A heart, wreathed in flame

What happens when I pray.

2009-10-10T17:27:46Z

This is a post written in response to those who condemn petitionary prayer as a way of making oneself feel better about things without actually working to change them, a doing-something flavoured way of not doing anything. There's a general tendency to cast users of petitionary prayer as deluded and smug, doing nothing but sitting back and talking to their imaginary friends while other people do all the real work.

Sometimes you're confronted with an ill in the world and you wish to respond. Perhaps a friend is very sick; perhaps news has just reached you of some calamity occuring elsewhere in the world; perhaps you see a grave wrong being done to some person or group. You wish you could intervene, but what can you do?

Here's what happens if I don't pray:

Oh no, how awful, and I can't do anything! I don't have a cure for [disease]; I don't have the £1000 fee a volunteer agency wants to send me out to help in [location]; I can't oust [political leader]; I'm just one person; I don't have any resources: I don't have any relevant skills; I'm so useless...

...and so on and so forth, until I'm thoroughly eaten up with self-involved despair.

And now here's what happens when I pray:

Oh no, how awful, and I can't do anything! Ah well, at least I can pray. *closes eyes for a few moments, communes with Gods/spirits/aliens/figments of own deranged imagination/what-you-will* Ah, well, I can't cure [disease], but I might be able to chip in for for my friend's doctor-money bleg, or at least send a kind word hir way. I can't afford to go and volunteer in [location], but hey, here's an online project to collect information on survivours and get news to their families. Ah, here's a charity appealing for items of warm clothing--I'll get those jumpers I don't wear anymore out of the cupboard. I can't oust [political leader], but I can go and see if there's an Amnesty International campaign I can participate in. Oh, and here's a reputable relief organisation that takes credit card donations...

Sometimes I get input which I interpret as advice coming from my Gods or ancestors. Sometimes I don't really "get" anything, but the act of directing my intent in a positive way gives me space to order my thoughts and breaks the spell of the despair before it can get a good toehold. Even if no immediate, direct response presents itself, the simple fact that you have approached the situation from the perspective of someone for whom meaningful (if slight) intervention is possible means that you are more open to any mundane strategies that might emerge later on.

Of course it would be better if I could just pull myself up by my bootstraps and get that positive head on by myself, but for reasons beyond my control that isn't possible. Even if there really is no-one on the other end of the phone, prayer still helps.

burningblood @ 2009-06-02T23:59:00

2009-06-03T00:50:57Z

I was hoping to get into some of the recent topics in more depth today--especially the topic of spiritual abuse etc--but I'm basically just too sick at the moment. A variety of factors seem to have precipitated a crash in my mood, and all I can really think about is the symptoms. So I'm going to write about the depression.

As of Monday, I am now back under outpatient psychiatric care. I made the decision to seek help over a year and a half ago, but with various factors such as the move and waiting-list times it's taken this long to get here.

The visit itself had a great impact on me. I had to spend a full hour going over my personal history with the shrink. He was kind and sympathetic, and I guess there's a sort of bleak satisfaction in making an NHS shrink go "Good God!" in response to some of one's experiences. But... yuck. Dealing with this stuff in small chunks is hard enough. An hour of condensed misery really is too much. At least I didn't cry.

I know it was necessary, but part of me feels like it was a retrograde step. I've been managing my own condition successfully with meditation, prayer, and more recently my somafera practices, for almost ten years. (I haven't been "off my meds," it was a medically-sanctioned cessation where the decision was taken with the involvement of my doctor.) It's hard not to feel like I'm giving up somehow, like it's a sign of weakness or unworthiness.

There's a lot of stigma surrounding mental illness anyway, and in heathenry unfortunately this is even more pronounced. I've seen people state outright that if you recieve psychiatric care for any reason, ever, you should not be worshipping the Tivar or vaettir. Full stop. Others reserve their bile only for those who are too sick to engage in conventional employment (never stopping to reflect that someone who can't cope with a 4-hour commute and an 8-hour day at the office might have done perfectly well for themselves if "work" consisted of sitting at home and spinning or feeding the chickens in the yard).

I'm very fortunate in having access to a variety of groups now who do not hold mental heath needs to be a sign of low personal worth, and in having friends who give me an enormous amount of loving support. (I have really lucked out with the local groups, as well as with more distant allies.) Still, it is hard not to internalise those prejudices. Self-managing my depression gave me a kind of cushion: sure, I couldn't just magic the condition away, but managing it under my own steam represented an excercise in self-reliance. Without that, I feel flawed and lacking in worth. I keep telling myself that's irrational, and I certainly wouldn't accept that of anyone else, but there it is.

Then there's the "if you were any kind of a real healer..." noise. If you were any kind of a real healer, it goes, you would be able to successfully self-treat anything that goes wrong with you. Even though I'm a great cheerleader for evidence-based conventional medicine, I still get that one.

There's a lot of talk in magical and spiritual circles about the great virtue of "madness." It's a source of constant frustration for me that this kind of thing doesn't get examined more often. I frequently get comments about my mental heath needs which work off the assumption that being mad like me is A Good Thing; that depression will of course be providing some magical or spiritual benefit. The thing is, it generally doesn't--quite the reverse.

Depression has a negative impact on every part of my life. It impedes my studies. It has robbed me of anything resembling a career. It makes the simplest things appallingly difficult--bathing, cooking, household chores. And it impacts on my spiritual life too. I am not as well-studied as I really ought to be; I'm not as active in heathen society; I'm not as consistent or as industrious in my devotions. One of the principle symptoms of a depressive disorder is impaired concentration, making meditation, contemplation and prayer more difficult. When I am too sick to do anything else, I will often try to redeem those periods of inactivity through prayer, offering my consciousness to the Gods and spirits; but when I'm seriously impaired I can sometimes not pick a single thought out of the chaos.

My mind wanders. I space out. I dissociate. I go to pray at my harrows and come to myself to find I've spent the last half an hour in 1982, reliving some bitter episode from my past. It's not a matter of "wallowing in self-pity" as the Catholics like to put it; it's not that I want to constantly relive the past, in fact I would far rather be enjoying my life as it is now and sharing my heart with my spirits, but somehow my mind gets dragged off there. Thoughts of self-harm intrude into my consciousness hundreds of times a day. I am simply a less effective person as a result of my condition, even before we get to the more serious stuff like public meltdowns and so on.

The Gods have been kind, gifting me with a wide variety of tools and resources to help counter these problems. There is the blessing of somafera. There is the blessing of direct-contact with the Gods and spirits themselves--loving presences who help me turn my thoughts to more useful subjects and who support me. There is prayer itself, an immensly powerful healing act. And now I have to integrate conventional psychiatric medicine into this--for that, too, is a gift from the Gods in its own way.

What is a spirit-worker?

2009-05-31T17:34:38Z

There's a lot of confusion surrounding this term, which I'm hoping to help clear up.

Some people see the term "Spirit-worker" being used in a book or two, and assume it was invented by that author and refers only to the set of practices in those books. In fact it's a very common term that has been in use for quite some time, and has a lot of applications. It does pretty much what it says on the tin: a steel-worker works with steel, a social worker works with social issues, a sex-worker works with sex and a spirit-worker works with spirits. ("Spirits" in this context could include any sort of non-corporeal being from a God on down, including animal spirits, ancestors, trolls, fae, house-wights, etc.)

Implied also is a sense that this is the practitioner's primary focus--other forms of devotional work or sorcerous magical practice may well be involved, but this person fulfills their duties largely through means of working with the spirits. Almost certainly they will be serving some community thereby... although in this context, it may be a non-corporeal one.

Note also that I have used the phrase "works with spirits" here, not "for." Just as there are many different relationships between people, there are many different relationships that can happen between a human and a spirit. Sometimes it's very much a friend-and-co-worker sort of arrangement. Other times, the spirit-worker is more like an apprentice to a guildmaster, or a pupil to a teacher. Or there might be a more familial kind of arrangement, with Gods and spirits as a great and loving Family who view the spirit-worker as Their own. In the case of some spirits, the spirit-worker employs them and gives them instructions.

The relationship might be short-term. In much modern evocatory magic, a practitioner calls down some spirit, demon or "God of the Week" in a magic circle, demands counsel or power for some sorcery, then sends the reluctant visitor packing with a swift boot to the backside. To my way of thinking this approach is ethically dubious, and likely to yeild lacklustre outcomes compared with the cultivation of a long-term and affectionate correspondance with a spirit. It is quite possible to have more brief interactions with individual beings; some spirit workers describe one-off meetings with an entity which passes on some piece of information or helps in some other way in exchange for something from the spirit-worker, then never appears again. More usually, a spirit-worker's relationship with the spirits will last for some years, even a lifetime.

A person can encounter their spirits at different times in their lives. Some individuals start very, very young, even in childhood. Others might only be visited later in life--perhaps after some significant change frees them from existing responsibilities, such as retiring from conventional employment, or having a child reach school-age or leave home. Conversely, spirits might arrive during childbirth. Spirit encounters may start to occur when the person takes up some skill, such as healing or writing. A very common theme in spirit-encounter narratives from many different times and cultures is the appearence of helpful spirits during a time of extreme crisis, danger or upheaval for the person--they may arrive to assist during a difficult birth, a severe illness, hunger or poverty, and then remain with the practitioner as guides and teachers.

It is interesting to note that spirit-work is not always spiritual, exactly. The ability to percieve what others cannot is what it is, and conferrs no especial personal qualities. There is a kind of continuum, with a strictly utilitarian approach at one end, and religious mysticism as devout as any medieval anchorite's at the other. Most people will be somewhere between these two extremes.

Some spirit-workers are deeply and passionately religious people, with their spirit-work, even the more sorcerous, practical elements, being an act of devotion; for others, it's a solemn and important duty but not a religious one. For a few it is simply a means to serve their own ends, and for an even smaller minority, it is something they are compelled to do to survive.

Very, very rarely you might come across a case resembling something like indentured servitude or thralldom, where the spirit-worker has no choice but to obey instructions from a God or other being, on pain of sickness, madness or death. It's highly irreguar, but it does happen. Rather unfortunately this rare condition has been seized upon by some as the essence of what a spirit-worker is, rather than the hen's-teeth-and-rocking-horse-shite occurrence it ought to be veiwed as. Usually this is accompanied by self-aggrandising declarations of personal liberty, and much contrasting of the bold, mighty, free-spirited non-spirit-working person with a straw spirit-worker cariacature who gets off on grovelling before hir Gods. Whether this is presented as "I am a pagan, not a spirit-worker--I'd just beat the Gods up on the astral plane!" "I am a l33t cHaOtE, I only work with Marvel Supoerheroes!" or "Asatru is a Warrior faith--we do not kneel before our Gods!" the subtext for all this me-big-you-small talk is often the same. "Oh cripes, if it happened to that guy, maybe it could happen to me..!" Alternatively, it may originate with an attempt to discredit an individual spirit-worker or workers by smearing spirit-work wholesale.

Unfortunately, this kind of grandstanding creates a false impression of what spirit-work is, leading to spirit-workers who don't have that kind of collared relationship doubting their own effectiveness; feeling "not good enough" because their relationship with the spirits is of a teacher-pupil, familial, or collegial kind. This is very sad. There is no right way to relate to the spirits. The nature of the spirit-worker's relationship should be less of an issue than how well things are going in terms of effectiveness in the role. One person does her job best when she's treated as a smart and valued co-worker; another when he is like a beloved child; another might function best with more minor spirits who serve them rather than vice-versa. The person in the child/parent role isn't weak, the person in the co-worker role isn't overconfident, and the person who is served by spirits isn't arrogant--and none of them are less valuable or less important than the person who gets screaming megrims if he doesn't do what he's told. The latter role certainly exists--there are any number of examples in anthropological literature, and a small handful of modern spirit-workers reliably report being in such a situation--and it is as worthy as any other. But it doesn't define "spirit worker."

What defines a spirit-worker is the ability and willingness to engage in work that involves spirits. The role is as broad and diverse in its expression as all of human nature.

In the spirits' silence.

2009-05-28T13:35:31Z

Sometimes, the connection goes down.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: for those who work for, with, over or around spirits, downtime is a feature, not a bug. You need the breaks in contact to process what you've recieved so far, to maintain your mundane functionality, and just generally collect your face. None of which necessarily makes things any easier.

The doubt is at its strongest and most maddening in the early months and years, and then with time and experience it begins to fade. But it never goes away completely. That chilling whisper rises out of the silence: What if this is it... what if I never hear Them again... what if I'm broken, what if They've left... what if none of it was real, a hallucination, a delusion...

In the specific case of the mad mage or the crazy spirit-worker, that's an even greater source of concern. I've touched on this in previous posts, but I thought I'd go into the topic in a bit more depth.

I've actually had what I later recognised as phantom input. "Mood specific delusions" is the technical psychiatric term for what I sometimes experience. In the past, when I was very sick, I would imagine things about myself that weren't true--past wrongs I hadn't actually committed, things I'd said or done that had never happened; I'd believe I was at fault for things I could not possibly have caused. While they weren't frequent and were never of long duration, the episodes were difficult to endure.

When magic and spirituality are involved, the potential to sink into delusion is increased. It is relatively easy to demonstrate to oneself that one is not a murderer, but if you bring "past life recall" into the mix the possibility for extended delusional guilt trips is bounded only by the person's appetite for self-flagellation. Add to this the eagerness of some other practitioners to join in with said flagellation for their own reasons, and you've got a recipe for disaster on your hands. This is why it's very important to develop critical skills early on in life. The subconscious mind does not know what is true or false, and will apportion emotional weight equally to a real memory and a manufactured one. Realising that my supposed past life memories generally tended to bear a striking resemblance to stuff I'd been reading or watching on telly shortly before "recovering" them helped me to get a grip and not go off the deep end.

In the current phase of my spiritual career, such false input tends to take on the form of spirit-contact experiences which are not in fact genuine and instead are generated from within my own mind.* I've had absolutely horrendous experiences wherein some beloved spirit, or worst of all one of my Gods, appears to me and essentially hands me my P45. Faliure. You're worthless. You're stupid. You're nothing but a traitor. Some of the scenarios played out are even worse than that.

How do I know those exchanges aren't real? A number of factors. One--the quality of the experience is different. The sensory input is thinner, tinnyer. The visual images are not as sharp. They may seem wooden, rigid, or stereotyped. If there's a tactile element, it will be dulled and muted. You get a feel, over time, for the difference.

Two--well, why would They bother? If you're a God, you can surely just break the connection with a mortal if things aren't working out. Hauling you up on the carpect for a chewing-out before giving you the boot is something an insecure middle-manager would do, not one of the Aesir. Such experiences seldom involve solid, reality-based criticism. A God or spirit harshing on you generally has a specific beef, and will be only too ready to spell it out. Input consisting of cheap jibes and put-downs--particuarly if they're duplicates of something a bully or harasser has put you through in the past--are more likely to be false input. Most likely this will be thrown up by your own mind, but in some cases a malicious spirit might be responsible.

I'm not saying that anyone should dismiss input just because it is harsh. Sometimes we get shown unpleasant truths about ourselves as part of a spirit's positive activity in our lives. With some, it's bascially part of their job. If you go before Loki, one of the more plausible things that can happen is to find yourself on the recieving end of your own personal Lokasenna. But that's the thing--Loki knows where the bodies are buried. He sees what you are and what you've done. Bad memories and experiences re-emerging in individuated form, or some not-so-bright spirit manifesting malice in your headspace, will be all about the cheap shots. It might know some of your weaknesses (like my fear of being unworthy of friendship) but it won't know the really ugly stuff--the things you've made excuses for, made up stories about, buried under self-serving narrative. A God will. A malicious spirit or toxic sub-personality will bring up the time you wet yourself in Assembly. A God will confront you with acts of selfishness, violence, mendacity--real things that have an impact on living people.

And when you're on the floor, all your defences down, writhing in the white-hot agony of that understanding, a God or helping spirit will help you process what you've been shown and respond to it meaningfully. The headsick will just keep playing the same stuck record, dragging you deeper into the spiral.

Aside from emergency situations where you or someone else has recieved input that's left them in grave distress or immediate danger, it's generally unhelpful to insist on categorising experiences as "real" or "not-real." All that is necessary is to recieve the input with grace, and hold it with grace. Relentlessly trying to box everything up by numbers is a waste of energy and attention. What's far more important is keeping an eye on the the overall pattern.

If you need confirmation on something big or important, you can either ask your spirits to provide it and then wait, or you can seek help from outside. I often get asked: Why, if you need to know something from Loki, do you not just ask Him yourself? You've got the God-phone, you've recieved meaningful/useful information in the past, ergo if there's anything you need to find out you can just enquire of your God.

Ideally this would be the case, but it doesn't always work out that way. I sometimes find myself struggling with what's actually required of me by the Gods and spirits. There are a number of reasons why I might find myself needing help with this. One is the aformentioned downtime: if something comes up at a time when I'm incommunicado and can't wait, I'll need to get someone else to make the call. As well as "schedualed maintenance" I experience a breakdown in the signal sometimes as a symptom of my psychological problems. Sometimes the headweasles gnaw through the cable. I can find myself so swamped with false input from various sources that the spirits simply can't get through. (This is one reason why Loki is such a great God for someone like me. He can get PRETTY BLOODY LOUD!) Other times, it's more like dead air. There's the white noise of the MDD, and no room for anything else.

Even if the signal is working as advertised, I can fail to recieve for other reasons. One is that I don't want to hear what's being said. Nobody wants to be chewed out, or have their faults revealed to them, or be confronted with some long and difficult task that absolutely must be done. It's hard to hear that. It's also hard to hear when things aren't going as well as I'd hoped in terms of my own progress--that I'm not as skilled or as advanced as I might like to imagine. Other times, the truth can be too wonderful to look at. You hesitate to accept what's being offered, because it's so beautiful you can't believe it. Joy can, at times, be its own form of Ordeal.

That's why having some skilled friend or neutral party step in can be helpful. Having someone to gently suggest re-evaluating what I'm getting from another perspective has been terribly important for me. When Loki has seemed unbearably fierce, having someone say "well, maybe it happened like you say and maybe it didn't--but have you thought of trying this approach?" has given me a way to respond meaningfully rather than be crushed. Also, having certain insights respectfully questioned or flagged as potentially dangerous ground--"plausible, but watch yourself--you're getting into crazy territory there!" has helped me go into a line of enquiry with the proper caution.

I've sometimes had people approach me completely out of the blue with information or commentary which seems to come from my Gods or spirits. Having a perfectly normal conversation about nothing in particular which suddenly switches over into "Wait, wait, I've got Someone telling me that..." Obviously you need to approach this kind of material with due caution, as it comes via a human reciever as apt to go wonky as your own, but really valuable intel has come to me this way. I'll go into this in more depth in a later post.

Remember to excercise your critical faculties regarding outside input. Some people are perfectly lovely individuals with only your wellbeing in mind, but who just happen to be completely out of their depth when it comes to direct-contact deity work. Others may be out to deliberately undermine you. From the get-go I've encountered people who were very keen to give me their opinions on what was going on with me, but who did not have my best interests at heart. Some people just want to tear you down to make themselves look big. Other people can't bear that you might have a connection anything like their own. Some individuals seem to work off the assumption that if things are tough in your spiritual life, it's because You Were Bad and are Being Punished (unlike them--they're Good and are Being Rewarded), and will immediately get into speculation and accusation regarding what you must have done wrong. None of this is terribly helpful and much of it can do lasting harm.

Welcome outside input and seek it actively, incorporating it in your understanding of your experiences; but never lose sight of the fact that at the end of they day you're the best judge of what is going on with you and your spirits. Always remember that the best person to assess what's going on with you spiritually is you, not someone else. Unless you're actually doing something completely out-there and actively damaging (such as writing essays about how Wotan is beating up Tezcatlipoca to prevent Mexico from annexing the US, or sending death threats to people who you deem to be Doing It Wrong), reasonable people should be able to agree to differ with you.

*Incidentally, this is still an important distinction even if you are of the opinion that there are no spirits and the whole shebang is internally generated. You still want to be talking to the bits of your psyche with something useful to say.

Speak!

2009-05-24T20:29:36Z

If you want to be heard, speak up.

Sounds obvious, doesn't it? If you have ideas and beliefs that you think should have broader exposure, then you have to do the work of putting them out there. If you think your particular way of working could benefit other people, then share it and celebrate it.

It's not always quite that simple, of course--it's very hard for a less mainstream practitioner to make themselves heard over large, well-established mainstream groups. But when we're talking about the fringes of pagan and heathen worship, the more marginalised practices and experiences such as spirit-work and direct-contact worship, it's a different matter.

You know those other big names on the fringe that you affect to find so threatening, so overpowering? You know why their names are better known than yours? It is not because they have some material advantage over you, some platform that you can't hope to access. It's because they put in the hours and do the work. They don't have anything which is unavailable to you. The tools that they're using to such effect are the same ones that are available to you.

Weblogs, free sites, e-lists, bulletin boards—nobody is stopping you from using those things. You don't need to have scads of money to make an e-book or a dead tree text happen any more. Web-based print-on-demand publishers offering free or very cheap services have proliferated in the last few years. There is no Evil Empire shutting you up. Nothing and no-one is stopping you from putting together your own texts and punting them out via Lulu, CafePress and countless others. These are the same tools that other fringe practitioners are using to get their ideas out. If you think a different set of ideas should be getting a wider audience, then go out and get them heard.

Ask others to contribute. Think of a topic you'd like to encourage more people to write on, and put together themed anthologies. Put out a general call for submissions, but also reach out to individuals who might have something to offer. I've often sat on an idea for an essay, story or poem for years, only prompted to get it written when some editor said "I don't suppose you could give me something on...?" This is a great way to support people in your line of devotion. People don't always feel entitled to contribute. Sometimes they need a helping hand to get over the self-doubt.

Join groups. Go to moots. Go to gatherings. Get talking. Listen, and respond. Offer to speak at events. Give classes. Share your ideas through active dialogue. Join web-based communities. Keep an eye out for newcomers to the ragged margins of paganism, and reach out to them. Be ready with a piece of good advice, something that's helped you in the past; be ready also with a kind word* when someone is struggling with their new-found faith and developing practice. The people I ended up attending to as a new spirit worker, in the first wild months when everything was happening so fast my head spun around, were the people who reached out to me with encouragement and support. People who were dismissive, critical, who pooh-poohed my descriptions of my experiences because they weren't what was expected or who ignored me outright because I wasn't important—well, they took longer for me to warm to.

Another thing that might really help? Stop lying.

Yeah, I went there.

Stop lying.

It's okay to be wrong, to make mistakes and errors—but let them be honest mistakes. Understand that your way of looking at things will grow and change as you travel along your path, that you may have to re-think your ideas not once but many times, and continually. And that's okay. It's not a sign that you were weak or stupid or misguided, just that you have a living, growing, developing practice. If you look back and think "I would do that differently now" or "Hmm, I no longer believe such-and-such," it's a sign of health, vibrancy and continued development, and you lose nothing by accepting and admitting to such a process. It's my belief that people writing on spiritual topics have a moral duty to be more ruthlessly honest than people writing on more neutral subjects. We owe it to the Gods we serve, to the communities who will be reading what we write, and indeed to ourselves.

So stop lying.

Stop lying about yourself. I'm not into being a disclosure cop—your level of disclosure is entirely up to you—but don't make claims about your life that are at totally odds with the facts. Be honest with yourself and others about your limitations and abilities. Don't lie about your past. Don't make up academic qualifications you haven't earned. Don't lie about your service record. Don't lie about your past beliefs. Don't claim that you were never a Christian when you once attended church regularly. Don't claim you've always been a heathen when you've got a background in Wicca. If your beliefs have changed over time, don't lie about your previous beliefs. Don't constantly try and retcon your past to fit in with the way you want to be perceived now. Don't lie about your practice. Don't lie and say you engage in an activity when you don't. Don't lie and say you never engage in an activity when you do.

Stop lying.

Stop lying about others. Stop demonising people because you don't agree with them. Stop smearing groups and individuals because they have different practices to you. Stop attacking people because their UPG doesn't match your UPG. Stop claiming that Author ABC has said XYZ, when they haven't. Stop making false claims of abuse. Stop making false claims of criminal activity. Stop slandering. Stop libelling. Stop defaming.

Stop lying.

See, when you make up stuff like this, you might well find believers. Other people as insecure and self-deluding as yourself will come and nod along; other, less culpable people will be made unnecessarily suspicious and leery of the groups and individuals you've attacked. But not everyone is going to be taken in. If you lie about what another author is saying, sooner or later people are going to go and read his essays or her books, and they'll then know that you were misrepresenting the content in unacceptable ways. If you lie about what a person does, other people who get to know them will realise that you're not telling the truth and will stand up and say so. Sure, your little clique of dupes and bigots will keep trotting out the same untruths, and yes you'll be able to sling enough mud that some, sadly, will stick. You might even be able to get them in serious trouble with the authorities. But it'll stick to you as well. People will know that you've put out misleading or fabricated information, and they'll recognise you as a liar and a defamer. They'll mistrust everything else you have to say, regarding other people, regarding yourself, regarding your beliefs. You'll make people who might otherwise have been interested in learning more about your ideas distrustful and angry. You will reveal yourself to be unworthy of trust and respect. You will cast even the more honest elements of your devotional writing into doubt. And the thing is that none of this needs to happen.

If you are writing about your own spiritual truth, writing from your heart, then your words will stand by themselves. That truth will shine through. When someone has it going on in their personal practice, it shows. It's impossible to counterfeit that, and you don't need to. You don't need to be absolutely perfect in every regard, only to be open and honest about your limitations and your strengths where they are relevant to what you are writing.

And you certainly don't need for everyone else to look bad for you to shine. This isn't a competition, we're not on a reality TV show. Everyone else doesn't need to be voted out of the house or kicked off the island. Everyone else doesn't have to be trashed and put down and silenced for you to be heard. There is room for diversity in pagan devotion, in heathen devotion, in spirit-work. Don't just whine about how other ways of working get more currency than yours (especially if this is not actually the case). If you want your ideas out there, put them out there.

And stop lying.

*such as "pistachio."

More on ordeal

2009-05-24T02:59:03Z

So, the idea of writing in a more general, detached way about the topic as a way of processing the anxiety and fear over this summer's forthcoming work was very successful. Until I finished the piece, and then it all started to

creep

back

in.

The fear takes hold.

How bad is it going to get? What if something goes wrong? What if I'm left impaired in some way? What if this is the time where I just can't get up again afterwards? What are my peers going to think of me when they've seen me that way?

What if I fail?

What if I can't summon up the resolve to go through with it? How bad is it going to get?
What if I chicken out? What if I'm too weak? What if I'm too cowardly? How bad is it going to get?

What if I fail?

What if sabotage myself? What if I do things that will injure my health? What if I make myself ill through eating the wrong foods, not eating, not exercising, over exercising? How bad is it going to get?

What if I fail?

How bad is it going to get?

What if I fail?

What if I fail?

What if I fail?

Long essay is loooooooooooong

2009-05-24T00:03:47Z

So I went back to that piece I posted the other day and cracked it open with the intent of pruning/cleanup. And... it was kind of like the topic scruffed me and wouldn't let me go, you know? I felt like I just HAD to add all this extra stuff. Now instead of being shorter it's about 3 times as long, GAAAHHH. I ended up writing more on the emotional aspect of ordeal work, expanding on the "case-study" from 2007 and adding another one (my somafera initiation), and doing a section on risks in ordeal.

Here is what I have for the risk section:

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This is an attempt to lay out some of the risks as I see them. It should not be considered exhaustive; I'm sure more experienced folk could add plenty to the list.

If all you have is a hammer...

Ordeal work is tremendously potent and effective. It can succeed where everything else has failed. It can bring you into power that you never knew existed. Thus, if you're not careful you can become a victim of your own success. Serious ordeal should not be your go-to technique every time you feel stuck or hit a plateau in your development. It's especially important for new spirit-workers to be careful here, as those of us who start out young may not have had the opportunity to build up a good varied toolkit, while those of us claimed later in life may find our existing skill-sets stripped away to prepare us for the new knowledge that we must integrate.

Always be ready to adopt new techniques as well as building on existing ones. Experiment with different ways of altering your consciousness. Do not always reach for the most strenuous, difficult practices. Accept that there will be times in your life where things do not appear to be moving forward as you would like. Downtime is not a bug, it is a feature—you need those periods of slow or halted development to integrate and consolidate your development so far. It will pass.

If you do all this, you will not be a worse ordeal worker but a better one: one who uses this set of techniques with the respect it deserves.

Emotional addiction

It is possible to get hooked on ordeal for other reasons. Human beings need emotional support and care in their lives. They need to receive things like compassion, affection, approval, sympathy. However, some people actually have a lot of trouble receiving these things. Self-reliance is a good thing but it can be taken too far; it is often the more responsible course to seek help than to try and struggle on alone. Yet some individuals resist seeking or accepting help until they are all but broken. This often isn't about being too proud, but an inability to see oneself as deserving. The suffering of an ordeal can give temporary respite from this, "buying" permission from the inner monsters to experience what it is to be cared for and supported. But it is only temporary. The effect wears off, and the person is thrown back into feelings of worthlessness. Such a person may end up turning to ordeal over other, more appropriate techniques in a subconscious attempt to placate those woeful wights of self-loathing; only in the wake of extreme suffering can they receive support from their fellows.

It's good to feel proud of successfully accomplishing an ordeal working, just as it's good to be proud of successfully completing anything important. But it shouldn't be the only way you can feel good about yourself.

This is one of the risks I myself faced. It was handled well, however, and instead of becoming mired in a toxic hurt-comfort cycle the experience of undergoing ordeal and receiving care afterwards became a powerful mechanism for healing in my life. By being broken in that way—being placed in a condition where I had no option but to accept care and support, because I was so utterly destroyed—I was made able to give and receive the same kind of care more freely in other, less extreme circumstances.

Ordeal vs self-harm

This can be a tough one, certainly. There's a degree of overlap between the set of people who self-harm at some point in their lives, and the set who end up on the ordeal path. But there's also a difference between self-harm as a symptom of some severe underlying problem, and the kind of work we're talking about.

First of all, self-harm seldom manages to make the jump to ordeal. People who self-harm are generally engaging in it as a survival mechanism rather than hoping that it will lead to some major breakthrough. Secondly, the nature of the suffering is different. It's very risky to suggest that self-harm is "not severe" enough to constitute ordeal, since some self-harmers are already pushing themselves to the brink of death, but it must be stated that the nature of the suffering is usually different from what is required for ordeal. One is not self-harming to introduce extra stressors into the body-mind system, but to swap out one form of suffering for another. Indeed, since it is more challenging for the self-harming individual to suffer through the impulse without acting on it, resisting self-harm might be more likely to result in an ordeal-type state.

The principle difference of course is that ordeal work is about inducing positive change, whilst self-harm at best represents a stop-gap measure against a downward slide, and at worst is actively damaging.

It should be made clear that a former self-harmer can certainly use the application of painful stimuli for more positive purposes later on. However, such a person must be extra-vigilant so as to make sure that they continue making positive progress rather than letting self-harm sneak back in by the side-door.

The dangers of fasting

Spiritually and psychologically, fasting can have amazing benefits. Physically though, current medical opinion holds that it's not so great. It's become a common belief that fasting "rests the body" or "detoxifies the system." It does neither. The wonderful rush of energy you get round around day two is not a response to being free of toxins, it's your body trying to get you to go out and find food. The human digestive system evolved to have food going through it regularly, and doesn't benefit from being put out of action any more than your muscles benefit from not being exercised. The exception might be when there is an infection present, and the body needs to clear out the waste in the gut to get rid of the bacteria. If you're worried about toxins then eat a healthy diet high in natural unprocessed foodstuffs and leave off things like alcohol, refined sugars, and so on. Oh, and stop smoking.

Fasting presents a number of very significant risks. While fasting for a moderate period won't harm a healthy person, it presents health risks to people with medical conditions such as diabetes or blood-sugar disorders. Fasting rapidly alters your state of consciousness, such that your ability to function in the world may become impaired. You should not fast during times where you're going to need your concentration.

Another high-risk category would be those recovering from eating disorders. A recovering anoretic might find his or her condition triggered by a period of fasting; a person who eats compulsively might find themselves tipped the other way, into anorexia. Conversely a period of self-starvation might cause the opposite problem, as the body goes into overdrive trying to re-feed itself. Such a person should approach fasting with the greatest caution, and consider alternative ways to achieve their goals.

Instead of a full fast, you could try fasting from specific foods, fasting from dawn till dusk instead of all day, or "fasting" from activities. None of these are likely to constitute ordeal, but they can be used to shift the consciousness in other very productive ways.

Emotional fall-out

Ordeal is really a kind of controlled, voluntary trauma, and thus carries the risk of post-traumatic effects. It can have very profound emotional effects that may not appear immediately after the working. Sometimes there is a period of euphoria directly afterwards which may create the false impression that everything is okay when it isn't.

The initial glow of success may give way to an emotional crash. The person may struggle to find the motivation to go about their normal lives. Everything can seem strangely distant and unreal, and everyday situations can become more difficult than usual. I myself believe that a period of low mood and relative inactivity is not necessarily a bad thing; it seems to be nature's way of assuring some downtime which will be invaluable if the person is to properly integrate the experience and learn from it. However, this is likely to be a difficult time and the ordeal survivor will need moral support and reassurance.

Ordeal teaches us about ourselves, and that new knowledge, though valuable, can be painful. Finding that you are capable of acting in ways that you'd previously thought alien to your nature can really shake you up. The only cure for this is time and working towards integration. A friendly ear can help with that; talk to the person, let them know that their new self is loved and valued.

Ordeal can also open a person up psychically. Someone who was used to managing a particular level of input in the past may find themselves overwhelmed by the flood of information, by the intensity of such direct contact. Again, time and patience with oneself are the best remedies. The new level of openness will eventually become normalised.

Note that the ordeal master may also be vulnerable to this one. Someone who goes through that kind of very intense journey with another person needs aftercare too.

Other medical risks

This is a vitally important topic and I fear I would do it an injustice if I attempted to enumerate all the possible risks here. This isn't something you can learn about properly from a written essay in any case. Take a first-aid class, and find reputable trainers for more advanced techniques. I will confine my comments here to a couple of reminders. One, that just because you're in a ritual context, the usual risks presented by sharp objects, broken skin, etc. do not take a holiday. The ordeal workers I've practised with all observed the same precautions that they would in a more mundane setting; I'd like to encourage the reader to do the same. Secondly—there is a lot of misinformation flying around regarding medical risks, with some people dismissing quite proper caution with an airy "but crossing the road is risky!" and others inventing all kinds of horrors based on their own very shaky understanding. Reasonable minds can differ but this stuff isn't a matter of opinion. It's flesh and blood, life and death. Get properly informed.

In closing

These risks can be reduced, but they can never be got rid of entirely. Why, then, in the face of all of this potential danger, engage in ordeal work? Why would you worship Gods if They would ask such things of you?

Ordeal is a healing modality. This is quite counter-intuitive, but it's one of the most powerful and effective healing resources I've ever experienced. The joy—yes, joy!—of ordeal is twofold for me: I get to offer up this significant gift to the Gods and spirits I serve, something They seem to truly value from me, and at the same time I receive a gift of healing. I get to leave behind a portion of my suffering, and move forward with my life. I am stronger for this work. I am happier. I am more fulfilled. I am closer to my Gods. Is it worth the hazards? Yes, a thousand times yes.

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Lemme know what you think.

Incidentally: a couple of people have asked recently if it was OK to pass my journal address on to others. The answer is yeah go for your life--this one and my mordantcarnival account. Everything that's publically viewable is for public consumption. This one in particular is written to be read. I'm especially keen to get communication on these kinds of topics happening, so anyone reading this (not just my friends) should feel free to quote, comment on, link to and generally pick up and play with anything you find here. Even if you disagree with what I've written. Especially if you disagree with what I've written! I'm confident that my beliefs can stand up to scrutiny and if they can't--well, heck, I haven't really lost anything by re-thinking, have I?

It's not that I enjoy contention--I don't, I'm naturally rather a wimpy avoidant sort of person--but I'm aware that when you write about certain very emotive topics then soonre or later you're going to come into conflict with people on the other side of the debate. Best to meet that head-on, ready to engage with at least as much respect as your interlocutor has shown you. The process of discussion, disagreement and resolution, is one way in which I process information and refine my thoughts.

burningblood @ 2009-05-20T19:34:00

2009-05-20T18:39:09Z

I'm facing ordeal again in a couple of months, and as you'd expect it is on my mind to an increasing degree as the time gets closer. To help me process, I've been writing about ordeal work: what it is, what it's not, why do it (and why not). Maybe clear up a few common misconceptions.

Firstly, what is ordeal? Ordeal can be many things. Work involving pain or other physical stressors is not necessarily ordeal, and ordeal work does not necessarily involve physical stressors. My personal working definition would look something like: “a transformatory experience involving heavy stressors, physical, emotional, or psychological, such as to take the subject out of their normal consciousness for the purposes of spiritual or personal development.” Another important—nay vital—component of ordeal proper would be the possibility of failure: the chance that one might not be able to complete the working as planned, or might suffer some form of lasting harm in attempting to complete it, or simply be emotionally unable to proceed.

Physical ordeal rituals are NOT an integral part of heathen worship. This should be made very clear. Although ordeal work as a valid part of Northern tradition practice can be supported from lore, it is a fringe activity and not a part of mainstream heathen practice.

Some misconceptions

The first misconception I'd like to address is the idea that I go about engaging in scary hurty ritual as a regular thing, or that it's the most important part of my devotional work. I don't, and it isn't. The most important parts of devotional work, in my opinion, are the quiet parts-- the daily prayer on rising, the moments of reflection, the practice of looking for the Gods and wights in all things around you as you go about your day. The small sacrifices of time and attention; the larger sacrifices of making good choices about your life even when they are hard choices too. That is devotion. It is not flashy, it is not what is considered notable, and it is terribly, terribly precious. Without a solid devotional practice underpinning it, an ordeal working would be meaningless; think of a deadbeat dad disappearing for years on end then turning up with an X-box and expecting to make everything okay again. I undertake serious physical ordeal maybe twice, three times, in a given year. It would be a very thin practice that only involved devotion a couple of times a year!

The second misconception is that ordeal work is being recommended for everyone. I do not believe that ordeal work is necessary, or even appropriate, for everybody--maybe not even for the majority of people. My understanding is that you have to be wired just right for it all to work properly. If a person had any appreciable health problems going on I would recommend some other form of work.

The third misconception is that all ordeal work is centred around physical pain or suffering. It is not. Ordeals can be wholly emotional in nature. Sensory deprivation, fasting, isolation, being forced to endure insults—these and many other things can represent an ordeal. Where physical stressors are involved they are a means to an end, not an end in itself.

An example from my own practice

In 2007 I underwent what was for me a very extreme ordeal as an offering to my God. To an outside observer it might not have looked so very severe, but it was so wrenchingly hard that I am still dealing with the fallout to this day. It involved a heavy physical-pain component, but it's not that which stays with me.

After turning my back on Loki for a decade, I felt a powerful need to offer up some kind of expiation for that. It was very, very important to me to express my sincere regret over rejecting His call when I was younger, and to affirm my commitment and devotion. (I believed and still believed that this was something that my Friend wanted from me, although of course mortal assertions on the part of the Gods should always be taken with a very hefty quantity of salt especially when they come from someone with my metric shedload of psychiatric and emotional ishoos.) There was a painful physical component—a long and not-fun flogging—but also a psychological component. The working involved a group of volunteers from the spirit-worker gathering I was attending at the time. Those who had agreed to be present were instructed to mock, jeer and sing while the beating was going on.

And. It. Sucked. It sucked it sucked it sucked it sucked.

I really cannot convey to you in words the epic, weapons-grade, end-of-level degree of misery. The plan was that when I felt that I'd taken enough, I was to call a halt; for most people this would be a perfectly reasonable set-up, but the nature of my psychological damage is such that there never is “enough” when it comes to suffering. I always feel like I deserve more, should be able to take more. And under those conditions that deep, dark hole rapidly broke open inside of me; it seemed to inhale all the suffering like smoke or mist. Every time I felt like I needed to stop what was happening, like I just couldn't take any more, that sucking pit of insufficiency would breathe Not enough. Never enough.

Eventually somebody else clocked that I had gone too far out, and intervened. I am terribly grateful to this person. Left to myself I couldn't have called a halt if my life depended on it. I would have stood there all night, under the lash. I would have stood there until I lost consciousness.

Gods, it nearly broke me. Nearly?--No, it did break me. I was destroyed. It took me months to put myself together and get up from what had happened. In a sense, I never really have and probably never will: the joy and reconciliation at the end of the ritual can be drawn to mind only with an effort, whereas the misery... It's not the physical pain that I recall. It's the emotional element that comes back to haunt me in the small hours of the night; it's the shame that rises up to throw its shadow over every accomplishment I've made since then. The humiliation; the despair. Those things linger long after the physical pain has faded from memory.

(None of which should be taken to indicate that the working was anything othre than necessary or successful. It enabled me to start putting my bad choices behind me, and taught me a great deal about myself. Others who were present learned from it too.)

Diversity in devotion

Another misconception is that ordeal workers look down on practices other than physical ordeal as somehow lesser, not as "hardcore" I really want to lay that one to rest, as it's not merely wrong-headed but actively toxic and dangerous.

It's hard to keep in mind, but negative comments about this kind of devotional work are often coming from a place of great pain in a person's heart. When you see an act of devotion being offered and it so happens that you cannot offer something similar, it hurts! It really does. It's like seeing someone make a generous gift to a lover, one which you can't afford—that sort of feeling. If you're a hard polytheist, then the Gods and wights really are like your friends and extended family; you receive these amazing blessings from Them, and it is very natural to want to respond with your own love-gifts. I would like to lay this discomfort to rest and and reaffirm that ordeal work is just one way in which you can serve your Gods. People often say things like “I wish I could do so-and-so, but I can't because I have such-and-such a commitment,” with the implication that they are falling short in some way. As a faith, we really need to get away from this. So you couldn't learn Old Norse because you were working overtime to buy your kid new gear for school—don't you realise that this itself was an act of devotion? When you fulfil such commitments with your heart and mind open to the Gods and wights, you are performing a living prayer. When you have to miss a heathen gathering to take care of your sick child, you are also giving care to the Gods who watch over family and hearth. When you go out of your way to help a friend, you are also gifting those other Friends. When you work your backside off to put food on your family's table, you also feed that other Family.

So, you can't fast because you're diabetic or you can't get a tattoo because you are anaemic, or you can't risk an act of fire resistance because you're the main provider in your family right now. So what? There are a thousand—a thousand thousand—ways to offer up devotion. Paint a picture. Learn a poem. Teach a kid to read. Volunteer for a charity. Go about your everyday life in mindfulness of the Gods. This kind of devotion, it's not some shoddy booby-prize you've switched out for the real deal. It is the real deal! This is where it's at!

The myth of the snooty ordeal worker might be comforting to some, but back here in reality all the ordeal workers I know take care to emphasise the validity of other forms of practice and encourage diversity. We are generally not the ones attacking other people's work.

Lies, damn lies, and bad mystics

It's often implied that by talking about our own ordeal practices, ordeal workers are in some way insisting that everybody ought to be engaging in them and also doing-down other forms of service and devotion. The comments range from the mildly snippy--"it's all very well for you, but I've got XYZ responsibilities; I can't put my health at risk like that!"--to the shockingly hostile and defamatory.

You're lying--you never did those things.

You're just an exhibitionist.

You're only doing this because it gets you off.

You've obviously had it too easy in your life--that's why you have to counterfeit suffering this way.

You're misleading vulnerable people.

Putting people through physical ordeals is abuse. You're a predator. You're no better than a rapist.

You're bringing infamy to our faith.

Liar! Pervert! Abuser!

Even when you know that this must be coming from a place of deep pain, it is very, very hard to hear these things said about oneself and one's fellow voyagers on the ordeal path. The friendships I've forged with those who've participated in ordeal work with me are of great value and it really hurts to see mud hurled at those good friends and allies, especially knowing that at least some of it is bound to stick. I've seen all kinds of things invented about ordeal masters I know and respect. Some of this is just exaggeration or garbled versions of real events, but there's a lot of whole-cloth fabrication too—pure fantasy involving accusations of outright criminal activity. This last is a major act of wrongdoing as such fabrications could get people into severe trouble if they were taken seriously, either by the authorities or by hotheaded individuals who might take matters into their own hands.

I'm going to go through and try to pick the bones out of some of the common accusations.

You're just an exhibitionist.

Actually, having people witness the ordeal is one of the hardest parts of the work. If a solitary ritual can be arranged, I jump at it. I don't like being seen that way. I want people to see me as strong, level-headed, competent and in control. Who doesn't? Who truly relishes the idea of being brought before a gathering of respected friends and colleagues, and reduced to a blubbering, screaming, shivering mess? Who wants to walk around randomly bursting into tears for days afterwards? Would you want people to see you like that? Of course not, and I don't either. No amount of reassurance and comfort from my allies in the working ever makes that part not suck.

In fact much of the ordeal work I've accomplished has been undertaken in private and in secret. I don't write about that side of my practice as much because it's very personal. Not dangerous, not shameful, not wrong, just mine.

You're only doing this because it gets you off.

Ah, that old chestnut! Okay, let's get something out of the way before we begin: yep, I'm a pervert. I'm not a heavy player by any means, and I can't claim any great degree of skill or experienced, but I am into pain—mine or other people's (well, mostly other people's). But this routine dismissal of physical ordeal work as “just a kink” or “just a sex thing” could not be further from reality. A BDSM scene could conceivably tip over into ordeal; a physical ordeal might possibly contain some sort of sexual component. However in most cases sex is going to be absolutely the last thing on your mind. If it's not pushing you well past your comfort zone and out into the farther reaches where there is a real risk of lasting trauma, it isn't an ordeal. If you're standing there thinking “hey, this is kind of hot,” it's not an ordeal. It's really unlikely that there'll be any part of you left over that could be titillated; everything is eaten up by the wrenching experience you're undergoing. You might as well talk about a broken limb being a turn-on, or a bereavement, or a divorce. (I've actually found that repeated physical ordeal has kind of “unplugged” my masochistic streak to a great degree; pain just isn't the turn-on it might once have been, because it connects with those experiences now and not with playtime. Might not be a lasting effect, I don't know yet. I'm a bit sad about that, but I'm okay with it. If I have permanently sacrificed an enjoyable kink on the altar of spiritual development, so be it.) Even as a bystander, I can honestly say that I've never found witnessing another's ordeal in any way erotic. I get too caught up in their suffering to objectify them.

You're bringing infamy to our faith.

I know of no ordeal worker who is claiming that heathen faith requires ordeal at all; in fact, most are at great pains to emphasise diversity in the expression of heathen faith. I hardly see that endurance and dedication can bring ill-fame to anything. If people are worried about ordeal workers bringing heathenry into disrepute, perhaps they could stop lying about the people and practices involved. Every time you make up a nice juicy story about torture, abuse, or medical neglect, the faith takes a hit right along with your intended target.

Putting people through physical ordeals is abuse.

I deeply, deeply resent this one. As I said I'm not an ordeal master, I've only ever given support or been the one going through the ordeal. I guess that according to the anti-ordeal brigade, that would make me a pathetic victim.

Well, I'm not a victim. The people involved in my ordeals are not my abusers. They're my allies. In some cases, they're my great friends. They've travelled with me through some of the most extreme experiences I've ever endured. There has been no coercion. Nobody has ever lied to me or misled me. No-one ever said to me “you have to do this or you're not part of our clique.” No-one's ever said “we'll think less of you if you don't go through with this.” No-one's ever said “you have to do what we say because the Gods will be angry if you don't.” Nobody has ever forced me to undergo ordeal. I've walked voluntarily into the ritual circle; I've bared my own back to the whip; I've thrust my own hand into the fire. And I've been supported, cared for, loved. There was proper care, damage limitation, compassionate support, and whatever lessons needed to be learned were duly learned. Where risk has been involved I was properly appraised of it ahead of time, repeatedly and by separate individuals.

You've obviously had it too easy in your life--that's why you have to counterfeit suffering this way.

Anti-ordeal work people are very, very keen on talking about how they've undergone painful and difficult life events, and contrasting these with the supposedly lightweight kinky fun that physical ordeal workers are fictioned as engaging in. They've experienced “real trials and tests,” whereas we've only been “poked with sharp objects” in (of course!) “a sexually charged and exhibitionist [sic] setting.” Well, I have a few questions for those who offer such cheap, thoughtless little snipes.

What do you think? Do you think I've never suffered? Do you think I've never bled? Do you think my whole life was laid out for me like a turf lawn outside a mansion, rolled smooth and free of hazard? Do you think I've never faced hardship, violence, ill-health, suffering? Yeah, I know that other people have horror stories worse than mine, but I'll tell you this—it was bloody well bad enough. Bullying. Harassment. Abuse. Violence. Medical neglect. An attempt on my life by someone I loved. All the time I was growing up, and well into adulthood. I've had people—not naïve sheltered folks, but people who have seen the worst that humanity can dish out—professionals who work with battered spouses or homeless teens, people who are themselves survivours of childhood abuse—express surprise, on learning my history, that I'm even still alive, let alone functioning as an adult. Although I've made a lot of progress, I've been left with areas of permanent and incurable psychological damage by the things that have happened to me in my past.

Try and imagine how it feels, then, not only to be told that the suffering involved in the ordeal work I've undertaken is counterfeit, but to have everything I went through as a kid and a young adult written out of the script to suit the self-serving agenda of people who don't even know me. It's a gut-wrenching feeling. It's like being humiliated and beaten up all over again. It's like having all the hard work of undergoing ordeal smashed in front of me. Imagine what it feels like to undergo something like the ritual described earlier in the post, and have that dismissed as just kinky shenanigans, not real, not meaningful. I try very hard to rise above it, but oh, it is hard.

It's also very dangerous. Like it or not, ordeal work is here to stay, and that means we have to have meaningful, reality-based dialogue around it. Making up scare stories, or credulously spreading them around without checking your facts, does not achieve that. All it does is create an atmosphere where the only discussion that can be had is about how awful physical ordeal work is and what terrible nasty people ordeal workers are. If people are so used to having to fight to hold space for their practices that they may be more apt not to register more reasonable notes of caution, this does nothing to improve safety or quality of care.

Although it can be a profoundly healing thing, by its very nature ordeal work does involve risk. We need to be constantly vigilant regarding those risks. There are the obvious medical dangers posed by practices such as cutting or branding: transmission of blood-borne infections, wounds going septic, etc. Moreover there are also more subtle dangers that we need to be aware of. Risks like becoming too reliant on ordeal at the expense of other important techniques; pushing oneself too far, too quickly; becoming emotionally hooked on the process; feeling that one can only ask for help or support in the wake of ordeal proper, and not at other times; delayed adverse emotional reactions. We need to be talking about these things and in an atmosphere of finger-pointing, scaremongering, lies and half-truths it is much harder to do that.

Bless bless.

burningblood @ 2009-05-18T19:02:00

2009-05-18T18:17:04Z

Some readers will already be familiar with Wayland Skallagrimsson's essay Racism in Asatrú, a thorough disembowelling of Folkist belief and ideology. He's now written a follow-up piece, Responses To Folkish Heathens, where he revisits the themes and notes that in all the years since the original essay was first posted online, not one single person has been able to offer any reasoned response to counter the arguments made at the time. (What a surprise eh?)

The W-word.

2009-05-15T15:14:23Z

I'm an ill-tempered git at the best of times, quick to anger and supplied with a very short fuse. There are certain things, though, that will chop off that fuse altogether and set off the whole dynamite cache like a Wile. E. Coyote cartoon. One such thing would be this book.

It's kind of a perfect storm of "send Mordant into a steaming rage"-ness. It's a curbie text, and I don't like curbieism one little bit. It's an anti-vax text, and anti-vaxxers make me spit tacks. It's written by an actress rather than someone with a background in medicine. And to cap it all, there's the title: Mother Warriors. Yep, the W-word. Cue rage.

Whatever else the perfectly groomed blonde on the front cover may be (and I could certainly think of a few choice terms), she is not a warrior. She is not striving in battle for some beautiful goal. The right to abuse, poison and torture autistic children into a semblance of neurotypicallity is not a glorious ideal worth laying down one's life for, nor is the "right" to deny one's offspring necessary medical treatment (vaccination), placing not just them but all other children they may come into contact with at risk of a terrible death.

She is lauded for her nonsense, not challenged--let alone threatened. Nobody ever got stabbed on Oprah, or got a spear through the chest on a book-tour. The only personal risk she runs is that of humiliation when the anti-vax hoax is finally abandoned by the media. What terrible injury does she face, this "warrior"? Eyestrain? Paper cuts? A slight ache between the shoulderblades from a badly-adjusted computer chair?

I sometimes get asked, jokingly, "So, are you going to Valhalla then?" Coz that's one of the things people reckon they know about, isn't it--there's this really good place you go to if you're a Viking and you die, and it's called Valhalla.

The short answer is "no, I'm really not." And that makes me sad, sadder than I can ever put into words. Am I sad because I'm going to a Bad Place instead? No, not at all--far from it.

In recent years the concept of going to the hall of one's fultrui has gained currency, but it's by no means the only, or even the prevailing perspective amongst heathen scholars. Heathen soul lore is so rich and complex that one can't really say with accuracy: "these people will go here and those people will go there." The very nature of the soul, the eternal element of the person that survives after death, is a complex topic. Some see themselves as going to the hall of Thor, based on the verse in the Lay of Harbarth where Thor is depicted as recieving thralls--working folk--as opposed to Odin's slain warriors. Some see themselves as going into a gravemound. Many see themselves going into Hel.

It's tempting for folk raised in a Christian culture to divvy up the Afterlife into a Good Place (Valhalla) and a Bad Place (Hel). The first book on runes I ever read described Hel Herself as a disgusting, demonic figure and Helheim as a nightmare realm full of freezing fog, misery and decay, where everything--even imperishable gold--rotted.

What a load of cobblers. If you look at what's actually set down (even by our Christian scribes) Hel is a great Goddess, queening it over a mighty realm with many different dwellings. Yes, there's a place for the wicked. But there are also places of peace and repose. There is a hall with benches covered in gold and walls hung with it, bubbling vats of sweet mead, and a feast prepared; there dwells Baldr the Beautiful with His bride Nanna, waiting to bring all the mysteries of peace and justice out to the world that will come after this one. There is nothing to fear there except what you brought with you. No rigged game where no matter how hard you tried to live a decent life you get booted downstairs for not saying the magic words, no Jack Chick horrorshow full of haw-hawing demons. Simply a dwelling for the dead, where you will join your ancestors in peace. So no, I'm not in fear of Hel.

This, of course, is leaving aside the question of whether I personally believe in an afterlife. I prefer to leave the question open, a sacred mystery to ponder rather than a rigid dogma to adhere to, and to focus not on what happens postmortem but what I can accomplish in life. It is more important to me to be a better ancestor than to gain a particular reward in the hereafter.

Onwards. if most people are going to end up in their barrows, or in Hel, who goes to Valhalla? Valhalla means "the Hall of The Slain." It is a place for dead warriors. If you died in battle, you went there. If in life you were a great warrior, you went there. (Unless Freyja head-hunted you. It is said that She and the Old Man go halfsies, and the Lady gets first pick.) Some would argue that only a death in battle could get you into Valhalla. However this would put Egil Skallagrimmson in Hel, not Valhalla, and frankly I do not think so. "Valhalla" as concieved of in soul-lore is a place of courage, moral and physical; not just one-off acts of bravery but an eternal process of honing and refinement.

In Valhalla, the slain are united under Odin as the Einherjar: the Single Host, the One Army. There they will spend every evening feasting and drinking. Each day they will go out to fight. They will hew at each other, and even though they may fall maimed or slain they will be restored again by evening for another round of carousing. This is in preperation for the final battle on the field of Vigrid, where the hosts of the Jotnar and the hosts of Hel will do battle with the Aesir, Vanir and the Einherjar. (This is all a bit confusing, since it is established elsewhere that not all Jotnar are the foes of the Aesir, Vanir or humans, and that in Hel many good folk dwell. I've go my own UPG-based understanding of this, but that's a digression for another time.)

Soyeah. To get to Valhalla, you need to be a warrior. End of.

But what is a warrior? The usual metric when it comes to assessing warrior status in modern heathenry is to ask "has this person served in the military?" This is... okay, ish. But it's really just a rule-of-thumb. Not all warriors are soldiers, and not all soldiers are warriors.

I've known people who could duly namecheck their COs and would get waved through into the warrior set by most heathens, but who had never seen any action beyond getting thrown out of their local for slapping a barmaid. Conversely, I've known people who face real physical danger on a regular basis in the course of striving for something that matters to them, have significant combat skills which they maintain and hone continuously, and who in all ways live a warrior's life; but who do these things without the societal regard accorded the conventional military, without those support structures that a soldier can hope to access. People absolutely detest it when you point this out, splitting hairs and playing word games, but anyone with an honest heart can see that it is a reasonable position.

In my book, a warrior means one who engages in physical combat, with the real and present risk of death, not just one one or two occasions but for some significant period of hir life. And not just fought--fought like a warrior. Getting into a barney outside the pub on a Friday night because some bloke looked at you funny doesn't make you a warrior. I have been in the position of unexpectedly having to fight for my life once or twice, but that doesn't make me a warrior.

Unless you have really fought in this way, and in that fighting have been shaped, heart and soul, you are not a warrior. Unless you have a certain fairly specific way of approaching the universe around you, you are not a warrior. Unless you have picked up a weapon and gone out to use that weapon, to kill or die, because you believed in your heart that you had something worth killing for, worth dying for--be it family, friends, tribe, an ideal--not just once but again and again--then whatever else you may be, you are not a warrior.

That's physical striving, by the way, against an enemy presenting a real and imminent physical threat. Not letter-writing. Not rock-climbing. Not getting better from an illness. This is not to say that those things have no value, should not be lauded and celebrated--they do and they should; but we don't accord them their value by appropriating inaccurate lables from elsewhere. I've not lived the best or most honourable life, but I have done one or two things I'm proud of; however, I don't want these things classified as "battle" just because I found them hard or testing to achieve. I want my accomplishments valued for what they really are, not awarded the booby-prize of a fake designation. (In truth, I would definately argue that the warrior path, especially as represented by conventional military service, is overemphasised in modern heathenry. Witness all the self-proclaimed True Heathens who find it necessary to invent completely fallacious military careers for themselves.)

So. If I'm not even that invested in the concept of an afterlife in the first place, if I don't fear Hel, and if I can admire and value other skills and life-paths... how come I'm not perfectly happy?

Since my conversion just over four years ago, I've had to do a lot of hard thinking about my life, and the way I express my personal beliefs and values. I realise to my sorrow that in many areas, I have not lived my convictions. I have not acted in such a way as to support and express them.

As I come into middle age, I feel that I have failed; that a path was offered and I didn't take it. One of the principle ways that I've erred has been in avoiding--consciously and unconsciously--situations where physical risk might be incurred and self-defence might become necessary. Specifically, I have not been vocal enough or active enough in support of civil liberties and human rights. If you are defending genuinely oppressed groups to any significant or meaningful degree, someone is going to want to throw a rock at your head sooner or later. I don't even recieve that many verbal threats anymore. I feel that while others were putting their bodies on the line, I didn't.

Partly this was out of my hands--I have certain physical and psychological barriers to effectiveness which I did not choose and have taken measures to overcome--but much of it is on me. Partly I have felt in the past that if I went along to a demo or whatever I would be at a significant risk because of various health problems, and because there generally wouldn't be anyone there to get my back; for example, although I'm a staunch feminist myself I very seldom attend demonstrations for women's rights because I have been repeatedly ostracised and rejected by other feminists, individually and in group contexts--but other people engage in direct action without making that kind of consideration. It is especially glaring in my case because there was nothing to hold me back, really--I have no major physical disabilities, no children to take care of, and nothing you could call a career to protect.

I've also neglected to aquire the skills I'd need to defend myself and others effectively, and that's been mostly down to sloth and moral cowardice. If I never become an effective martial artist, I never have to worry about losing control, snapping and hurting the wrong person. If I let myself stay weak and soft, I will never be seen as a possible defender, never be called upon to protect someone weaker than me.

It bothers me rather that it's taken conversion for me to truly recognise these things, since they were certinaly visible to my atheist incarnation; I just chose not to see them. I should have been a warrior, and I was not.

What I'm sorry for is not the loss of some theoretical afterlife destination, but for the dearth in myself of the qualities that would carry me there: courage, physical and moral, and dedication. It's that lack I feel. I should have been a warrior, and I was not. I have begun at least to try and change, though I suspect, at my time of life, it is too late.

He's just not that into you.

2009-05-13T12:45:52Z

There are certain tropes in the dialogue surrounding spirituality, especially direct-contact spirit-work, that I have aquired a marked distaste for. There's "you must be this white to ride," there's "you are disabled, ergo you would have been exposed at birth back when Pantheon X were last regularly worshipped, ergo you cannot now worship Pantheon X," there's "you got laid off from your job one time and it took you a couple of months to find a new one, ergo you can never be a Twoo Heathen." And then there's "your Gods actually hate you."

That one really grates. And the more I hear it, the more it gets on my pecs. Sure, if you claim a strong relationship with Thor but sit on your backside all day watching TV on your spaouse's dime, knock said spouse about when ze gets in from work, and spend the kid's savings on beer and pot, it's fair to say that you're probably not Thor's favourite person. True, if you claim to be a Freyja's-man yet denigrate women and femininity at every turn and continually treat the living mortal females in your life like dirt, it's not entirely out of line to question whether things between you and the Vanadis are as cosy as you claim. Further, if someone is reporting communication with, say, Loki in which Loki expresses His wholehearted loathing of cross-dressers, or a talk with Odin in which the Wanderer expounds on the evils of witchcraft or the virtues of radical pacifism, it's fair to ask whether that person actually had either of those Powers on the line.

In short, if someone is claiming to be BFFs with a particular being, yet constantly speaks and acts in a way that is wildly at odds with that Being's character and mysteries, or reports communication that is not merely unusual but entirely counter to anything you'd expect the Being to come out with, then it's okay (and sometimes necessary) to question what's actually going on here.

What's not okay is "I don't like you, so the Powers don't like you either." That really bothers me. We've had a bit of a spat over something or another, and now you are Not Talking to me; that doesn't mean that the spirits are also Not Talking.

There used to exists an absolutely fascinating website made by someone called Delling9. Delling9 was apparently a very popular chap with the spirits. He recieved oodles of channelled communication from all sorts of wights; a large chunk of the NT pantheon were represented, along with various elves, a spider, Gandhi, and a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Oddly, most of these august personages wanted to tell Delling9 how much They approved of him and how much they disliked anyone that Delling9 disliked. The Dark Elf contingent were apparently less interested in sharing Their eldritch wisdom and more concerned with telling Delling9 how much they hate the Goth chicks who won't go out with him. And so on. I once came across a similarly bug-eyed piece of fan-fiction in which Loki falls to earth and spends most of His time telling Lokeans how much He's not into them. You'd think such puissant wights would have better uses for Their time, really.

This is all fairly obvious froth, but on occasion it is sorely tempting to ask "is She really going out with him?" If someone's done something genuinely ghastly to you or people in your circle, you do find yourself wondering if their connection is the real deal.

This is especially true in heathen or NT contexts. Some of the commonest wrongs done amongst people fall under the umbrella of defamation; it is easy to attack people via lies, so it happens a lot. Slander is easy. Libel--thanks to the internet--is even easier. And in heathenry, there are very clear and specific prohibitions against that sort of thing, evidenced both through mythology and historical evidence. Thus, it is very tempting, when you're the victim of malicious gossip or you witness other people attacked thereby, to say "well if you do that you can't possibly have the ear of the Gods." The damage is certainly real, the means proscribed by the Powers and the ancestors. Open and shut case, right?

But that's human thinking. Bad conduct doesn't necessarily mean that the person is unloved by their Gods, lying about their connection, or completely deluded. In the above example, it's important to recognise how endemic the concept of doing harm by lies is in our culture. This happens from the grandest scale, as when large companies lie about scientific evidence that doesn't serve their interests (the polluter that refuses to acknowledge the environmental impact of their actions, the pharmaceutical company that plays up the effectiveness of a medication whilst concealing side effects, the food supplement supplier who invents lies about AZT), right down to the personal level.

You're raised with it. The most popular kids in your school are the best liars. You're encouraged to lie to friends, lie to lovers, lie to spouses. You cannot get ahead in virtually any industry without lies and fraud. To succeed you must spin your skills and abilities beyond what they are worth, inflate past achievements, play down faliures. Most of all you must damage others through lies. You must take credit for others' work or devalue it, make rival look less competent than they are, make yourself look good, no matter what the facts are. And all the while you're doing this, you have to feel good about yourself. If you faced the sheer unpleasantness of the whole process, you'd sink into a slough of self-loathing. You have to take a real hit when you give up deceit--it puts you at quite a horrible disadvantage. Only the very skilled can fight on with one hand tied behind their backs.

Our culture is so thoroughly mired in relativism that we've practically forgotten, as a people, what truth even means. Everything is a matter of opinion. People now believe that "the truth" is whatever they can get others to swallow. What does it matter if something never actually happened, provided you can convince enough people that it did? Even when the accusation is criminal in nature--assualt, torture, abuse--it's not a lie if you can spread it around enough. And sadly, converting to heathenry doesn't just wash away that acculturated love of falsehood, any more than it washes away all the other baggage we pick up before we find our way home. You have to struggle, day and night, to rid yourself of the rubbish you're weighed down with, and to keep from picking up any more. And the Gods know this. They know that on some level the gossiper and the defamer are aware that what they're doing is wrong, and trust them to own that knowledge in the fullness of time (even if they take it to the grave).

We all fail our Gods. We all betray them. I betrayed Loki in the worst ways possible. But He forgave me and went on speaking to me, going to great lengths to maintain the connection. He sees my heart, and He knows all the parts of it that are broken and flawed, and goes on loving anyway. I honestly believe that while aspects of the communication that some person presents might be erroneous, their connection can be real; that while I personally might not see much worth to them the Gods are wiser and have a finer sight than I. Their Gods go on loving them despite their errors, just as my God has gone on loving me in spite of mine. The spirits and the Powers know why we do what we do. They don't demand that we be flawless, only that we strive.

The Powers, They deal with us lovingly. They see beauty which may be hidden from other mortals. They see our hearts; They see all our hearts; even the parts we keep hidden.

Bless bless.

The wisdom of the Dvergar

2009-05-05T11:50:24Z

Recently I've been making an effort to familiarise myself with the lore relating to the Dvergar, the dwarves of Norse lore. This is a rich field and I can already see I'm going to get a lot out of it. I'll do a longer entry on this at some point down the line, but for now I just wanted to jot down a couple of thoughts. (Largely coz I got back from camping yesterday and I'm shagged.)

Here's the famous exchange between Loki and Andvari when the former capures the latter in Ran's net with a view to stealing His gold:

...Then Loki said:

1. "What is the fish | that runs in the flood,
And itself from ill cannot save?
If thy head thou wouldst | from hell redeem,
Find me the water's flame."

Andvari spake:
2. "Andvari am I, | and Oin my father,
In many a fall have I fared;
An evil Norn | in olden days
Doomed me In waters to dwell."

Loki spake:
3. "Andvari, say, | if thou seekest still
To live in the land of men,
What payment is set | for the sons of men
Who war with lying words?"

Andvari spake:
4. "A mighty payment | the men must make
Who in Valthgelmir's waters wade;
On a long road lead | the lying words
That one to another utters."

--Bellows trans.

This is interesting, because although according to the poem Loki is on an errand to obtain the Dverg's vast wealth, he doesn't start out by asking for money. What Loki first obtains from Andvari is information--wisdom. The clear implication here is that the knowledge held by the Dvergar is of great worth, maybe as much as gold itself.

Also interesting is the content of the information requested and given up. Here is Loki, asking what fate is reserved for liars and slanderers. As has often been observed, Loki's reputation as a liar and a deciever Himself is grossly unfair, if one sits down and actually combs through the lore. Much rests on two points: the translation of frumkveða flærðanna as "Father of Lies," and on the popular interpretation of Lokasenna as consisting of slander.

In fact the accusations in Lokasenna can be seen to be more-or-less accurate when one knows about the characters and histories of those on the recieving end. It is interesting to note that in the poem, nobody really seems to be able to offer a solid defence against Loki's accusations; they must rely on distraction and tu quoque instead.

As for frumkveða flærðanna meaning "Father of Lies," this translation is up for dispute. First of all we must note that "Father of Lies" is plainly a Christian interpolation, being a Biblical title for the Christian devil (John 8:44). It is true that one interpretation of the phrase might be "originator of deceptive speech" but alternative translations have been offered in recent years, such as Selvårv Stigårð's rendering: "seductive-speaking." (Although I have to confess I'm not good enough at ON yet to work out how Stigårð arrived at his interpretation, I'm still at the plodding-through-dictionaries stage.)

A thorough investigation reveals that Loki is recorded as lying on only one occasion, and that was to decieve the hostile Thrym who had already forfeited the right to fair treatment by ripping off Thor and trying to force Freyja into marriage. Despite being short of practice Loki lies effectively and splendidly throughout the poem.

The verse quoted above is another example. Here Loki is holding Andvari to ransom, and yet asking what the fate is of those who "war with lying words." Evidently we're meant to understand that the idea of lying about someone was viewed more harshly than just tying them up and nicking all their stuff. And it is Loki who is digging out this information. Sly Loki, the trickster, will do a lot of things--He'll steal, cheat, and even murder--but we are being given to understand that He draws the line at slander.

The implications of all this are really interesting to me. Genuine information was so very precious to the culture which produced this poem that it is treated like a literal treasure--Loki will steal Andvari's knowledge before He will steal the wise dwarf's gold. False information--attacking another with "lying words"--is seen as so venomous that spreading it around gets you sent to one of Hel's rougher neighbourhoods. (Valthgelmir only shows up in this one place, but it's likely the same river mentioned in Voluspa, where murderers and the foresworn wade.)

Headweasles, UPG, signal clarity, and related topics. And how you're probably not Jesus.

2009-04-30T12:16:57Z

A couple of years ago there was a guy doing the rounds of various internet fora. He'd join up and post the most incredible screed as his introductory post. It was the same boilerplate text each time. It started "Hi, I am Allfather," and I'm afraid it rather went downhill from thereon in. He wasn't just borrowing the name Allfather as a nifty handle. He actually thought he was Odin.

And Jesus.

And Nanahuatl.

And Sun Tzu, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Arkantos, Napoleon, Che Guevara, Wild Bill, and Jim Morrison. (It might actually have been quicker and easier to provide a list of mythological and historical figures that "Allfather" had not been.) And he destroyed Atlantis. And then there was the time that Allfather and Thor flew to earth in a spacecraft. Most of the posts and this guy's website have gone poof, but you can still read the full screed here. It could have just been an elaborate troll, but the length, complexity, number of reposts, and existance of a web presence espousing the same views seem to argue against it.

Now this is obviously a pretty extreme example. I doubt that many people, reading that long list of extravagant claims, would see it as anything other than the fruit of a rich and varied inner life. But what if it wasn't quite so extreme?

Just saying "well that guy is obviously crazy" doesn't cut it. I'm "obviously crazy." I have for-real, on-paper psychiatric diagnoses, and a battery of other symptoms that are likely to be the result of yet other psych conditions that haven't been formally diagnosed thus far. You can have mental health needs--even quite serious mental health needs--and still be a functional spirit-worker.

You can also recieve false or garbled information at times and still be a brilliant spirit-worker. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'd seriously like to see people move away from a binary model of data evaluation where EITHER every single syllable is crystal clear 100% of the time, OR the reciever is "deluded" or "crazy." Everyone can get wonky input, need clarification, get the wrong end of the stick, get accurate but incomplete data, and so on. Everyone. No matter how skilled, no matter how experienced, no matter how many years you've served under the hat, you're still human and you're still prone to error. And that's okay! That's why we build commnities and seek out other practitioners: so that when it comes to big important stuff, we can check in and get confirmation from outside.

I'm quite fortunate in the nature of my personal badhead. I don't get pronouncements of my divine nature or recall life as Alexander the Great, I get told that I'm worthless and fired and the Gods hate me. The experience is not pleasant, but it's much easier to recieve "no you're not fired, go and put the kettle on" than it is to recieve "no, you're not Jesus."

When you start to investigate where on the spectrum between "While I was chopping firewood today, I had a moment of inspiration that I felt originated from Thor" and "I'm Odin and Jesus and Sun Tzu and possibly a set of enamelled soup-spoons" to draw the line, you rapidly find yourself on Loki's Wager territory. It's pretty clear that we don't have to seriously entertain our quondam "Allfather's" claims, but what about more modest assertions from more articulate and ostensibly level-headed individuals? How do you avoid a "my UPG can beat up your UPG" situation?

Most of the time I'd say you don't really need to challenge other people's UPG anyhow. It's certainly important to evaluate UPG, otherwise you'd end up credulously accepting all kinds of garbage as Divine revelation. It's also fine to gently help correct common errors, such as "Baldr is a Sun God!" And you should certainly speak and write about your own take on things and share your ideas, even if they're at odds with other people's; in fact, the more material out there for people to draw on, the better.

However, the choice to actively challenge a specific person over a specific piece of unsubstantiated personal gnosis is a different matter. Even if you disagree, you can choose to politely registre your altrenative perspective and then just let them get on with it. One of the beautiful things about human spirituality is its diversity. When it comes to direct spirit contact, it's entirely plausible that a particular God or spirit asks ABC of me and XYZ of you, or tells me one thing and you another. Our needs are different. Our relationships with that Being are different.

I experience this a lot as a Lokean because my God is so gloriously multifaceted. I am quite convinced that He's gone to some people and said "I don't want any sort of ritual whatsoever, I just want you to hang out with your friends and eat Twinkies," then gone to others and said "I want heavy ritual with hymns, a bonfire, a drinking-horn and some hard liquor!" As long as the Twinkie-Eaters don't call for a violent crusade against the Bonfire-Lighters, it's all good. The only things you truly need to ask about a piece of UPG are "Is that relevant to my path, does it 'ping' and can I back it up in any way (from lore, history, my own UPG, a trusted friend's UPG)?"

Problems arise when for some reason, folks can't agree to differ. This can happen for a number of reasons, good and bad.

A good reason might be if someone were to engage in seriously damaging or dangerous conduct as a result of hir beliefs. If a man were to wake up one morning convinced that he is Tyr, and decide therefore to hew off his right hand, or to self-enuclate in order to get closer to his true identity as Odin, saying "look, old chap, no offence but you're not Tyr and you need to check in with your doctor!" would be perfectly in order. Again this can be a bit of a grey area, with one person's unacceptable risk being another's Friday night entertainment; risk and danger are always relative. But if someone is going to make a huge, damaging, irreperable change to hir life based on misguided beliefs, then stepping in is not only okay, it's the ethical thing to do.

Another reason for conflict arising is that someone espouses a personal belief that is dramatically at odds with the rest of the community and is not prepared simply to maintain that belief on a personal level. It is reasonable to ask people not to poke you on your unique beliefs as long as you are not demanding that they share them. But some people really struggle with that, especially if their belief causes them to feel that they are due some special regard that the community is not offering.

For instance, say someone has a revelation that they are actually the Only Chosen Priest of the Great God Spoon, and falls in with a community that does direct-contact work with Spoon's pantheon. Sooner or later, someone is going to report a conversation with Spoon (which can't happen if you are Spoon's Only Chosen Priest). Sooner or later someone is going to offer a version of Spoon's Journey Through the Lands of Marmite which does not accord with your version of Spoon's Journey--which is the only correct version, since you are His Chosen One. Unless ze possesses an almost deific level of patience and discretion, our self-identified Chosen Priest of Spoon is going to twitch every time one of these things happens, and may go so far as to start contradicting members of the community who offer Spoon-related input and demanding recognition of hir role as the Only Chosen Priest. A tolerant community may well try to go on accomodating this for some time, but in the end something will give. Usually it's going to be the Only Chosen Priest's ego, precipitating an ugly departure.

And what if it's your UPG? What if you've come by some unusually out-there bit of gnosis, and you're struggling to evaluate it? Let's say that Freyja appears to some heathen man in a dream, and asks for the startled fellow's hand in marriage. Our man meditates, prays, and engages in divination. It seems to him that Freyja really has taken an interest in him and really does want a spirit-marriage. How to assess this information further?

First of all, he can look at the whole idea of spirit-marriage. It seems out-there at first, but as he invesitgates, he finds out about such things as the custom of Maraj Lwa in Vodou, and the existance of spousal relationships between spirit-workers from other cultures and their tutelery deities and spirits. Next, he can look at the character of Freyja: She is noted for being generous with Her attentions and seems to take an interest in the lives of mortals. He can also ask folk in his own trad; this is a bit hit-or-miss, given the very varied character of heathen worship, but it shouldn't be too hard for him to make contact with other heathens who are accepting of the idea of spirt-marriage and may even know people who've experienced this. Thus he's moved from an utterly incredible bit of information to something which, whilst not mainstream by any means and still very out-there, is at least supported by multiple data from elsewhere.

If the same fellow woke up one morning with the conviction that he was the only mortal spouse of Freyja, that would be a different situation altogether. Examples of mortal spirit-spouses are relatively easy to produce; examples of unique mortal spouses, almost impossible unless the nonhuman "partner" is a personal spirit rather than a God with multiple worshippers. He might have more of a case if instead of Freyja he was the only spouse of eg. some specific individual Valkyrie, especially if She was unmentioned in lore.

After all of this, he still doesn't know in the absolute sense--not in the sense that he knows the sun will rise tomorrow or if he's got any mead left in that jug--whether Freyja really is interested in him (or even if She is speaking to him, or if there is such a personage as Freyja in the first place). But you can see from this and the other examples given previously that out-there ideas and beleifs are not simply a homogenous mass. There are some that are supported by outside information, and some that are expressed in a healthier way than others. It is not enough just to shrug and say "well, your beliefs are crazy too!" when useful ways of corroborating one's ideas, and even more importantly more or less appropriate ways of expressing them, are available to us.

In closing I'd like to restate a couple of important points. One: Reasonable people can differ over important matters, and excellent spirit-workers can differ over UPG. Two: 100% signal clarity is available--if you don't mind ripping out an eye, hanging from a tree for 9 nights, training up a couple of ravens to fly around gathering intel for you, and have a magic signal-booster throne. The rest of us need to recognise that we'll have off-days sometimes, and that doesn't make us crap at our jobs.

There are nine and twenty ways
Of constructing tribal lays
And every single one of them is right!

Bless bless.

burningblood @ 2009-04-29T23:43:00

2009-04-29T23:50:47Z

Today I went out and stocked up on easily-portable long-life dried foods. I collected together, in one easily accessible place: water-purification tablets, basic first aid supplies, alcohol-based hand sanitiser, necessary medications, fuel, a spirit-stove.

Survivalist swine flu prep? Nope, camping. I lucked out a few months back and made contact with a really nice bunch of local heathens and pagans. They hold a regular pub moot, and have these camps a few times a year.

There will be ritual activity, but I'm not signed up to do any kind of clerical duty or whatever. I volunteered to help run the food stand thingy, nice practical stuff. I'm looking forward to it. I have some big old rituals coming up in the summer--including helping to ground-crew at least one person's somafera initiation. It's going to be quite an intense time, spiritually speaking, and while I'm glad of that and appreciate the honour, I'm also appreciative of the opportunity to do the more grounded, human sort of work. I think it's very easy to forget just how important that is.*

It'll also be good to get away and off into the woods for a bit. It's been pretty nice around here climate-wise, and this region has a lot to offer in terms of varied flora and fauna. Right now all the bluebells are out, and I go doo-lally for a nice bluebell wood. I seem to remember that the New Forest is home to the Early Purple Orchid, if memory serves-

Mostly though I am just looking forward to spending time with these people. I've met lots of the other attendees in the pub, but pub moots are... well, they are in the pub. People are either a bit lubricated or dashing off to work in the am. You get wedged behind a table and can't circulate. Conversations about the ins and outs of pagan worship grind to a halt when the bar staff come to pick up your empties. It's good, but less than ideal.

They are a very cool and accepting lot by and large. I've been told that some of the heathen contingent are critical of Loki-worship, but it's a case of reasonable minds differing rather than a serious source of strife. And there are others who feel differently, including one or two Lokean folks. I've found the UK heathens to be rather different in character from the Americans; UK folks seem to lean more toward the adaptive side, and don't place as much emphasis on group religious ritual. I'm sort of in the middle. On one hand, I think the down-to-earth UK approach has a lot going for it. On the other, I sometimes feel a need for the kind of shared worship that seems to get more emphasis Stateside, and wonder if we're not trying a little too hard to be sturdily irreverent. (Isn't it great, though, that there's such diversity of spiritual expression in heathenry, and that we have such unprecedented opportunities to learn from each other?)

Also I get to sleep in a tent and have legitimate reason to use a windup torch, spirit stove etc. Part of the joy of camping is playing with the gadgets.

*Having said all that, I have probably now doomed myself to end up wearing a pink hat with bells on and leading a round of orange Tang toasts.

Paganheathendramawank...

2009-04-24T00:17:25Z

...still smarts, even when you're only tangentally involved.

Okay, so for those of you who don't know what's prompted this, a couple of people--one of them a virtual chum of whom I had become rather fond--have made some pretty harsh (and to my mind terribly, terribly unfair) comments regarding certain groups and individuals I'm connected with. Very public, very ugly. (Wank here, if you can stomach it.)

Even though I wasn't personally implicated and am pretty much unaffected by what was said, I was shocked and upset by the sheer unpleasantness. It literally hurt to read some of the comments and accusations. I was contemplating a point-by-point rebuttal kind of thing, but I find I'm just not up to it. It would be almost too easy to pick apart the assertions made, but I'm not sure that another sad, angry rant is such a great idea at this point. (There's also the fact that I've gone over some of this material so many times that I feel exhausted by it. I mean, seriously? Bashing Etin-worship and Ordeal work? We have to go over all this stuff again?) More aggro isn't what anyone needs right now, and I doubt anything I could say would help those involved to reverse their rather confusing heel turns.

But I can't quite let it go either.

Instead, I'm going to take another tack, and make this a happy, blessings-counting sort of post.

I am glad to be associated (even if it's only a little bit associated) with The Kingdom of Asphodel, and proud and happy to be a member of Ironwood Kindred. I find the hostility directed against Asphodel and IWK almost surreal; it's like, are we talking about the same people?

Do the people involved make mistakes? Yeah. Do I agree with them on everything? Nope. Do I ever worry about the way things are done, and feel like maybe this could be safer or that could be handled with more compassion? Sure. I feel pretty much the same way about every single other group of people I've ever been involved with. Reasonable people can have different opinions--yeah, even over big important stuff. Am I ever concerned about things like safety issues and good conduct? Occasionally--but never have I felt that my concerns were not heard, or that I couldn't take a reasonable comment about something bothered me to someone who would listen.

The folks down on Cauldron Farm have been very kind to me. Online and in meatspace I've had a lot of valuable help and support from Raven Kaldera. When I've stayed on the farm, I've been treated with friendship, hospitality and compassion. I never felt unsafe around those people. I never felt threatened, or anxious, or skeeved out. I was in some pretty vulnerable, messed-up states both times, and both times I was cared for and looked after. Everyone was super-appropriate and super-supportive. I'm going to visit the farm again this summer, and I am looking forward to it with great eagerness. I'll be attending IWK's Etinmoot--thanks to the incredible generosity of one of the members--and I look forward to spending time with them. Some members of the kindred have become dear friends as well as co-religionists, and I can't wait to see those people again. (Looking at you, ignited_spark, tamyris and kiravmoon.) I thank the Gods and wights, especially Loki, who brought them into my life.

burningblood @ 2009-03-06T15:30:00

2009-03-06T15:51:23Z

I don't know, sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

Raging cultural insensitivity aside, this is an eminently sensible notion. I mean, I check in with the witch-doctors of my aquaintance every chance I get. I actually quite like the fantasy of having Western woo-woo merchants look at how their gear stands up against folks from cultures where modern medicine is a distant dream and magic is the only treatment available. In my brane this would go like:

Real shaman: So let me get this straight. You dilute the active ingredient how much?

Homeopath: Er, so there's one part in ten to the power of 30...

RS: And then you shake it.

H: Actually it's called successing. You see we--

RS: And while you shake it, you do what? You pray?

H: No.

RS: You chant?

H: Um, no.

RS: You enter trance and commune with the spirits of your Ancestors and ask them to intercede on behalf of the client?

H: Not... really... no.

RS: Oh...kay. And how did you learn your craft? Did the elders of your group train you?

H: I went to the local community college.

RS: Okay, so to perform this ritual, what initiation did you undergo?

H: Initiation?

RS: Yeah. How did you become a healer? Did you suffer a sickness, journey into the underworld and return with the knowledge? Were you subjected to trial by ordeal? Did you go out to a holy place and meditate for many days until you were granted this ability by your spirits?

H: Well, the course fees were pretty steep.

RS: And what happens if your clients do not recover? Do you go hungry? Do their angry families accuse you of witchcraft and burn your house?

H: Uh. You see some people actually choose to be sick, either becuase they want attention or because it's their karma, and in those cases--

RS: I've seen enough. Book'em, Danno!

Although in real life it would probably go more like:

RS: Yeah, the spirits are telling me that you're a sacred healer, you are a blessing to your people, you are destined to become a shaman and things and stuff oh yeah and you're a what was it, an indigo child. That will be my kid's malaria shots and a new roof, thanks.

H: (hands over 6 grand, does not shut up about encounter for REST OF LIFE.)

burningblood @ 2009-03-04T12:07:00

2009-03-04T12:20:04Z

Was originally going to be a response to this thread, but ended up a bit long and self-indulgent.

Other poster: I don't know whether to smile or lament that the immediate response of most Heathens I know to someone asking to know more is to assign a fairly long reading list.

Me: Or in worse cases to offer a rude dismissal where the actual informative content is half as long as the list of the writer's qualifications.

Heilsa. I am Godhi Torvald Obscurefigurfromthesagasson MA PhD, headman of West Anglia Northern Kindred (the largest Tru Heathen Hearth in Northern Vinland), Lord of Othala Hof. I am the author of The Tru Way: Real Asatru, Horsewhip, Hanging or Bog?: perspectives on homosexuality in modern heathnry, Kitchen Kin and Hof: a handbook of Heathen Femininty, and Loki the Evil One: Why We Can't Have Nice Things. I am the founder of the Ethnospecific Asatru Foundation for Metagenetic Studies.

Read the sagas and the Eddas.

Godhi Torvald Obscurefigurfromthesagasson, Asatru Godhi.

burningblood @ 2009-03-01T09:59:00

2009-03-01T10:04:50Z

Today I am praying for compassion.

In times to come I'm going to be dealing with a lot of people who are going through what I went through when the spirits and the Powers first made Themselves known. It's already started to happen, in fact. And I just know that some night, I'm going to be tired, and cold, and hungry; maybe my arthritis will be kicking my arse or I'll be wrestling with my asthma symptoms; or perhaps I'll be recovering from Ordeal; and some poor bastard will email me or phone me or post to a comm. about some privation, situation or demand that they're having trouble dealing with.

And I pray that when this happens, I have the self-control and the compassion not to yell "you think you've got problems? I had an NDE last week and my inhaler isn't working and my knees are making a weird clicky noise when I walk! And I have to take a transatlantic flight on Tuesday to go and do priest stuff!" and so on.

Help me to remember that even if their suffering looks slighter than mine, we've all got different boudaries and tolerances and our weak spots lie in different areas. Help me also to bear in mind that I do not know the whole of their situation, and that things may well be much worse than they're giving out. Help me to remember all the times I took some issue before communities that were notionally dedicated to sharing advice on these topics, and got hate-mail or public chewings-out for doing so. Help me to remember the times something especially distressing got gag-ordered, so I could only speak in generalities.

Help me remember also that when I've been given support and counsel, they most often came from the people who had the worst of it. Short leashes, chronic sickness, disability, sufferings past and present, pain physical and emotional didn't stop them finding a kind word for me, or some good advice. When tough love is called for, help me to make sure that it really is love that I'm offering, and not self-aggrandisment or spite. Help me to remember that while it might fellate my ego to show off those old war-wounds, this is less acceptable when the other person is actively bleeding to death. Help remember that my voice might be the thing that keeps someone going through a dark time or pushes them over the edge into despair, and help me curb a sharp tongue when need be.

Help me to remember that whether it's really spirits putting someone through the wringer or just their own head-weasles, the pain is real.

Help me to remember that even if after taking all of the above into consideration it is my professional opinion that someone really is just being a whiny brat, I have the option to remain silent and take my energies elsewhere.

Help me to remember that while I might be able to slip things past the mortals in the audience, the spirits are watching and They see what's in my heart.

Who would honour the deteriorated mind?

2009-02-20T15:36:59Z

So I'm browsing NT-related texts on Amazon, and Feeding the Flame pops up as a suggestion. As it happens I've already got Feeding the Flame cuz my well-chewed Loki essay is therein and the editor was kind enough to send me a copy. Oooh, I wonder if there's anything juicy in the reviews..?

Jackpot.

"Who, with any scant bit of sanity, would venture to honor the deteriorated mind? Loki was at one time buddy-buddy with the gods. Then it became a slippery-slope to an evil intent; including murder. It insults me to think that anyone would make an effort to glorify that which represents all that is without honor."

Gods that makes me so happy. Just reading it puts a smile on my face. "The deteriorated mind," "a slippery-slope to an evil intent..." it's as if a fortune cookie got called to the Tivar and started writing Amazon reviews. A toast to Godhi Fortune-Cookie!

Goodbye Mr Lensherr

2009-02-11T20:22:28Z

Over at the Bad Place I see that the old "pop-culture figure vs deity" row has broken out yet again, with the l33t ch40z majykyanz arguing that a practice centred around a pop-culture figure is every bit as powerful and rewarding and meaningful as one centred around a traditional deity; that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is, if anything, a more potent force than Freyja (coz more people have heard of Buffy, right?)

I disagree with this position. I have encountered any number of people over the years who make this claim, but only one or two have actually described a meaningful practice based around a figure from pop-culture. The thing that stands out about most of these people is that they don't really seem to understand what a devotional practice is. Comments like "you took a boatload of drugs and Papa Ghede kicked your ass" are pretty much the standard, and indicate to the reader that the writers must be basing their own opinions on a small selection of isolated incidents, since they assume that others are doing likewise. Someone making the claim "I've worked with traditional deities and with fictional characters, and there's no difference at all" is very likely to mean "I did a couple of half-baked rituals in respect of [Deity], having done no background investigation as to the way [Deity] was/is/likes to be approached, and making everything up as I went along. Six months later I got drunk with some of my mates and we invoked The Fantastic Four for a laugh. I got roughly the same buzz off both experiences, and therefore I concluded that there was no difference between Thor and The Thing."

The impression I get is that these guys often don't know what a practice is: what you're usually looking at is barebones sigil workings for everything and some kind of experimental ritual a couple of times a year. There's no photographs of an active harrow to Willow Rosenberg, no happy, exited discourse on the changes that Yoda has helped them make to their lives, no "this is what I've accomplished, this is what I've learned." Nothing but the rote repetition of what has become an unshiftable graven-in-stone dogma, every bit as sterile and inflexible as the traditions it purports to replace are supposed to be.

It seems funny now, but only a few years ago I would have been on the other side of the debate, arguing for the validity of pop-culture magic. I was a chaos magician for some years, and just prior to my conversion I was working in a fairly serious way with two fictional characters: Marge Gunderson from Fargo and Magneto, the antagonist from the X-Men comics.

I will never cease to regret refusing Loki's call in my early 20s, but in an odd way I'm glad I did that work. It gives me a solid experiential position to speak from. I can truthfully say that the work I did with Magneto was perfectly decent, effective magic; I can tell you that it did what it was supposed to do, which was in essence help me create a positive relationship with my own freakishness and undo some of the ablist, sane-ist self-loathing inculcated in me by society. Eric Lensherr is great for that.

I was working specifically with movie-Magneto, as portrayed by Ian McKellen. That fine actor brought some new depth and meaning to the mix, being a gay man from a generation that was even more oppressed than LGBT people are oppressed now; when he was young, Sir Ian could have been thrown in prison for his sexuality, or subjected to degrading, dangerous and worthless "treatments" to "cure" his orientation. He's a gay rights activist. As a person, he has many characteristics that I'd like to emulate. This all added a lot to the work.

In the Marvel universe, Magneto is an interesting character. He's a Holocaust survivour, and this experience is depicted as having given him a very bleak view of humanity. He's far more extreme than his one-time friend and current adversary, the moderate Charles Xavier. Xavier wants to achieve equal rights for mutants through peaceful means; Magneto is righteously pissed off with the oppression and cruelty that regular humans subject mutants to, and doesn't give a damn about hurting "normal people." To Magneto, it's the mutants who matter: normal humans have made their bed by inflicting violence and misery upon mutants, and they don't deserve to be protected from the consequences of that. Obviously this is not the basis for an ethically defensible or terribly useful attitude to the rest of humanity in real life, but in the context of my magical practice it was what I needed. I was pretty much entirely beaten down at that point in my life, and needed something wildly over-the-top to counter that.

What did the work look like? Well, I'd watch sections of my X-Men DVDs ritually, I'd replay scenes where Magneto was talking about mutant rights or just doing something cool. I'd envisage myself in that universe, as a mutant, getting counsel and support from Magneto. When I had to deal with stuff like being turned down for jobs because of my epilepsy or my gender, I'd switch channels from the reflexive self-loathing ("man, they won't even give me work in a fast-food place, I must be completely worthless") to a more Magneto-ish interpretation ("that person is rejecting me because I'm a 'mutant'. It's their attitude that sucks, not my ability.") Where appropriate I would refer to and address people in my social circle as mutants, as a term of affection and inclusion. (Still do that now.)

In retrospect, I think that a lot of what I was looking for in Eric Lensherr, I ultimately found in Loki. Magneto isn't a "Lokean" character in the sense that, say, the Red Guy from Cow & Chicken or Johnny Storm the Human Torch from Marvel are like aspects of Loki. But there's some stuff in the mix that ties in with Loki's mysteries. Lensherr has some of the ruthlessness that Loki sometimes displays, and some of the rage. He values and prioritises mutants in a world that wants to lock them up or wipe them out, so he's kind of a "father of monsters," in a sense--and it's the Father of Monsters aspect of Loki that I've ended up working with.

So, why scary badass challenging demanding old-school Loki, and not undemanding socially acceptable modern comic-book Magneto? Leaving aside the fact that I can't reject Loki* I wouldn't dream of doing so anyway. There are a number of reasons for this.

The nature of the experience is very different. I went into my pop-culture work in good faith; I genuinely bought into the popular chaos-magic bromide that the Gods were fictional characters and therefore there was no substantive difference between a deity and a character from a comic. I had no reason to imagine that my experience would be any less rich or mysterious; in fact, one common assertion is that pop-culture figures should be more powerful than Gods, since they are somehow imbued with the "psychic energy" of a multi-million-strong audience, and have been tailored to be appropriate to a modern context. But although my conversations with Magneto were rewarding enough in their own way, there was never that sense of being in the presence of Someone awe-inspiring, none of the sheer wallop of contact with a deity.

Right from the word go, my encounters with Loki were profound and magical and intense in a way that none of my previous practice had ever even approached. On a purely selfish level the benefits to me have been greater. I have derived much more personal power from my devotions to Loki than from all my previous magical work put together. But I've also witnessed things, astonishing things, that I never experienced as a chaos magician. I have seen and experienced impossible events brought about by the power of the God, laws-of-physics-breaky stuff. I've DONE laws-of-physics-breaky stuff. I've stuck my hand in a bonfire and pulled out a glowing branch, and held it in my hand before witnesses, all thinks to the blessing of my Vinr. I have been gifted in more readily-explicable but no less magical ways through my spirit work; gifts of community and friendship, the precious gift of being able to contribute something to a group.

On a personal level, there's the way I feel about the Tivar and especially the Son of Laufey. I would go to the wall for Loki. A lot of friends of Loki are covert--understandably, because they know that they'll get stick from other heathens about their devotion, maybe even get driven out of their groups. I'm openly Lokean because if I forfeit your respect through my worship of Loki I lose literally nothing, because your respect is worthless to me. I don't care how famous you are, how well-regarded you are, how influential you are; I don't care how many books you've got out or where you studied. Because you despise my Friend, your regard is trash. Yeah, Loki gets attacked by the self-appointed "heathen mainstream." Loki-worshippers get get told that our God is not a God; that He was never worshipped, that He's an evil giant, a woeful wight, the "Norse Satan," a plot device. We get defamed individually and en masse--we're feckless, we're lazy, we're frithless, we're ignorant, we're cowards, blah blah blah. I truly do not care. Bring it on, I say! The despite of the despicable is as sweet as the praise of the praiseworthy. Lies reveal more of the character of the liar than the lied-about, and if slander is to be Loki's portion I will share in it happily. I would never willingly give up my devotion to Loptr; it would be like losing your dearest friend. My life would be empty.

You see that? You see what I just wrote, all that batshit religious maniac purple prose? You think I don't know how risible that looks? But I meant every single word. Deity contact will do that to you. Marvel antihero contact never did.

None of the above means that you can't have a worthwhile, effective practice based around a pop-culture figure. As an animist, I must also acknowledge that since they are named and can be distinguished, all fictional characters are wights--beings imbued with some kind of spirit, fully contactable and possessed of a certain kind of personality. I used to have a stock joke about the plastic magician who worships Delirium from the Sandman comics, and then stone me if I don't meet this utterly fabulous person who does real, meaningful work with that very character. Had to eat my words. (I'd argue that the Endless are a bit of a special case, since Gaiman pretty explicitly ties them to actual Gods, beings who were worshipped at one time or another. Dream is Morpheus. Death is Persephone. Delirium is Mania. Arguably you're simply interfacing with a new mask for an old Power, one that's accustomed to human traffic and carries with Her the centuried accretion of personality that seems to set such spirits apart from fictional characters. The other thing to note about the Endless is that they are conceived as being anthropomorphic personifications of certain concepts that are of great significance to the human condition--mortality, insanity, the future, and so on.) The thing is that so few people ever seem to have that kind of solid practice. The assertion that pop-culture figuers are the same as Gods is almost always based on theoretical assumptions, ideas recycled unquestioned from book to book to webpage, not on lived personal experience.

The most frustrating thing is trying to communicate any of this; you're always banging your head against the brick wall of someone's ego. To get into a meaningful practice, you first have to admit to yourself that something is lacking in what you're doing now, and most people don't want to admit that even to themselves.

*My situation, as I understand it, is basically like one of those tribal shaman guys you read about in anthro texts, the ones who had their spirits turn up and go "Hey you! You're going to be working for Us now and you'd better get used to the idea," and the shaman goes "nah, guys, being a shaman is all hard and stuff and You're scary," and then the spirits go "Oh okay then, enjoy your RUIN" and then the shaman is mad and sick and has fits and stuff till he eventually gives up and goes "okay then I'm a shaman then just stop dicking with me!" I'm not a proper shaman of course, but sort of like that.

Writing

2009-01-24T19:39:55Z

When I was a kid, I used to hope that one day I would become a professional writer. I wrote a lot. I read a lot. As I was been removed from school at an early age and much of my education was unsupervised, most of my study consisted of reading books and then writing down what I understood from them. I would write all day sometimes, and far into the night. I completed my first novel at the age of 14 (burning it a bit later, which is probably the most merciful thing to do with a novel by a 14-year-old), I wrote countless poems, essays, stories... at one time, it seemed entirely reasonable that one might be able to parlay that output into some small income. This has never actually happened. I have published various short pieces, and sometimes even got paid shiny pennies. In Spain I worked sucessfully as a teacher of English. But I've never actually worked as a writer, nor had much in the way of publishing success.

The reasons why are interesting, to me at any rate. What nobody noticed during my early education and young adulthood, not even me, is that I don't really have writing ability so much as writing behaviors. What happens to me while I write is only partly a conscious process. It's not the result of inspiration but of compulsion: when I'm doing it it's often because I MUST do it, I can do nothing else, I will write and write and write, I will go hungry and thirsty and not notice it, I will lose track of the time of day, I will write tired, I will write sick, I will write when I am experiencing visual disturbances so severe that I can hardly see the paper or the screen. I may produce tens of thousands of words. But I have a limited amount of conscious control over the process. I write like babies puke: copiously, effortlessly, and inconveniently I cannot always decide what I will write; the compulsion plugs into this topic or that one and I don't necessarily have control over the theme or how much I will write about it. Information is not discrete for me, it does not come in neat chunks, but appears fractal in nature, each concept capable of being broken down into smaller concepts and each of those potentially connecting to great trains of inter-related ideas--so that I can begin to write a ghost story and find some hours later that I am now engaged in constructing a narrative essay on the London housing crisis.

Constructing essay plans and plot outlines helps somewhat, but there are two major pitfalls here. One is that even within a structure, I can rage out of control: a paragraph that needs, for the purposes of an essay, to be 200 words long, mutates into a vast sprawling tangent as long as the whole essay was supposed to be; what was supposed to be a quick Meanwhile Back At The Ranch interlude becomes a spiralling sub-narrative, often taking on a wholly different character to the rest of the story, and yet invading the fiction in so many places as to resist simply being pruned off and requiring that I start the bloody thing from scratch. Two is the converse: whatever sub-routine of my selfplex drives the whole process can sometimes be satiated by a plot outline or an essay structure. It looks at the bare bones and says, "ah, there we are--that's that, job done." and vanishes, while I run after it screaming: "No, you idiot, come back! We haven't finished! We haven't even started!" These can both be overcome but it often takes a monstrous effort, an unbelievable wrenching struggle, to get things back on track. I hate to tell anyone I'll have an essay or an article for them unless I've got a good couple of months to do it in. They may need only 800 words and I may produce 18000, and the pruning job is always more draining and demanding than the baby-puke process of spewing words. Or I may find that the conversation we had about what I was going to write has satiated/switched off the sub-routine, and I'll have to spend days or weeks trying to get it off its new fixation and back onto the the topic I'm supposed to be writing about.

It's difficult to describe what happens when the sub-routine goes on strike. It's a little like the aphasia that overtakes me when I am in gangr. My whole ability to string together a line of text basically deserts me; in extreme cases I may find it physically impossible to make my eyes focus on the page. My cognitive processes pack up and I can no longer coherently order and express the material. I have to spend ages picking out words one at a time, in the most laborious way imaginable, often grabbing at stereotype phrases and cliches in the hopes that these chunks of menaing will suffice to bridge the gap between me and my subject, at least until they can be replaced by something more interesting at the editing stage. Yet if I shift my attention to the thing the sub-routine has got stuck on, the thoughts come, and the words come, and it's all gravy. I have no idea why this happens.

I have no formal qualifications in English beyond GCSE level (the one you take when you're 16, although I took it at 15), except for my teaching certificate. My writing has been useful at various times throughout my life, but I have no index as to how good or bad it might be. I have no idea if I am an effective reader or not. I have no idea if I am a good writer or not. I just know that the spew is going to happen and I might as well make the best of it. This does not mean that I don't strive to improve as a writer--I do, constantly--but on some level the improvement is irrelevant. Good or bad, read or unread, the "attacks" of writing will come anyway.

This has both advantages and disadvantages. One is that my opportunity for productivity is above what it would be otherwise. I would like to be a high-functioning depressive; I am not. I can spend great tracts of time incapable of movement as my bodymind grinds to a halt. I can sit in my frozen physicality, screaming inside my head, while minutes become hours, hours become days, and my life spills away like dirty water down a drain. I may be unable to eat, I may be unable to get sufficient fluid, I may be unable to engage in the physical excercises I need to do to remain pain-free. I may be unable to cook food, to bathe, to get to the shops. But even down there in that paralysed place, even when I am sitting in a dirty room in filthy clothes, hating everything around me yet utterly powerless to address it, I can find that the writing behaviour will manifest itself. There is no guarantee that what will come out will be of any earthly use to anyone at all, but there is a chance--some small chance that I can wring worth out of what often seems like a worthless life.

What has this got to do with heathenry and spirit-work? Well, since I was converted and allowed myself to be open to the spirits, my level of functional writing has increased dramatically. Instead of having to wait until the compulsion randomly attaches itself to some worthwhile topic, I am now sitting on a treasure-trove of wonderful, beautiful, amazing things to write about. Instead of pruducing heaps of words pretty much at random, I almost always find myself plugging in to something that deserves to be described, celebrated and shared. This is most especially true of my Friend-in-high-places; although deluges of ink get spilled on the "Loki issue" much of what is out there is wrongheaded, ill-informed, and based on prejudice rather than lore or personal experience. Loki can never be too much written about.

All I have to do when the compulsion seizes me is turn my mind to the Gods and the wights, and They will offer me the meaning I so often lacked in the past. Even when the compulsion leaves me and I am spent, I have at hand a wealth of lore to study; I have dictionaries to browse, stories to enjoy, histories to marvel at. In time, some element of these will fire the whole process up again. Because the lore is so rich and because the world of the spirits as I experience it is no so well explored, it doesn't matter if I write 800 words or 8000--someone somewhere will benefit from it. Best of all there seems to be some special quality about spiritual writing that soothes the compulsive element and lets me order my thoughts without spending the impetus thereby. I no longer feel like I am blundering around in a fog of words, dragged by a mindless compulsion and never knowing if I'm ever going to write anything coherent again. And whether I am a good or a bad writer, whatever the quality of my work, I know that the act itself has meaning. No longer compulsion, but devotion.

Dear "mainstream" heathenry,

2009-01-24T01:43:11Z

1) The central focus of heathen worship is the W-I-G-H-T-S, not the W-H-I-T-E-S.

2) Atlas Shrugged is not lore.

Thoughts on magic and spirituality in the Northern tradition, Part I

2009-01-07T11:52:01Z

Gods, religion and worship.

First of all we must address the knotty problem of "faith," "religion" and "worship," and how those terms relate to the various flavours of Northern tradition spirituality. All of those terms are arguably problematic, coming as they do freighted with a lot of cultural baggage; it is easy to read into them a Christian meaning, since that is the context in which we have previously encountered them. (It is even easier for idle minds to affect to read such in the interests of wasting others' time and derailing discussions, or of furnishing an association fallacy with which to dismiss views they cannot refute via reasoned argument or evidence.) Unpicking the whole tangled mess is therefore a bit of a nightmare, but let's have a go. It might be useful to start with a look at the basic idea of heathen spirituality, then move on to the "magic" element. There are some common general statements made about these topics, so I'm going to lay some of them out as jumping-on points.

"Pre-conversion heathens didn't worship the Gods." This can mean one of two things depending on the speaker.

I have seen many people argue against the idea of heathenry as anything other than set of lifestyle choices, with any kind or degree of literal belief in the Gods being pooh-poohed as a Christian or Wiccan holdover that the votary has failed to shake off. I disagree with this since I'm a raving religious maniac; but at least there's a degree of honesty in that position. The idea that pre-Christian heathenry was essentially secular in nature lies at odds with the lore, as well as with contemporary accounts and other historical and archaeological data. Certainly this need not affect the practice of people who find that approach more meaningful to them, as long as they're not presenting their practice as "real" heathenry at the expense of animist heathens.

To accept that the Elder Kin were an entirely secular folk is to ignore vast tracts of available evidence. If they weren't worshipping the Tivar and other vaettir as individuated and separate from the worshipper, then it would follow that they were interacting with something else: ideas or archetypes given humanoid appearances yet not conceived of as having any kind of autonomous existence, rather like those artworks from more recent centuries representing such worthy principles as Courage or Victory or Agriculture. The most cursory glance at the lore shows that this is patently risible. Who hangs a man in the name of an archetype? Who gives up life or liberty for a vague concept rather than switch allegiance to some other vague concept? Who casts scads of gold and treasure into a river for the glory of a nebulous mythological image, or conducts elaborate rites to celebrate a fairy-tale? Individuals may do these things. Cultures by-and-large don't. A culture engages in such irrational conduct when that culture supports a belief in the existence of some external conscious force which can be interacted with and which will benefit from and/or reward certain actions or modes of behaviour. Of course there is a positive superabundance of data supporting the veneration of the various Gods and spirits as external intelligences, but the preceding will do very nicely for now.

The second meaning of "didn't worship the Gods" is somewhat more nuanced. Here the speaker accepts the Tivar as having some kind of independent existence but takes issue with the term worship, this typically being characterised as "grovelling on one's knees like a Kristinn," or something along those lines.

How do we respond to this? Well, first of all, there's the meaning of worship. Worship does not mean "grovelling on one's knees." It does not mean going shamefaced before your Gods, abasing yourself and making a lot of You-big-me-small noises. Worship is weorth scipe, to give or ascribe worth to. That's it. Any connotations of cringing and boot-licking are therefore what the speaker is bringing to the feast, and not what the hosts have laid on. There is also a related assertion, that early heathens did not physically bow or kneel before their Gods, which is equally without foundation. Contemporary records do in fact describe heathen folks prostrating themselves before representations of Gods or spirits as part of their interactions. This whole "heathens don't worship, heathens don't kneel" business owes more to people watching too many Hollywood Viking movies, or trying to practice heathenry out of a copy of the Satanic Bible with the word "Satanist" crossed out and "Viking" written instead*, than it does to lore or history. It certainly does not admit of personal spiritual experience, which really can knock your feet out from under you at times no matter how tough and independent you imagine yourself to be.

A related tangent that one can find oneself dragged off on is the old "the Tivar are not Gods" chestnut. The most appropriate response one can offer for this is to tell one's interlocutor to put a sock in it and shove off, since they've just revealed themselves to be wholly uninterested in meaningful discourse and merely out to rattle one's cage. Were it worthy of a response, one could offer the following: the term God(/dess) is entirely proper in respect of the Tivar and other wights because it includes the meaning of a powerful entity who is seen as personifying, in charge of, or associated with a particular matter, and as being possessed of certain greater-than-normal powers. Seems to fit the bill well enough, and it's in common enough use in heathen circles that quibbling over it marks one out as a bit of a pillock. (Incidentally, I like to use "Tivar "over "Æsir and Vanir," as I believe that the Jötnar received weorth scipe in the past and are worthy of weorth scipe today.)

"Heathenry is not a religion."

Essentially, this comes down to yet more linguistic quibbling. Of course heathenry is a bloody religion. Still, let's pick the bones out of this and see what we're left with.

As with "worship," much of the objection to the term "religion" rests on baggage that the user is hanging on the word—grovelling, Kristinn, et hoc genus omne. Those with pretensions to linguistic mastery will usually reach for its having supposedly descended from a Latin term meaning "to bind," and will assert from this that it implies bondage, slavery, grov―by this point I'm sure you know the words and can sing along.

While it's true that "religion" ultimately derives from religio, and that religio itself derives from ligare which can indeed mean to bind or to tie, ligare can also mean to connect. Likely the term derives from re (again, as in English) + ligare: re-connect, gather. Not a binding in the sense of being placed in chains, then, but in the sense of being linked, connected, joined to some greater whole. Getting back from the Latin to the English, one of the possible dictionary definitions of "religion" is a "system or institution with which one engages in order to foster a sense of meaning or relevance in relation to something greater than oneself." I think most forms of Northern-tradition spirituality could be accommodated by that one.

Certainly it is true that adopting a cringing, lick-spittle attitude before the Gods is unlikely to do anyone any good. They are not your perfect, omniscient, omnipotent, immortal and infallible Masters on High, before Whom you are as a lowly worm etc. etc. If you go in with that kind of attitude, you'll have a lot of problems in constructing a healthy, meaningful relationship with the Powers. You'll be shutting yourself off from what They have to teach, from the strength They can bestow, and from that in you which is the echo of Them. If They should happen to want to take you down a peg or two for some reason you'll know all about it, don't worry.

But nor are they a bunch of mates that you might meet down your local on a Friday night. Odin is not some old codger you might nod to in the supermarket; Freyja is not the mean girl who sneered at your shoes in the 6th form and who you now get the chance to snub and put down in return. Better to think of the Tivar as wise and experienced experts in certain vital fields―a particularly skilled and supportive University lecturer, say, or a well-regarded sensei. Go in with respect and compassion, don't bow and scrape but don't show off and throw your weight around either.

In conclusion: Heathenry is indeed a religion, within which one may engage in the worship of the Gods. Next up, magic.

*in green fucking crayon.

burningblood @ 2009-01-05T01:33:00

2009-01-05T02:40:35Z

The other day, I happened across yet another article on heathenry written by a Folkist. This happens fairly regularly, Folkies being such a very vocal minority, and is always irritating since Folkies seem to shoehorn their racist political agenda into every single thing they write (I sometimes wonder what Folkie shopping-lists must look like: "Eggs, bread, milk, NO COFFEE IT IS AN ALIEN FOREIGN DRUG, cabbage, loo roll..."). Thus, of course, this chap's overveiw of heathenry included a statement to the effect that heathenry is an ethnospecific religion. As usual this was not substantiated in any way, other than by the usual appeal to the existance of ethnospecific faiths elsewhere. Also as usual, there was the more-hurt-than-angry "...and they call us racists!" arse-covering. This particular writer compounded the latter, though, with the meanly-mouthed assertion that since Folkies can't actually stop anyone else from worshipping the Tivar, it doesn't matter if they choose to believe that certain groups shouldn't be.

Is this true?

I have to say that my answer is "well, not really." While it is true that Folkies are becoming increasingly irrelevant as the reality of heathen resurgence rolls on over them and that they cannot prevent the Gods from calling who They will call or stop people from responding to that call when it comes, they certainly give it the old college try. I have seen Folkists defame, harrass, belittle, and attack all those who they disagree with. Folkists who engage in criminal activity in the service of their various political agendas (in my experience, the race angle tends to come as part of a fully-comprehensive package of bigotry, including homophobia, ableism, transphobia and so on) are often not ejected from their organisations but welcomed with open arms and lauded for being "proactive." Hardly surprising, when the heads of such organisations also engage in harrassment and blackmail to try and prevent non-Folkish heathens from participating in public rituals or from speaking out about their beliefs. Even people who don't identify as heathen but who practice in the Northern Tradition recieve hate mail and threats of violence and death, and find themselves publically libelled and slandered by supposed "heathens" looking to discredit them.

More subtly, by repeatedly questioning the worth of people who don't fit their critera (not white enough, straight enough, gender-confroming enough, etc) and the right of those people to explore the Northern tradition, they create an atmosphere where heathenry becomes indelibly associated in popular consciousness with race-hate and other forms of prejudice, thus deterring many people from investigating further. I know that I'd garnered a similar impression of heathens myself before I converted, and though very far from the whole story this was certainly a contributing factor to my refusing Loki's call when I was younger. I have had many people describe being put off by the lousy reputation that Folkies and white-pride plastic heathens create for the rest of us. I personally know people who lost friends after they converted because they were assumed to have thrown in their lot with a bunch of Nazi sympathisers. (Ironic, isn't it, that a group who prates so very loudly about people "dishonouring" the Gods should bring us all into such grave disrepute.)

So while the Folkies can't actually interfere with others' spiritual lives to the degree that they would like, they certainly do a fair bit of damage. It's up to the non-Folkists to help rectify this, by continually informing ourselves and checking our own privileges, by being as vocal in our rejection of bigotry as the Folkies are in promulgating it, by being accepting where they are intolerant, by being truthful where they lie and defame.

Below the salt

2009-01-03T18:38:17Z

This is a difficult entry for me to write.

I remember the first time I came across the Theodish rite of "worthing" a couple of years ago. I'm not keen on Theodism for a variety of reasons, chief of these being that it's a system which focuses too intently on reconstructing the past rather than attempting to build a healthy, living form of heathenry for the future (and that many of its chief proponants need to clean their politics out with a pistol-grip hose, but I digress). But when I read about the practice of worthing, I literally choked up and my eyes filled with tears. Not because I thought it was stupid, or cruel, or damaging; not because I thought it yet another mindless assualt on personal liberty and rights in the name of heathenry, but because I was eaten up with a kind of sorrowful envy.

"Worthing" refers to the practice of undertaking a year's apprenticeship within the Theod, as a way of exploring that system and better understanding if it is right for you, and also of demonstrating to the broader community your commitment and ability--proving your worth. The person entering into this apprenticeship ritually sells hirself into thralldom to a senior member, and spends a year serving under that person before being formally granted hir freedom and membership of the group. (A bit like joining an old-school leather family.) Obviously such a system relies on the thrall's "owner" being an upright and ethical person, since the potential for abuse and exploitation is very clear; yes, the thrall can walk away at any time, but when you're dealing with the kind of heavy emotional investment inspired by powerful drives such as personal spirituality and the need for community acceptance things aren't that simple. Evidently, though, plenty of people make it through the process successfully, finding it meaningful and rewarding.

And when I read about that I was honestly heartbroken, because I would so much love to have that kind of "worth" myself. I would give a very great deal for the opportunity to accomplish something like that--not necessarily in the form of servitude (I suspect I am constitutionally unsuited for thralldom), but I genuinely crave the community-sanctioned "worth" that comes from having undergone some kind of formal process involving the service of that community. It's not a matter of acceptance, exactly: I have found acceptance and kinship among various groups and I value those things very dearly. But all of those good things I've been gifted with feel exactly like that--like gifts; they demonstrate no worth of my own but the generosity, compassion, and hospitality of other folk. None of it feels earned. What I bring to my various communities, and to the Northern Tradition in general, is terribly slight. I have come to my Gods rather late in life, not for want of opportunity but for want of courage and resolve; I am constantly playing catch-up. I can boast of no new discoveries in the field of scholarship--I'm just learning what other people have already revealed. I can boast of no material contribution. I can't even boast of any contribution in the more nebulous field of mysticism or magic, since again I am years behind and simply replicating the work that others have already done. When I am challenged, when I am asked "what did you bring to the table, what have you contributed," I don't have a good answer.

It is not good things from others that I lack, not good friends and osk-kin, not generous gifts or advice or kind words. It's that sense of having well-earned my place, of being able to point to some formal accomplishment or service and say "there, I did that; I made that contribution, I underwent that process"--that, I don't have and likely never will.