism. However these techniques, although very well presented and effective, lacked the substance that comes from a cultural tradition, but I had no connection to any of the Native American or other cultures. When I was doing research into Norse mythology I had seen references to seidhr, which sounded like a northern European magical tradition that I could explore without the danger of cultural appropriation. Unfortunately, at that time, I knew of no one who was practicing it, so I had to figure it out for myself, using what I had learned in other traditions about spirit journeying and trance work to interpret and flesh out the information in the lore.

Where does Seidhr come from? What was Seidhr in the past and what is Seidhr today?

In the Eddas and sagas, Seidh is used as a term for a variety of magical practices which involve a trance state and is often translated into English as “witchcraft”. The list of skills ascribed to Odin in Ynglingasaga (although presented in negative terms) is similar to lists
of shamanic practices from other cultures. The oracular practice described in the saga of Eirik the Red and other sagas is also called seidh (or spae). It is said to have been taught to the Aesir by Freyja.

Oracular Seidh is the best known form today. The process I developed is based on the sources given in my answer to question 4. I have trained people all over the US, in England, and in Holland. Many have taken the basic approach and developed their own variations.

Why do you think Seidhr should be practiced? What does result from practicing Seidhr?

Oracular seidh is a community service, a way to provide insight and counsel. Other forms of seidh can be used for healing, inspiration and to gather information.

What sources have inspired you to take up the practice of Seidhr? What sources have you studied / read?

1. The sagas, especially the saga of Eirik the Red, which includes the most explicit description of any Norse religio-magical ceremony that we have.

2. The Eddic poems in which Odin visits the Völva in hel to question her: Baldrsdraumar, The shorter seeress’ prophecy, and Völuspá.

3. Saxo and other sources that describe journeys to the Otherworld.

James Chisholm has put together a sourcebook of references to seidh, published by RunaRaven Press.

Do you think one has to speak Old Norse or has to study the original sources to be able to practice Seidhr?

In order to understand the references in the lore it is useful to at least compare several translations and look up problematic words in an Old Norse dictionary, as modern languages have a more limited vocabulary, and terms are often mistranslated.

Despite the fact that the term ‘shamanism’ is itself controversial outside the context of Siberian shamanism, do you believe that Seidhr is a kind of ‘Northern Shamanism’? Does Seidhr feature shamanistic elements?

I find “shamanistic” to be a useful term for practices that resemble those found in true shamanic cultures. Ethnographic research (see Eliade’s „Shamanism“) indicates a remarkable similarity of practices in widely separated cultures. I believe that such practices were once
world-wide, and some may have survived in the Indo-European cultures. It is also possible that the Norse borrowed practices from the Finns and Saami (just as the latter borrowed some elements from Norse mythology). Oracular seidh, though it uses many of the same skills, in format is clearly part of the Indo-European oracular tradition.

What are the differences between shamanism and Seidhr? What are the specifics of Seidhr?

My understanding of the way “shamanism” is now being used is that it properly is applied to the practices of tribal hunter/herder-gatherer cultures, with the classic initiatory and other experiences.

By the saga-period, practitioners of seidh play a more anomalous role in their societies, except for the seers, who seem to have been highly respected. Because terms such as “seidhjallr” are used in connection with spae, I classify it as a subset of Seidh.

Do you consider Seidhr as part of the ‘Northern Tradition’ / Teutonic-Germanic Religion?

Although not universal, oracular seidh is practiced in a number of heathen communities in the U.S. In my opinion seidh is the proper term for such practices in Asatru. Groups basing their practice on Anglo-Saxon or Continental Germanic ways might find other terms (such as
“hexerei”). Certainly “Seidh” is the best-known and most popular term for Teutonic-Germanic magic.

What is the role of women in Seidhr? Is Seidhr somehow more connected to women?

In Ynglingasaga we are told that in earlier times both men and women practiced seidh, but that later it was considered so “ergi” that it was only taught to priestesses. Apparently as the Norse became acculturated to European Christian ideas, the status of women and anything requiring receptivity was lowered. Thus, except for the seidhmadhrs persecuted by the Norse kings, the seidh workers we read about in the lore are female.

I have trained both men and women in seidh, and both are quite able to master the skills. It is true, however, that those who continue to practice seidh and make it part of their Asatru identity include more women and gay men than straight men.

Is it ‘unmanly’ to practice Seidhr? What does that say about the role of men and women in (ancient) Germanic culture? How is this seen in (post)modern
Neo-Paganism / Ásatrú?

See above, and for a full analysis, see my article, “Sex, Seidh, and Status” (http://www.seidh.org/articles/sex-status-seidh.html)

Germanic Neo-Heathenism has been often accused of being racist / right-wing? Why do you think that is the case? Can descendents of non-European cultures be part of Ásatrú?

This is a topic that has been discussed exhaustively by contemporary heathens. For an analysis, see Chapter 7 of /Our Troth, Vol. 1/. Essentially, opinions range from those who believe that anyone who feels called by the Germanic gods can worship them to the splinter groups who think that Asatru is the natural religion of a superior white race. The heathen emphasis on family and heritage means that for many, their descent from Germanic peoples is one motive for becoming heathen, however, at least in the U.S., everyone has been formed by speaking a Germanic language and living in a culture shaped by Germanic ideas, so we all have a Germanic cultural heritage.

Why do you think so many people feel attracted to Neo-Paganism today (including Wicca, Druidry & Ásatrú)?

There are many reasons: the Abrahamic religions don’t deal well with the feminine or the environment, many of them fail to help people connect with Spiritual Power, focusing on sin and guilt is depressing, and finally, Monotheism doesn’t really make sense (see John Michael Greer’s „A World Full of Gods“).

Finally, what answers does Heathenism / Paganism have to the condition of the modern world (including modern challenges like climate change, overpopulation, financial crisis etc.)? In which way does it help to improve the conditio humana? (I would also like to ask in this context: Why is it ‘better’ than the monotheistic cults?)
To properly address any one of these questions would require a book. In brief, Paganism in general sees humans as part of the natural world, not superior to it, and teaches harmony and cooperation rather than exploitation. If we understand natural law and apply it to our own
actions, we have a better chance of restoring balance in all areas of life, and thus human, as well as natural survival.

Heathenry in particular offers a strong ethical system with an emphasis on personal responsibility, and plenty of inspiration for meeting adversity with courage. One popular saying is, “We are our deeds.”Polytheism makes more sense because no matter how hard people try to deal with the Divine as an all-powerful, etc. universal Being, so long as we are in human bodies, we inevitably personify our gods and in doing so, limit them. The solution is to have many deities that cover all aspects of existence.

Heathens tend to think of their deities as friends or relations, senior partners in the fight to preserve the world.

Skaal,
Diana.

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The Joy of…Fermentation

Tonight I came home from work, ate dinner, and then got busy preparing some traditional foods – a bucket of salsa, a jug of beet kvass, and three buckets of sauerkraut! The more I explore the art of making food from scratch the more joyous it becomes and I wanted to share some reflections that came to me tonight.

First of all, getting into more traditional cooking is easier than it seems. At first having to work from raw ingredients, putting it all together by hand, seems intimidating for anyone used to pre-made supermarket convenience. But traditional cooking is like meditation – the effort invested quickly pays itself off and then starts raking in the interest on very favourable terms.

After only a little experience you begin to realise just how fun it is to make salsa or kvass or sauerkraut or whey & cream cheese. I feel deeply energised even though I worked all day and then spent more than a couple of hours in the kitchen.

I spent my time cooking listening to the music of Ironwood, which always makes me happy, and preparing food from raw ingredients involves a lot of repetition – cutting, and pounding the cabbage for the sauerkraut. This work provides brilliant doors for trance!

Everyone knows that repetitive rhythms can induce trance and in the process of my cooking tonight I drifted into some lovely and quite blessed states. I wandered through different worlds and I could literally feel the small wounds of daily life healing throughout my body from the altered consciousness into which I had drifted. What a bonus!

And of course it makes my soul happy to know that I am making fermented foods, which are super-nutritious and super-delicious and fun to make. My kind of traditionalism (small t used on purpose folks) is not ideological – I am neither against nor for the modern world, though I have many criticisms to make of it.

Rather, my kind of traditionalism is empirical in basis – for there is extensive and very sound science for the view that premodern approaches to cuisine are far superior to the high calorie, low nutrient rubbish so prevalent these days.

The fact that making food as healthy as sauerkraut (a far superior source of Vit C than any pill), or beet kvass (which cures allergy attacks, mouth ulcers, and jet lag with casual alacrity in my personal experience, as well as tasting divine) also connects me with the living experiences that shaped the mythic worldviews of old Europe is just beautiful, elegant even.

I really think that exploring such practices and ways is just as essential – perhaps more so – than even delving into mythology or runic artefacts or whatever. These simple domestic practices were and still can be the bricks and mortar which nourished the pre-Christian Heathen imagination.

You’ll notice that all the foods I made tonight – salsa, sauerkraut, beet kvass – are fermented foods. Fermentation is a fascinating thing. Before we had fridges we used fermentation to make food last – and it just so happens that fermentation (of which making alcohol is only a very small part) also loads up the food with nutrients and makes them super-easy to digest. A nice little bonus which we in our fridge-age unfortunately no longer reap.

Fermentation is essentially the art of letting food rot into something tastier, healthier, and longer-lasting than what it would be straight out of the ground. There’s something brilliant about the way this simple practice marshals the vast chemical complexity of food molecules.

One of the reservations I have about untrammelled technologisation is that it invites us into simplistic understandings of the world, since we begin to focus on what we understand and tend to forget that things are way more complex than we might like to think (a common problem that has been studied extensively in experimental psychology, and to which it seems even the most brilliant scientists have been found to be susceptible to).

But fermentation elegantly marshals the vast chemical complexities of food with a dead simple strategy – chop it up and let it sit at room temperature for a few days. Brilliant! I see fermentation as a brilliant analogy for various alchemical processes, and so as I make my fermented foods I experience it as a spiritual analogy, just as alchemists use the quest for gold as a physical metaphor for their spiritual quest for the philosopher’s stone, for enlightenment or healing.

This is one of those things that really illustrates the fact that spiritual life and everyday mundane life are not qualitatively different. They exist on a continuum and if we are imaginative, curious, and a little bit industrious we can shorten that continuum so that the spiritual permeates the everyday and the everyday permeates the spiritual. To me that is nothing more or less than animism in action, the gods living at one with our every breath. And isn’t that the whole goal of premodern spiritual paths such as Heathenry?

Incidentally, for those wondering, I’ve been doing more research on premodern lifespans and health. The only sound and genuinely empirical, quantitative study I found (other than Weston Prices’s work) looked extensively at fossils and human remains from before the current age, and also at contemporary premodern cultures (mostly hunter gatherers).

They found that the average lifespan under these conditions is in the mid 70’s. They also made some other surprising discoveries – for example it appears that infant mortality rates were not through the roof in these cultures!

From other archaeology material I’ve read – Barbarians to Angels provides some low key but very clear examples – it is clear that the premodern lifestyle produced good health generally, including good dental health. Monty Python’s mud-eating, snaggle-tooth peasants are hilarious, but they’ve maybe unduly prejudiced our ability to understand the lifestyles of premodern times.

This is all in line with Weston Price’s work on nutrition. His theory was that the premodern diets of many cultures were and are superior to modern processed diets because they are super-dense in nutrients and relatively low in calories – just the opposite of McDonalds, really.

Can anyone really argue with such a view? Certainly from reading Michael Pollan and Nina Planck it seems to me that rigorous research (and sadly much nutritional research isn’t) strongly supports this view.

So eating traditionally accords nicely with the modern scientific method, a perfect example of why “going back” to the past for inspiration can sometimes actually be much more scientifically sound than the reckless technical “innovation” to which we in the West are unfortunately quite invisibly addicted to.

Incidentally if you think you can’t afford to eat organic or small-farm grown you might like to look at what you do spend your money on…do we need cable TV, three cars per household member, 10,000 inch televisions, etc, etc? There’s more room in your budget for good food than you realise.

Raw ingredients, even organic or small-farm grown, have two other advantages – making food from scratch generally works out more economically than processed premade foods anyway, and also such foods (in Australia at least) are largely GST exempt, so its cheaper than you think.

Plus you can explore food co-ops, growing your own, etc, etc. If you are willing to use your imagination you can do it. That said, please don’t take my comments in a finger-pointing or moralising way. I’m hoping to inspire rather than harangue. Did I mention how fun and easy it is to make  fermented foods?

Incidentally, from what I’ve read it also seems clear that premodern cultures traded food with one another extensively. The poisonous monoculture that lurks in this modern world is not a product of cross-cultural food munching, despite what some more ideologically based traditionalists might like to think.

Multiculturalism is not monoculturalism, and premodern peoples, from what I have read at least, loved to chow down on each others’ specialties.

Sauerkraut, that quintessential German dish, arrived in Europe with the Mongols. That doesn’t take away its special Germanic-ness, which has accrued quite legitimately over some nine centuries, it just reminds us that there’s a difference between cultural purity (which pretty much doesn’t exist and never did and is purely a modern fabrication) and cultural specificity (which clearly did and does exist since we can talk about distinctly unique and different groups, but which included intercultural exchange as one of its elements).

In other words, the isolationist tendencies of ideologically-based traditionalists are anachronistic and untrue to the ancestral ways – and do not in fact do much to safeguard the old traditions. How ironic.

As often is the case my writing jumbles together politics, philosophy, history, spirituality, mythology, domesticity, health sciences, psychology, and eating! We divide the world into neat categories but in doing so we lose our ability to understand it. As Mr Heinlein said, “specialisation is for insects.” My thoughts keep rotting up into more and more complexity and richness, and fermentation is a great metaphor for both the creative and the intellectual processes…

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Reflections from the Tree

“There’s no one path to god, but there is an authenticity to every path that is there, and it is your job to get to that.”

– Arrowyn Craban

“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”

– Rumi

I recently had a beautiful experience at an Isis gig, dissolved into totally wild dance as their crushing, trance inducing post-metal swept all before them. Isis tend to draw fans from the metal and hardcore scenes – blokes who don’t know how to be in their bodies and who find it difficult to respond to the simultaneous subtlety and force of Isis’s music – whereas I have years of studying improvised dance behind me and a sharp nose for doors into altered consciousness.

I threaded my way through wild and beautiful embodied consciousness, dissolving into communion with the whole cosmos – with the World Tree as the binding force of all oneness and difference, the paradoxical solution to the contradiction of universality and particularity. The most wild “spiritual” states tend to go with intensely physical expression – a perfect conjunction of opposites.

The final song of the set had a long and potent build that exploded into ecstasy and after that I floated, sated, through the encore, in a state of high bliss. Who needs drugs when there is music and dance in the world? I just wish there were more good opportunities for experiences like that, I suppose it is up to me to be open to finding them. I spouted poetry praising the World Tree and my patron, and sang and laughed. It was berzerkergang but without a military purpose, yet the same kind of state, driven by the parasympathetic nervous system.

And curiously, I even found myself dipping into the Sufi practices I have not participated in for some years, head swaying right then left, the turning away and remembering from heart to universe to heart, the sacred words la illah ha il allah spilling from my lips. It felt good to find that I can still call Sufism home. I wish more people knew what a spiritual jewel lies beneath the hard monotheistic armour of Islam (including more Muslims)!

And this gets me to thinking about my tendency to rubbish Christianity too. There’s no essential reason why Heathenry has to adopt any particular stance towards Christianity. At its best it is a marvellous religion – and while I deplore the many terrible things done in its name, I think that if I am going to be able to consider myself to be possessed of a mature spirituality then I think it is time to put aside the easy contempt I tend to lazily adopt towards Jesus and his sheep.

In the same motion, of course, I’ll never stop having contempt for the horrors perpetuated in Christ’s name – which are too many to even begin to enumerate – nor will I accept the various foolish consequences of Christian influenced philosophy. On the other hand, the ideals of love, compassion, and personal responsibility are noble and cherished by most human beings, including (I would guess) most Heathens. Without such ideals no society or family or culture can last for long, even if we are not obliged to follow these threads in the fashion that Christianity (in its infinite and hilariously mutually contradictory variations) would see us do.

But at the end of the day, when I am in trance, when I am dipping thickly into the Well of Memory and I recover the primordial experience of the poignant beauty of the mystery of oneness and difference…well, I remember how much Sufism has taught me about how to be a spiritual practitioner, and how similar Sufism and Heathenism are with their emphasis on the importance of Memory and Recollection (Plato has to join them on this one, too).

And while we are all free to erect all kinds of rules about which tradition goes where and how we “should” think, and all the rest of it…well, I’d rather be the guy at the Isis gig, tranced out of his head from dance and song and amazing music amongst the sea of awkward heavy metal dudes.

Religion is a door, a door which can open into experiences which are ineluctable. We can invoke them with poetry but we cannot capture them in words. Which door is best? Can we really be certain that our dogmatic beliefs about religion are indubitable, when nothing seems to be? Heathenry is the door that caresses my nature into pulsating life, yet Sufism has been an essential part of my journey and I will always consider myself a Sufi…indeed, I hope to be to Heathenry what Sufism is to Islam – the spiritual quicksilver that lies within the dead armour of the essential but insufficient religious forms.

I’d rather be the blood in the tree, swelling and sluicing and radiating LIFE than I would the dead bark of authorities and rules and commands. That isn’t to say the bark is inessential…but those that speak for the armour and the rules of a tradition generally try to suppress those that speak for the living breath of the tradition (the former are generally motivated by fear and ignorance in this endeavour). Actually…why put form and essence into opposition? They are meant to be complementary. I want it all.

Hence the importance of the magic of the Hedge! To have one foot here and one foot there, dancing impossibly between extremes – for is this not what the whole universe does at every moment in every place? We think we have made of sense of reality by splitting it into pieces, yet the more concrete our understanding the less accurate it becomes.

I am learning to trust more in my wyrd. I am unbinding the bonds of my orlog, the weight of the chains of negativity that have pursued me in various ways throughout my life. I am moving energy and causing transformation that is needed. I am just as mortal, inconsistent, confused, and fallible as everyone else, but at the same time, the currents of the flow of the waters of life through the World Tree grow stronger and stronger through me.

To some, these words will mostly be gibberish. To others they might make perfect sense. I congratulate the former for their bewilderment and the latter for their successes in walking the authenticity of their path.

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Chaos and Mystery

...it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone.

Henry David Thoreau, „Walden“


In such a union „each element achieves completeness, not directly in a seperate consummation, but by incorporation in a higher pole of consciousness in which alone it can enter into contact with all others.“ (Teilhard de Chardin) Tillich was expressing the same thought when he denied that union with the Ground of Being means a loss of self in a larger whole. „If the self participates in the power of being-itself,“ said Tillich, „it receives itself back. For the power of being acts through the power of the individual selves. It does not swollow them as every limited whole, every collectivism, and every conformism does.“

Braden, „The Private Sea – LSD and the Search for God“


There are two souls living in my breast. Goethe said that. And I often feel the same way. On the one hand there is the „Anarch“ (Ernst Jünger), the free spirit („Freigeist“), the one, who dares to live without certainty and follows his own path… …and then there is the one, who follows more systematic approches to Mystery by more experienced magicians, the one, who needs some guarantee that he’s on the right track, someone who believes that someone ‘out there’ might have THE answers. Ironically these antagonistic forces in my soul led me once into the arms of the OTO. They promise freedom of speech and individualism, but practice dogma, rigidity, hierarchies and, ultimately, the subordination of the individual under certain ‘truths’ (read DOGMA=AMGOD). The fine line where freedom of speech ends and dogma begins is not easily seen, especially when you’re a 19 years old occultist, who believes in the Great White Brotherhood (I know why cynics exist). However, when I study the magical systems of others and try to follow their approaches to the Mystery, I always get stuck at some point where I begin to question some (or all) of their basic premises. This always leads me to the same conclusion: that I’m not a follower type, that I want to create my own philosophy and that there are Masters and Magicians who can help along the way, but there are no guarantees. If I may just quote a quote that resonated deeply with my being:

„Theoretical loyalty provides clear direction but is inherently limiting; theoretical anarchy enables flexibility but also inserts uncertainty…there are no fixed and correct ideas or methods…and therefore no inherently right ways…“ 

Just think about it: Theoretical Anarchy enables flexibility but also inserts Uncertainty! Don’t we all just yearn for that absolute certainty? But with absolute certainty Mystery ceases to exist. Hasn’t the world reached that point already? The way of the world is not my way… Uncertainty means freedom, certainty means dogma.

To trust my own instincts is the hard part of the equation. I do, but not all the time. However, doubts and conflicts have always been an important part of my path. They have often created a Need-Fire (Nauthiz), which led me to new horizons beyond what any magical model can describe as every model is „a map, not the reality“ (RAW). This dynamic of ‘friction-resistence-breakthrough’ was also behind the process to go beyond Crowley’s Thelemic model that finally culminated in the termination of my OTO membership in 2006 (and that dynamic is behind many other important processes that led to inner development). I regard this step as one of my most important ones towards an independent magical path.

In Occultism there is the tendency to explain everything, to package the Mystery in a formulae. Crowley’s teachings are full of such formulas and they explain a lot, but ultimately mean nothing. They may be used, but after all they cloth the Mystery in some costume. But this costume is not the Mystery itself. The Mystery is sensed in a certain state of consciousness (usually a kind of gnosis in a CM sense) and fills the seeker with awe. (Rudolf Otto described this awe in his work about The Holy and called the two emotions of man when he encounters the Divine mysterium tremendum and mysterium fascinans.) And after such an experience the seeker tries to rationalize what he experienced by creating certain correspondences between his experience and the system he’s using. He does this by assigning certain concrete elements of his experience to certain abstract qualities of his system-in-use. Too abstract? Ok, I give you an example:

Let’s say I invoke my Genius / HGA / Augoides / Wode-Self / Fylgja (what ever you want to call it – I’m not saying it’s all the same thing; the HGA seems to represent a combination of Wode-Self and Fylgja) and I’m deeply rooted in the Kabbalistic Psychocosm. If you invoke that part of your psyche in that system you will do it with surrender and love and, maybe, with submission. After you have established a rapport with your Deep Mind a voice starts speaking (not necessarily verbally, but visually or otherwise) that seems to come out of the core of your very existence (one-dimensional, uneducated and spiritually underdeveloped primates often think they met „God“). After this mysterious experience you turn towards your Tree of Life and assign that experience to Tiphareth. This corresponds to the Sun and the Heart. This again is connected to the Anahatha-Chakra, which leads to another chain of correspondences. In modern QBL these can be connected to the Hebrew aphabet and Tarot cards, so that finally a psychocosm full of correspondences is created. Too many are obsessed with the symbols, signs, correspondences, colours etc., so that they forget what the initial intention was behind to use them in the first place. And that’s basically to allow the mind to focus and use all those tools as keys for opening the doors of perception and thus to reach higher states of conciousness. BUT, once you are there, as Isreal Regardie never stopped emphasising, throw away the ladder, because you don’t need it anymore! All too often from such correspondences predetermined routes to „enlightenment“ (also known under its mysterious name „delusion“) are created that alienate the true seeker from the goal.

So, what is the goal? In my experience the first and foremost aim is to experience reality directly, without immediately conceptualising and contexualising the experience itself. Though I don’t deny the usefulness of certain concepts I realize that it’s all to easy to take the package for the content. Honestly said, I believe that my path has often revolved around CONCEPTS (package) explaining some of my (hardly to explain and hardly to accept) mystical and/or magical experiences (content). This, I believe, is the reason why Jan Fries said in my interview that „I believe that the individual is a lot more important than any system, religion, cult or school. And if you have to stick a label to yourself to do your thing you ain’t good enough yet.“

Labels, they give certainty, don’t they? Words are more real than reality – for most of us. But in truth we’re caught in our own prison of concepts most of the time.

Ludwig Feuerbach, the first real atheist we know of (maybe the Greeks had also some examples of what we think of as ‘atheists’ today) showed how to free man from the concept of a transcendental being called „God“. He was a German philosopher, who declared that God was nothing but the projection of human qualities in their perfected form. He argued that the superhuman deities of religion are involuntary projections of the essential attributes of human nature, and this projection, in turn, is explained by him by using a theory of human consciousness that is heavily indepted to Hegel. Feuerbach is really the unrecognised father of the criticism of religion, because whatever was interesting in Feuerbach has been taken up by Marx and Freud (I’m not saying they’re right), who formulated their theses in a more logical, coherent and systematic fashion. However, Feuerbach proved that ‘God’ is just a WORD (label). But wait, words are more real than reality, right? In the beginning was the word… and the word was God. (By negating the existence of God – after his daughter has died at a very early age – Feuerbach has been prohibited to publish his works.) But those of us who experienced the Divine (content) cannot believe in the explanations of religion (package). And isn’t it strange that those Christians, who encountered the Divine in mystical experiences (like Meister Eckhart, Jacob Böhme, Paracelsus, Giordano Bruno, Blaise Pascal etc.) were doomed by the Church and that the Fathers of Dogma (who are the fathers of fear) became the patrons of this alien creed called Christianity? Before they imposed their dogmas on our forefathers and foremothers we had no conception of THE Divine (as the “One God”), but experienced that quality of reality (or consciousness – after all, I don’t know, if it has an objective reality) in different forms (thus polytheism). So, if Feuerbach is right (albeit a materialist), then he is confirming the mystical premise that the Gods live in our breasts. Thus the projections of “the superhuman deities of religion” that man has created aren’t mere illusions of human consciousness, but become an essential expression of the divine nature of Consciousness itself (Óðr).

In this way the label “God” degenerated into a concept that man has to believe in, instead of being the vision of each man realizing the core of his very existence. (I finally have to read Emerson. I know that he had a lot to say about that.) This imprisonment to labels is the hypnotising effect of language itself and due to an “evolutionary error” in our brains to ceaselessly create meaning. Zen Masters and other Masters of Meditation developed all kinds of techniques –including shock techniques, gazing at walls for hours, silence, sensory deprivation, mantras, mudras, yantras etc. – to overcome that miserable condition, also known as the conditio humana.

What I learn from this is that being a chaos mystic – doing your own research, experiments, rituals, meditations asf., and trusting your own experiences and your own perception, asking any premise and any dogma, system or preacher – is the only way to go. We can learn from those who walked the Path before us (magicians and mystics), we can learn to read their sign posts (symbol systems) and explanations (philosophies), but after everything is said and done, whom will you trust when you’re in danger or when death approaches? Your guru, your system, your God?

My answer is: “No, I will trust mySelf.”

This Self, I believe, is part of the Divine energy of godhead that creates and maintains the universe, who is the Alföðr and whom the Einherjar called Óðinn.

Persistence is all. Search continues…

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