Month: May 2009

Galdra Logic

“It takes only the acceptance of a single belief to make someone a magician. It is the meta –belief that belief is a tool for achieving effects. This effect is often far easier to observe in others than in oneself. It is usually quite easy to see how other people, and indeed entire cultures, are both enabled and disabled by the beliefs they hold. Beliefs tend to lead to activities which tend to reconfirm belief in a circle they call virtuous rather than vicious, even if the results are not amusing. The first stage of seeing through the game can be a shocking enlightenment that leads to either a weary cynicism or Buddhism. The second stage of actually applying the insight to oneself can destroy the illusion of a soul and create a magician. The realization that belief is a tool rather than an end in itself has immense consequences if fully accepted. Within the limits set by physical possibility, and these limits are wider and more malleable than most people believe, one can make real any beliefs one chooses, including contradictory beliefs. The magician is not one striving for any particular identity goal, rather one who wants the meta-identity of being able to be anything.”

– Peter J. Carroll, Liber Kaos

If it is possible to effect changes in reality simply by changing one’s beliefs, then it logically follows that words must be powerful tools of magic.

Putting it another way…you can make things true simply by stating them as fact, provided that your statement is convincing.

It further follows, then, that the most basic foundational skill of magic is to speak and write convincingly and with authority. To develop this talent, one should study oratory, rhetoric, acting, art, poetry, hypnosis, psychology and propaganda. Practice telling stories, anecdotes and jokes as a means of making a point. In order to develop the glamour of authority, the magician requires a broad general knowledge. Study history, philosophy, mythology, religion and languages.

The ability to speak multiple languages carries with it the glamour of the world-traveller and renaissance-man. In the US, a facility with French will make one appear cultured. Spanish, streetwise. To speak and read in archaic and forgotten tongues is especially impressive as this taps simultaneously into the archetypes of priest, scholar and mystic.

It should be clear by now that it really doesn’t matter much which particular languages one chooses to study. Each has a slightly different, though equally positive effect. Much more important are the foundational skills and the conviction with which you speak. No-one’s going to think you streetwise as you stutter through your basic, overly formal high-school Spanish. Likewise, no-one’s going to mistake you for wise and powerful Magus if your command of the Elder Tongue extends no further than chanting the Futhark in your deepest D&D voice. On the other hand…maybe they will. There’s a sucker born every minute.

Hail Chaos! Viva Loki! Aum Wotan!

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Elhaz Ablaze – Happy One Year Anniversary!

One year ago we started Elhaz Ablaze. The idea to have a website where we could express and explore our idiosyncratic and potent brands of mystical Heathenism had been pressing on us for a long time.

Finally our empty talk reached critical mass and, with my discovery of the crappy but easy-to-use Weebly blog system, Elhaz Ablaze was born. It was (and is) an ugly site to look at, but we hoped that we could fill it with enough worthwhile content that readers would not mind.

Of course, we had absolutely no idea who would be interested in what we had to say. As far as we knew, the notions that we have come to refer to under the rubric of Chaos Heathenism would fall on dead (as opposed to deaf) ears.

Actually I have to admit that I hoped to provoke hate mail for the controversial opinions we and our guests have presented. But to date we have gone unscathed (much to my Loko chagrin).

Instead we have discovered that people actually seem to like our stuff – and moreover we seem to have some kind of readership, at least guessing from the Google Analytics thingy I set up in early January.

Since January 4, 2009 we’ve had some 1,238 unique visitors, 2,763 visits and 8,693 page views. Not bad for what must be one of the weirdest Heathen/magic/martial arts sites on the ‘Net! I have no idea what the patronage was like prior to that unfortunately.

I don’t know whether we are preaching to the converted (perverted?) or whether we are actually opening folk to new perspectives – I’d like to hope for a bit of both.

Certainly we felt terribly unrepresented by the bulk of Heathen writings out there and we hoped that we weren’t the only ones. Consequently, one of the joys of Elhaz Ablaze is that it has put us in touch with folk on similar wavelengths to ourselves. It’s a relief to know that we’re not alone.

I’m also pleased that we could invite Matt Anon to join our group. I’ve known Matt electronically for years and we are like cosmic siblings (despite having never met), so to have his ideas presented alongside mine is a deep privilege.

One of the fundamental principles of Elhaz Ablaze is our commitment to the notion that there is only OPINION in Heathenism: there is no orthodoxy and anyone who claims a monopoly on truth in such a sketchy cultural manifestation as ours is a fraud.

Hence, I love that we contradict ourselves and disagree with one another. Nietzsche says that the more permissive a culture is, the stronger it is; the more restrictive it is, the more brittle and weak it is. We want Heathenism to be strong, and therefore it must be pluralistic. I’m proud that Elhaz Ablaze has become a model for this ideal.

That extends also to our guest writers, who do a great job of both agreeing with and contradicting both us and each other! I might not entirely agree with, say, Sweyn’s views about modernity (see his articles in the guest section), but I’m proud to offer them a home, to defy the widespread anti-modernity Heathen attitude that I myself tend to adopt.

For myself, I settled into a regular writing discipline from day one of the site and maintaining my journal has really assisted my spiritual development. Keeping a public diary, writing short monographs on magical subjects, etc, has enabled me to objectify the sometimes all-too-ephemeral unfolding of my spiritual experience.

This in turn has helped me to integrate the various facets of my existence to a much better degree than I have ever achieved – Elhaz Ablaze for me has been a powerful alchemical vessel. Although, of course, there is a great deal more work to come, and many a loose end yet to be brought to roost in Wyrd’s weave.

When I am lost to myself I can turn to my writings on this site and they anchor and reintegrate me into Mimir’s gift of memory, so essential to the nourishment of my personal microcosmic Yggdrasil.

Indeed, writing my journal has been like mapping out a vast and unknowable continent. Every entry I write feels utterly essential to my being once it is done. Some time soon I will read over everything I’ve done – it will be fascinating to retrace my steps over the last year (and the earlier essays I posted in particular).

This journal has been a profound anchor and way-station for my evolution (and in the last year I can barely start to express how much my life has changed, mostly for the better, though certainly not without great struggle and suffering).

Given it is our first birthday I feel it is high time to explain the name Elhaz Ablaze.

Elhaz is a rune of polarities – consider the Old English Rune Poem (this translation by the inestimable Sweyn Plowright):

Elk-sedge is native most often to the fen,
It grows in water; it wounds grimly,
Burning with blood any warrior
Who, in any way, grabs at it.

The fen, the marsh, the swamp, is a liminal place between land and sea. We know these were holy places to the arch-Heathens – the bog offerings archaeologists have found alone confirm this. Yet for all of its liminal openness, the marsh is warded by the elk-sedge – sharp grass, the points of the elk’s antlers, the reach of a deadly blade.

Elhaz represents, therefore, all the beauty and magic of vulnerability and mystery; but also the strength and integrity of the wild beast that dwells within the wetlands. It represents our desire to deal only with those on the ‘level’. This isn’t a question of elitism or anything silly like that, more a question of taste and time management.

Why Elhaz Ablaze? The fire to me represents the overflowing flames of inspiration, magic, possession, enlightenment, purification, celebration, Life itself. The two words in combination to me suggest the meeting of frost and flame, fire and water: in Elhaz Ablaze all oppositions are subsumed into a greater and dynamic whole.

In a sense, then, Elhaz Ablaze is the necessary conceptual twin to Chaos Heathenism. Chaos Heathenism is a philosophy built on the notion of Elhaz Ablaze – the Chaos offers us liminality and magic, the Heathenism offers structure and integrity. In combination they create a synergistic conflagration.

Where to from here? Speaking for myself – I am about to go travelling for six weeks and this journal will likely be fallow in that time. However I will soon post up my voluminous (circa 13,000 word) essay in response to Alain de Benoist’s book On Being a Pagan.

This essay was written originally for Heathen Harvest, where it will also soon appear, but they have graciously let me present it here on Elhaz Ablaze too. I figure it should offer plenty of mind-meat in my absence for those that care to read it!

A word on the creative process of this essay. I took extensive notes on the book as I read it, until my brain was super-saturated. Because the book provoked me emotionally as well as intellectually it put me into an intense fervour over the fortnight or so that I read it.

Then, the day before my current university course started, I sat down with all my notes and wrote the whole thing out in one sitting. Since then I’ve been tweaking a little bit and getting a little bit of feedback from a few trusted readers (Volksfreund deserves particular praise in this regard).

In short, the writing of the essay was itself an act of applied seidh. I utilised extended altered states of consciousness, full activation of my deep mind, variegated forms of trance and seething, runic incantations and the riding of my Wode – my personal River of Fire – into the arms of inspired creation.

I could not have written it with cold blood, but thankfully I did not have to. So when you read it, please see it for what it is – an exercise in poetry as much as philosophical discussion.

Now – what next? I really cannot predict what I’ll do once I get back from my adventures (or what I hope amount to adventures), and I’ll be very busy with my studies as soon as I get back. But I’m sure that wherever the creative impulse leads me, you’ll read about it right here.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Wyrd, Runa, and the Beauty of Ignorance

I had another really beautiful, intense and long-drawn possession experience with Woden today, this one totally unplanned and spontaneous. Sometimes I call… sometimes he just turns up.

I cannot say anything about it (because there are some things that I just can’t stick on the Internet for everyone to read). But I can talk about how I’ve reacted to it.

I feel as if the course of my life is reflected in the image of an archaeologist lovingly brushing dust from an ancient relic. When I was born I was buried in the earth. At some point I was dug up. Now the process of carefully cleaning me off begins. Next will be detailed documentation and theorising about my significance and meaning.

Right now it feels like everything that has happened in my life was meant to be according to a hidden logic and significance that I cannot comprehend. I am woven so integrally into wyrd. Of course, everything and everyone is.

I’ve been reading a bit about Leibniz’s philosophy lately, his idea that this world is exactly how it is meant to be. Voltaire might have mocked Leibniz, but I think I might be able to understand what he was saying. Not the best of all possible worlds in any obvious sense we can grasp… but definitely meant to be just how it is.

To ask it to be other than what it is means being world-denying and… well, unHeathen. Just a thought, no need to turn that into rigid doctrine (unless you feel like experimenting with dogmatism to see what it is like [some chaos magicians come up with the most brilliant little psycho-magical experiments]).

If each of us is on a unique trajectory through time then perhaps, well, I cannot complete the thought.

As a Heathen I am both a determinist and a believer in free will. The division between these two is false and built on ill-conceived ideologies; it reposes in an ultimately Christian abstraction, and even hard determinists are thoroughly determined by Christianity in their views.

So here we are, webbed in wyrd, hurtling through time simultaneously under our own power and completely involuntarily as well. Making decisions, responding to the shifting weave of the Norns as best we can. Once things have occurred it is retroactively true that they could never have been otherwise.

But before they occur – well there’s a whole lot of possibility for the oscillations of our agency to come to bear. Free choice is only determined once it is fixed through the hand of time.

We know Urd, the past (though the past constantly changes in meaning as it expands and is never truly fixed despite the illusion of its certain solidity).

We are in Verdandi, the present that stretches forth and most certainly is not fleeting or momentary. Heidegger was right on that one – he was paying attention. St Augustine, on the other hand, really had no idea.

Skuld, the future, is a debt that, sure, we’ll pay, but never just yet. We’re always going to pay or else we’ve already paid but you can never catch any of us handing over a wad of cash to the time bank. And even after the big cosmic foreclosure at Ragnarok things will keep going – you just watch!

So yeah, right now I ride the chariot of trust and calm. Everything is unfolding in just the right way. That isn’t the same as pretending that the world is perfect or that I and others don’t suffer all kinds of wounds or that struggle isn’t both necessary and worthwhile.

But right now I can affirm it all. Not, as Nietzsche demands, that I force myself to see the whole past as an act of my will (as though I could ever have even conceived of all this, let alone willed it!)

Rather, I affirm it all as the veil of Runa – of mystery – which I can never penetrate. Nor can any finite human being. I affirm the beauty of the horizon of Verdandi which escapes me no matter how fast I run towards it.

This is why I ultimately have so many grumpy things to say about the approach to magic typified by the ‘step by step’ logical, linear curriculum that groups like the Rune Gild espouse.

Reality is so much more complex and so much richer than that! Think of all the opportunities you miss out while you dally with you regular rigid practice of galdor, stadha, “rune thinking” and all the rest of it.

While you’re off “constructing” your Wode-Self as Mr Thorsson recommends you are missing out on the real Woden coming and showing you that a) it already exists and b) its way beyond anything you could have created anyway.

We aren’t creating from the force of our ego wills; we’re just brushing the mud off our golden forms so that we can shine with the light that falls upon us from the sun and the moon and the torch of human community (Kenaz, folks, Kenaz).

Yet ironically I worked through all that stuff for years when I was in the Gild and to carry my current train of thought to its conclusion, even that time spent doing “magical training” I now consider nearly worthless was crucial, just as crucial to my evolution as my beloved Jan Fries-style Seidh with all its serendipitous riches.

Sure, the latter is inspiring, beautiful, profound and actually helps you embrace magic and mystery. But for it to be the oasis that it is to me – well, I had to stumble through the desert of ego magic teachings and all that other rigid spoon-feeder magic rubbish first.

(The Gild say they’re against spoon feeding, yet the Gild curriculum is exactly that, an all-too-human crutch and distraction from the magic going on everywhere around the “aspiring Runester” … even if I must confess I profited from the rigid practice of getting my chanting in every day, meditating on the rune poems, etc, etc and owe the Gild a big debt of thanks).

So right now I know that I cannot and never will pierce the illusion, that the way things are unfolding for me is way weirder and more magical than anything I could ever have consciously constructed or conceived, and even my exposure to stodgy ego magic rubbish contributed to that (so maybe its good that such philosophies exist after all and I should be a little more circumspect when I grouch about them… aww, but grouching just feels so good).

And yet I have pierced the illusion at various times and will again. This is also true. Folks, two contradictory statements can be true at the same time; Aristotle was wrong (though, and here’s the kicker, for consistency’s sake I will also say that Aristotle was right).

Well anyway, things are unfolding and I’m in the eye of the storm and always have been and we all have because we’re all on our trajectories and maybe it will take one lifetime or maybe billions of years, I really don’t know if or how that reincarnation gig works, but right now I’m in the heart of marvelling at how ignorant I am and how beautiful the universe is and folks, this is the place to be. Or really, wherever you happen to be right now is the place. Or whatever. You get the idea (or not).

And tomorrow I’ll forget and I stumble back to my fears, frustrations, quirks, my amnesia, my all too human tendency to forget Mimir’s well in favour of disconnected distraction.

That’s ok too.

We forget the big picture so that we can have the pleasure of remembering it again and again, over and over. Endings are great because they guarantee new beginnings and beginnings are great because once something starts it has to stop.

And every time you come back to Mimir’s wisdom, well, I’d like to think you crawl a little closer to wherever.

What is the ultimate point and purpose of existence? I have no idea. I feel so strongly that my life is unfolding exactly in the way it is supposed to, but that doesn’t mean I have even a shred of a clue. “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment” said Rumi – I reckon he and Odin would have gotten on something fierce.

Socrates was the wisest of all the Greeks because he at least knew he was ignorant. Somebody remind me to toast that old gadfly next time I’m at sumbel, please?

What is the meaning of the question of Being? Asked Martin Heidegger. Being is Mystery/Runa – this is my answer. We are skating on the ever changing skin of the Well of Memory that feeds the world tree.

If Heathenism really says that there is no sin, no fallen-from-grace-ness, no world-as-bastardised-image-of-God’s-wisdom – well then we might as well start loving the vast cosmic question mark that escapes and entices our every rising breath.

Because that’s all there is, the question is the answer, or might be, or probably isn’t, or…. Well, you get the idea (or you might, or might not or… [yes this can regress infinitely, another secret there! {I just added this layer of parentheses to be a smart ass – or did I?}]).

Hail Chaos! Viva Loki! Aum Wotan!

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Fehu Magik

So it has been a while, a lot has changed within.

I am not one for big words or essays but I have been told that I should share some of my experiences with Elhaz readers.

Here is one that has worked really well for me.

A little history to see the need for this magik:

I own my own business and for a while there we were doing it tough so I decided to do a little Fehu magic.

Nothing from a book just straight from the heart. No pre planing just a dark night and a sword.

On my property I have made a 7 foot Elhaz surrounded by 5-10 kg stones carved in runes that sit next to a dam.

After a silent meditation I began chanting Fehu.

Picking up the Fehu stone I slammed it against my head 5 or 6 times until I felt the blood flow.

With each blow my eyes were blinded by a piercing light as though lightning was striking through my body.

Feeling such rage I grabbed my sword along the blade and carved a Fehu rune over my face pushing the point so it felt as I was cutting my skull.

Once I had done this I started dragging the point of my blade down my forearms until slipped into a quiet trance. Where I stayed for how long I do not know.

The results of this outburst of emotion and rage were amazing. At the time work was very quite and things where looking pretty grim. I felt as though the stability for my family was under threat. The thought of failing my children was ever present.

Three days after the Fehu magik work came flooding in to the point I was working 16 hr days to keep up.

I have been able to move my business out of the city and closer to home, saving $70k a year in rent.

I was expecting to lose some client due to the distance I moved but instead we are gaining new clients on a daily basis.

I feel that it is the connection and the power you apply to your magik that makes it work not what someone else tells you is right.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Seidh, Odin, Frey

I’ve not been well. I had my wisdom teeth out last week. In the last few months I’ve struggled with two flu viruses and some mind-blowing hay fever (I’ve never been physically incapacitated by allergy in anything like this kind of way before).

Not only that, my creative flow has been blocked these last few weeks. Among other things this has been impairing my ability to get my university coursework done. Not good when you have short deadlines and vast acres of work! Words have just been escaping me.

My only solace has been my improving physical fitness, though mouth surgery induced laziness for this past week has cut back into that again. Perhaps today I will clamber back on board the bodyweight bandwagon.

Recovering from wisdom teeth removal is not fun. Worst is not the pain, the inability to eat, the bleeding, or even the ridiculous swollen cheeks. It’s the abject boredom and isolation.

Until yesterday I had not been outside since I got home from the surgery last Tuesday. Almost a week indoors will send even a dedicated introvert such as myself into paroxysms. I even managed to bore myself with computer games, which once were my arch-nemesis in the realm of addiction!

Knowing that I’ve been sailing through dark corridors of ill health and misery in the last, say, three weeks especially, I resolved a few days ago to go on a journey, to fare forth, and see what I could see.

As a general comment on this aspect of seidh – for me faring forth is very different to what I more generally consider to be my style of seidh (and I will describe a lovely example of the latter later in this post). It’s more introspective, calm and hazy.

Sometimes when I’m doing it I question if I’m just having myself on if my focus is week or I am unable to detach my ego from the process. With my more natural style of seidh, well, once I get there there’s no doubting.

There are lots of sophisticated thinkers about faring forth in modern Heathenry (read the backlog of posts on the Seidh Yahoo E-List to see what I mean). I however lack such subtlety. I just do it.

I don’t have a working knowledge of the distinctions between the various old terms for this sort of magic, I haven’t built my practice out of precise reconstruction (though obviously I am informed about the limited evidence available and less obviously I don’t tend to willy-nilly mix in ideas from other traditions with my faring forth work).

Anyway, so I am lying in bed, in various degrees of pain (who knew that removing teeth at the back of your mouth could make every tooth in your jaw scream with agony?) And I guess that maked it easier to abandon the ship of my body and dive into the deep blue sea of projected consciousness.

I find myself in a valley shrouded by thick grey mist. The earth is barren; it’s like I’m in an abandoned World War I battlefield before dawn. Woden has come to guide me; I see his cloaked form flitting in and out of vision, luring me along dry riverbeds. And I follow his almost spectral form.

Until I come to a cave. When the river still lived it must have here flowed underground, but now there is only dust and frost to line its floor. I shrug and enter and a strange silver luminescence in the air creates just enough light that I can make my way through the crags and shadows.

I’ve no idea where Odin is at this point – perhaps he has seen out his role as my psychopomp for this journey. Seated on a rocky outcrop, however, is a woman. She is dressed in rotting finery and a tarnished crown rests on her brow. And she is a contradiction to behold.

One half of her face, her hair, her arm – I assume her whole body – is young, pale, the perfect frigid ice-maiden beautiful bitch archetype. The other half is rotten, shrunken, shrivelled and foul. This is Helja and I know now that I am in Niflhel.

Here comes the strange thing – I cannot recall anything detailed of my conversation with Helja. I know that she is cajoling, manipulative, abusive and arch. I recall her trying to bargain with me to cure me of my ailments and my loss of spirit.

But I also recall the deals she offers are just ridiculous. I would have to offer her more than I would gain in return. No point in that!

Why did Odin lead me here? I’m not sure, but perhaps it is to give me some perspective. Maybe it’s to show me how much I take for granted. Helja and I reach an impasse and I find myself leaving the way I came, trudging through the cold and lifeless mists. I clamber up an embankment and find myself back in my room with my pain-filled mouth.

And Frey is there with me. And he is frowning. And he says to me “you know, you’re not supposed to be pursuing me as you have. It’s not good for you. You are not made to accept my gifts. There is only one who is right for you, and he is a god of wolves, not boars”. (c.f. for example this post).

(Well he didn’t say it exactly like that, but you get the drift. Sometimes I admit I polish the words that divine beings say to me when I write these journal entries. Hey, they were off the cuff, we can’t all spontaneously speak like a character on Shakespeare’s stage! Arguably Herodotus’ History is more truthfull for its fabrications).

And then he was gone. And he was right. I’ve been trying to stretch myself between the infinitely uncertain, variable, chaotic and disastrous hedge-sitting of my patron, Woden; and the vast, bountiful, fertile, stable and overwhelming hedge-sitting of Frey. I’ve been ogling that green, green grass just over the religious fence. And it’s been costing me.

I tried to call Woden then, but it just wouldn’t happen. Just no luck for me there. I realise I’ve been messing up our relationship by trying to force a relationship with another god. I realise that I just don’t really Know or understand Frey – especially when I consider the intimacy of my relationship with Woden.

It kind of reminds me of how I felt around the time I quit the Rune Gild – it’s getting close to 10 years ago! I just felt that for all the discipline of their practices, all their philosophy, all the rest of it – well, they just weren’t helping me forge any kind of personal or emotional relationship to runes or to Odin.

How can you emulate someone who is a stranger to you? My solution then was that I had to chuck out all thr intellectualism in order to find the seething wode. Anyway, enough of that digression, the point is clear to me – I don’t have the faintest idea how to forge such a connection to Frey, whereas instinct easily showed me the way to Woden.

Ok, so these faring forth experiences made me decide to perform a ritual to Odin. I needed to mend our fences, repair the channels that run between us. So last night I did it.

I arranged to have an audience of one, because the vulnerability of an audience helps with ritual as a performance. You are forced to either go there or not at all. I prepared offerings of beer, organic butter, organic sea salt, water, fire (from the candle Volksfreund and I used on our necromantic adventure), garlic, ginger and tissues soaked with my blood.

I set the atmosphere by putting on some ambient Odinnic music of my own (which, gods willing, should eventually see release [yes gods, that’s a hint!]) I opened the ritual by singing the singular rune Ansuz, getting progressively louder and more aggressive until I was purely screeching and screaming my guts out.

I also banged a hammer and my wooden “Daoist priest” sword (see again the necromancy posts on my journal) and used these rhythms to build the intensity of the moment.

Then I called Woden in all his dark aspects, as god of bloodshed, war, hate, fear, betrayal, violence, destruction and all that fun stuff. Then called him as god of poetry, song, sex, wisdom, hospitality, healing and all of that fun stuff.

I called him by many of his old names.. and a few new ones spilled from my lips too, like Elric of Melnibone, and The Raven King, and Saint Nick, and even Satan (who Goethe describes as blue cloaked, one eyed and raven-friendly in Faust, after all!) Yes folks, warning: Chaos Heathen At Work.

While all this was happening I was involuntarily writhing, staggering, thrashing, shuddering, shaking – “real” seidh, at least as I experience it as a Jan Fries-loving seidhmadr. My body was plunging into wild paroxysms of its own, my consciousness going right on with it.

Until I calmed a little. Then I just called “Woden” quite softly over and over. A most tremendous sensation, like stable lightning bolts, spread through my scalp and from my hands up my arms. It spilled down over my brow like a helm – I wonder if this was one meaning of “Helm of Awe”.

It’s very rare for me to get such a dramatic energetic and physiological response from my possession work. Such experiences are so beyond my ego and the domain of its power and they’re so reassuring, healing and humbling. I cried a little with joy that my patron would impose himself on me so strongly that I would feel it right there in my nervous system.

And then I was his.

I won’t say to much about what happened because it’s all very vague, but he accepted the gifts and gave my audience a bit of a freak out. My cat didn’t recognise me when He was in charge and avoided us. I changed in appearance. Things were made good between us. The rift, healed.

He cast some runes for me too – funnily the first rune to come out was Ansuz, His rune! And they portended lovely things – healing, positive change, hard work rewarded, blockages destroyed.

And – well, that is all I really want to say, except that I am feeling vastly better today, though still taking it easily and carefully. None of this is at all intended as a disrespect to Frey, either – it’s just that you’ve got to go with the course of the river you are.

I was made for Woden it seems, and while his inconsistencies and chaos sometimes cause me fear or frustration – well I have to accept it. The other option is slow withering.

He said something, I vaguely recall, about an irony of my personality. Namely that I give myself an awful hard time for not being perfect (and therefore a better agent for him.) Yet my imperfections arise because Woden is himself imperfect, and thus make me closer to him in nature. I love irony.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

What is Berserkergangr?

The Streetfighter

It didn’t take long before we were piling out of their car and heading into what I had always considered one of the mellowest pool halls I’d ever been in. (You can get an idea of what I was used to if I considered a pool hall mellow.) In short order we had a table and a pitcher and had settled down to the sort of trivial chatter that seemed so deep at the time. I’d noticed a couple of crusty types a few tables over who were giving me the hairy eyeball, but since they were about 10 years older than me I shrugged them off. All in all we were having a good, relaxed time.

I was leaning over to take a diagonal cross table shot and had paused in position to exchange banter with the girls. Returning my attention to the table, I was purposely ignoring one of their snide (but accurate) summations of my skills as a pool player when I heard her break off mid sentence. I looked back over my shoulder to see one of the crusties had walked up right next to me without me n oticing.

“What kind of knife is that?” he asked flatly, referring to the dagger on my belt.

“A Holden dagger,” I replied, starting to straighten up. A lot of people mistook it for a Nazi dagger, but it had been around a long time before (as in Viking times long time before) the Goose Stepping Brigade had stuck a backward swastika on it. My time in college was still a few years down the line, but even then I had a thing for history. Still, I’d jammed with a few folks over the knife who thought it meant I was a Nazi despite my dark hair and skin.

Without warning he whipped his right arm and I heard the snap of a buck knife opening. I saw the flash of stainless steel reflect wickedly over the green felt top of the pool table, and I knew I had better do something fucking quick.

Before he could bring his hand back from his overly wide and dramatic opening, I dropped the pool cue and lunged forward, my left hand grabbing his wrist and my right dropping down somewhere around his belt buckle.

With a loud “DON’T,” I heaved him up and slammed him down onto the pool table. Now don’t ask me how I managed the next few dribbles, as I really don’t have any idea except that it’s incredible what your adrenal glands can talk you into when someone pulls out a knife. I distinctly remember bouncing the guy three more times. He dropped the knife on bounce number three, but I must have thrown one or two more in there just to make sure. When he came to a rest, his arm was outstretched over his head and the knife was way down near his chest, so something must have happened that I don’t remember or I just didn’t notice. Anyway, he wasn’t going anywhere quick.

I whirled around to face his buddy, who had already decided that they had made a serious mistake and was backpedaling with wide eyes and hands held out in front of him. I saw a flash out of the corner of my eye as the bartender came barreling into view holding something down near his leg that I really didn’t want to know about…

The bartender looked at me and said, “You didn’t start it. You can stay.”

I thanked him, but told him I’d be leaving as soon as I hit the head. You don’t hang around places like that after a fight in case the suckers backed up on you with some serious firepower. I swaggered to the bathroom and locked the door. About a second later I was bent over the toilet barfing my guts out from adrenaline and fear. Once I’d washed up, we scurried out the back door to the car and got the hell out of there.

From A Professional’s Guide to Ending Violence Quickly by Marc “Animal” MacYoung

The Cop

Consider also Officer Stacy Lim from the Los Angeles Police Department, whose story is legendary among professional police warriors. It began when she pulled into her driveway after an enjoyable evening of softball practice. When Lim got out of her personal car, she was immediately confronted by a group of gangbangers who had followed her with the intent of carjacking her vehicle.

Her first response was to call out that she was a police officer. They responded by firing a .357 magnum round into her chest, which penetrated her heart and blew a tennis ball-size exit wound out her back. Stacy Lim stayed in the fight. She not only returned fire, but she also became the aggressor as she pursued the man, shooting him repeatedly. The remaining gangbangers suddenly remembered previous, pressing engagements and very wisely fled for their lives.

After she dealt with her attackers she turned around and headed up her driveway toward her house to call for help. She does not recall doing it, but as she was losing consciousness, she stripped the magazine from her pistol and threw it 20 feet away where it was found the next day. She did this because in the academy she had been taught, “Don’t let them use your weapon against you.”

Her attacker died and Stacy Lim died twice on the operating table. She required 101 pints of blood, but she survived, returning to duty eight months later. Today, she still works uniform patrol on the streets of Los Angeles, and her training philosophy is, “You need to prepare your mind for where your body may have to go.” Do they make them like that anymore?

From On Combat, The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman with Loren W. Christensen

The Berserkers

They prepared and equipped their boats, with twenty men on each. Kveldulf commanded one, and Skallagrim the other. They rowed of in search of the ship, and when they reached the place where it was moored, they put in to shore.

Hallvard and his men had covered the ship with awnings and gone to sleep, but when Kveldulf and his men reached them, the watchmen who had been sitting by the gangway at the prow lept up and called out to the ship, telling the crew to get up because they were about to be attacked. Hallvard and his men rushed for their weapons.

When Kveldulf and his men came to the gangway, they went up it to the stern of the ship, while Skallagrim headed for the prow. Kveldulf had a gigantic, double-bladed axe in his hand. Once he was on board, he told his men to go along the gunwale and cut the awnings from the pegs, while he stormed off back to the aftergaurd, where he is said to have become frenzied like a wild animal. Some other of his men went into a frenzy too, killing everyone they came across, and so did Skallagrim when he ran around the ship. Kveldulf and his son did not stop until the ship had been completely cleared. When Kveldulf went back to the aftergaurd, he wielded his axe and struck Hallvard right through his helmet and head, sinking the weapon in right up to the shaft. Then he tugged it back with such force that he swung Hallvard up into the air and over the side. Skallagrim swept the prow clean and killed Sigtrygg. Many of the crew threw themselves into the water, but Skallagrim’s men took the boat they had come on and rowed over to them, killing everyone in the water.

More than fifty of Hallvard’s men were killed there, and Skallagrim took the ship which had sailed there and all the riches on it.

They captured two or three of the most paltry men, spared their lives and asked them who had been on the ship and what their mission had been. When they found out the truth, they examined the carnage on the ship and had the impression that more of the crew had jumped over the side and lost their lives there than had died on board…

It is said that the people who could take on the character of animals, or went berserk, became so strong in this state that no one was a match for them, but also that just after it wore off they were left weaker than usual. Kveldulf was the same, so that when his frenzy wore off he felt completely exhausted by the effort he had made, and was rendered completely powerless and had to lie down and rest.

From Egil’s Saga, translated by Bernard Scudder

Fight or Flight

According to Lt. Col. Grossman, when confronted with the threat of violence we are limited to four potential options. Fight, flee, posture or submit.

The nature of the human animal is such, however, that we are not very capable when it comes to making these decisions in the heat of the moment. Once the adrenaline starts pumping, your rational cognitive ability drops sharply, so you need to make your decisions about how you would like behave in the face of violence before it happens.

People who have lived in denial about violence, or are unwilling to become violent themselves, are the most likely to simply freeze, submit, become victims and suffer the consequences.

But most people most of the time are not so willing to be pushed around. They’ll attempt to posture and bluff their way out, even if it means some yelling, screaming, pushing and shoving to get there. They typically are still not willing to really hurt anybody, and so if the situation does escalate to an actual fight they’ll resort to non-decisive tactics, designed to cause pain in the hope of scaring their opponent away. Often, a punch to the face is just another bluff in the game of escalato. Against a committed attacker, the pseudo tough-guy will be forced to fold or switch to a more effective option.

The street-smart survivor focuses his strategies primarily on avoidance and escape. He’ll fight like hell to get out of tight corner, but only until he gets enough distance to make a run for it. A true survivor will do absolutely whatever it takes to stay alive.

The warrior is a different breed, because he has chosen to stand and fight when others would fold or flee. The berserker, more than any other warrior, is committed to the principle that offence is the best defense. The berserker attacks without pause, without mercy and with little to no though for his own safety. The berserker is not a “cold blooded killing machine” like your favorite action movie star, but a raving lunatic, a mad dog entirely focused on the destruction of the target in front of him. Ironically, it is his extreme aggression that saves him. Opposing warriors are forced onto the defensive and ordinary mortals trip over each other in the scramble to escape his fury.

Berserkergangr is your natural, primal combat mode. It is a phenomenon that has occurred throughout history and across cultures. Berserkergangr is not therianthropy, though the two appear to be related, and it is not what eastern style martial artists call “no-mind” either. Berserkergangr does not require the use of any drugs or specialized training, though training will certainly help. The capacity to go berserk is something that is within you already.

Adrenaline

The physiological effects of adrenaline and the “fight or flight response” have been scientifically documented. The heart rate becomes elevated in response to stress, and progressive more elevated as the situation becomes ore stressful. Other symptoms of mild to extreme stress may include the loss of fine and complex motor control, diminished cognitive function and loss of higher reasoning, tunnel vision and auditory exclusion. The redirection of all energy resources to the vital organs and large muscle mass can lead to vomiting and loss of bowel and bladder control.

On the up side, brute strength and gross motor function are enhanced. The pain threshold is raised and vasoconstriction decreases blood lost from injuries. A berserker can run faster, jump higher, hit harder and tolerate more damage than anyone could under normal circumstances. Time may appear to speed up, or may go by very slowly. I personally have had several “out of body experiences” while fighting and have once had my conscious mind black out completely while my body went into full-bore attack mode.

In the oriental martial arts, heavy emphasis is usually place on learning to control and minimize the effects of adrenaline through deep breathing techniques. Deep, slow abdominal breathing helps you to calm, ground and center yourself. And this can be effective even in a hard contact sparring match or a low risk physical confrontation. I personally find it hard to believe, though, that anyone can remain calm, grounded and centered while facing down single, knife-wielding crackhead, much less a trained medieval army.

It seems to me that the correct strategy for the berserker warrior is not to fight against his own nature, but rather to embrace the madness. Accept the adrenaline rush. Take it and run with it. Plan your tactics to exploit the strengths of the battle-rage, and avoid the weaknesses. Take on the rage and run with it. Charge headlong into immortality.

Hail Chaos! Viva Loki! Aum Wotan!

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

A Rite of Warrior Initiation

EVENING – The warrior candidates assemble and line up in ranks. The nature of the challenge they are about to undertake is explained to them again and they are given one final chance to back out.

BASIC FITNESS ASSESSMENT – The candidates are put through a series of pre-determined physical fitness tests based on military standards: Chin-ups, push-ups, sit-ups and running are included.

SUPPER – After showering and changing, the candidates are given supper, but no mead or ale. They eat with together, but sit apart from the more experienced warriors.

UTISETTA – The candidates assume their individual posts for the night. Each one will stand guard at a designated point, alone and without shelter, until dawn. Needless to say, any candidate caught sleeping will have automatically failed the test.

DAWN – The candidates assemble in ranks at a time chosen to coincide with the rising of the sun. They are again run through a bout of physical fitness testing, this time of a nature not to be disclosed prior to the event.

TRIAL BY COMBAT – Immediately following the mystery fitness challenge, the candidates are paired up to fight. They will compete for the right to call themselves warriors in three rounds of wrestling, followed by three rounds of boxing, followed by three rounds of stick-fighting.

In these tests, the judges favor valor over skill.

BREAKFAST – After a chance to shower and change, the candidates are treated to a breakfast of ham, eggs, mead and cool water. This time they eat with the warriors. After breakfast, the candidates are permitted to retire to their beds.

EVENING – After the candidates have rested and the warriors have had a chance to confer, all assemble. The candidates are critiqued on their performance, praised for their accomplishments and informed of their success or failure in the test. Then, they are reunited with the tribe for a grand feast and sumbel at which each new warrior is sprinkled with ale, awarded the symbols of their new rank and welcomed wholeheartedly into the warrior pack.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Storytelling as the Weaving of the Self

We moderns have nothing whatsoever of our own; only by replenishing and cramming ourselves with the ages, customs, arts, philosophies, religions, discoveries of others do we become anything worthy of notice.
Friederich Nietzsche

Exit all legends, enter the laws of magick.
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

“You got no love in your heart. When you got no dreaming, no story, you got nothing”, an Aborigine says to the hero in a movie called ‘Australia’ (the movie is crap, but I’m used to look for gold in shit). The aborigines have a very mysterious concept that they call dream time, this is the mythical & magical time, where the ancestors still live & sing and every thing has a ‘song’ attached to it: rocks, trees, bushes asf. – all have a ‘song’. And the initiated sorcerer of the Australian natives can communicate with these ‘things’ by singing their songs (a form of verbal magic, in Norse magic represented by Galdor). Here we are once again confronted with the holistic vision of a sacred landscape, where everything is interconnected & alive – a worldview that was also common to our European ancestors (or wherever your ancestors come from). This vision is contrary to the modern myths created by the visions of Descartes & ‘Newton’s sleep‘ (William Blake). Both of them had literally visions. Descartes’ thinking has been influenced, for example, by his dreams & Newton has been an occultist, who has received his vision of the mechanistic ‘clockwork universe’ from an ‘Angel’ of the Enochian system of magick ‘invented’ by Dr. John Dee.

Their visions are the stories about the universe we are brought up with. (If you have really bad karma you have been brought up with Kristjan stories about the universe :-). They do not stem from dream time, but from the modern myth of linear time. (‘Our enemies are material. Our enemies are direction and fact. Our enemies are Because.’ GP-O)

Anyway, what really strikes me is the idea how much power a story has over our lives and that – since nobody owes the absolute truth, if such a mysterious thing exists at all – all religions, philosophies, myths, histories, fictions and movies are essentially stories, stories we tell ourselves or that are told to us. Of course, this is a postmodern attitude that I am extremely wary of as it includes the risk of fundamentalist relativism and an ‘epistemological hypochondria’ (Geertz), where ‘anything goes’ and thus real knowledge becomes impossible anymore. But everything has two faces and there are also great advantages, when one uses POMO thought in a critical & self-conscious fashion.

“Post-modern research … embodies a critique of the conventional logical positivist discourse derived from rationalist Enlightenment philosophy, which privileges the European, male, individual subject and the indisputable authority of scientific explanatory frameworks.” (Robert J. Wallis 2003: Shamans/Neo-Shamans: Ecstasies, Alternative Archaeologies and Contemporary Pagans, p. 2).

I think this critique is a necessary step, if one really wants to understand the local knowledge of a native people, like the Aboriginal tradition (or our Heathen tradition). This means, too, that to select carefully a few essential tenets of postmodern philosophy can bring about changes in attitudes, values, perceptions, and worldviews that help us to heal the wounds between ‘whites’ and the peoples we have hurt (see Henry’s article Culture, Genocide and Whingers). More generally speaking, such a ‘paradaigm shift’ on a grand scale can help us to heal the wounds between humanity and the Earth Spirit (Anima Mundi).

Further, the positive effects of postmodernism can be, if used wisely, that we deny to follow ‘universal rules’ (of life, art, philosophy, or anything else). And those who have the will and determination can choose pathways to individual fulfilment & self-empowerment based on the story (‘paradigm’) chosen or created by themselves, instead of following the universal appeal or supposed authority of a story they were told to believe (be it religious metaphysics or scientific materialism, or whatever your favourite mental prison is). If something feels internally authentic & right, it’s the way to go. For us Chaos Heathens / Pagans this attitude makes it possible to liberate us to return to the trú traditions of our ancestors in new, exciting, and creative ways, in ways that adapt and apply the ancient wisdom to the circumstances and the Need – in the sense of :ᚾ: – of our times.

However, to me storytelling is a form of magick and a form of knowledge. Imagine a tribe 10,000 years ago in a dark forest at night. You can hear the wolves howl, and you hear the strange sounds of other dangerous animals, above you the stars and a full moon. Only a little bonfire enlightens the night and you sit there in a circle with your comrades, the shaman of your tribe – a miraculous man with special powers, who is treated with awe by all men of the tribe – sits with you there and tells wyrd stories of cosmic, uncontrollable and daunting forces, of Fire and Ice generating the events that created the universe. He tells you about Ymir, the bipolar Giant, dismembered by the mighty Gods, Odhinn (Master of Ecstasy), Vili (Sacred Will) & Vé (Hollowed Space), who made order (Futhark) out of the totality of existence (Ginnung) and shaped the first man & woman, Askr and Embla, out of trees (!), giving them the triple Gift (Gebo) of human shape (Lík), life-breath (Önd = Prana, Chi, Libido) and (divine) consciousness (Ódhr). His stories tell you about the adventurous journeys and brave deeds of heroes that are your direct ancestors, whom maybe your dead great-grandfather met personally, when he was a child. These journeys of those heroes turn into ordeals & initiations, where they gain insights into the mysteries and cycles of birth, life, death & rebirth. These stories are strange allegories that illumine your understanding of the world surrounding you. They give you heroic models of behaviour that help you to live in an honourable way. Our shaman from 10,000 years ago is a storyteller. He creates a sense of self, of who and where you are. He gives codes of meaning & an intelligence to your life that makes you aware of the interconnectedness that the Web (Wyrd) woven by the Three Norns originates. Magick is possible here – you are not alone, disconnected and alienated from the world!

But 10,000 years later these stories of old are not told to us anymore. They became myths in a negative sense, fantasies of stupid, uneducated, brutish barbarians. The modern stories describe such states of consciousness (as mentioned above) as being ‘primitive’, ‘infantile’ and ‘wishful thinking’. They are something that must be ‘overcome’ by logical & scientific thinking. The French ethnologist Lévy-Bruhl interprets such a healing and wholesome state of unitary consciousness in a negative sense as participation mystique and the Austrian psychoanalyst Freud called this ‘magical thinking’ (based on his idea of primary narcissism). ‘Magical thinking’ is the belief that a person can impact reality by wishing or willpower. Such a belief demonstrates a belief in the self as powerful and able to change external realities. To put it shortly, magical thinking is in many ways what I strive for! For many years now, I try to decondition myself from this vision of ‘flatland’ logic by psychedelic drugs, meditation and magick (more or less successfully until now :-). Though in the long run POMO thinking is not at all ‘magic-friendly’ and, though the whole POMO current has created in many areas a body of knowledge of rather dubious value, I still believe that on a philosophical level some POMO ideas are useful to regain ‘magical thinking’ in a positive, ‘enlightened’ way, namely by creating new stories. Don’t get me wrong, science is invaluable! But the scientific story – if not balanced by wisdom, if not shown where its authority ends, and if not shown where it failed (!) – has not much (interesting) to say about the most important questions of life: What is the purpose of life? What happens after death? What is wisdom? Or, if I may quote again my ‘Aboriginal friend’ (from Hollywood:-), his answer to science would be the same as to the white man: “You got no love in your heart. When you got no dreaming, no story, you got nothing”. This is not completely true, of course. Science has a story: it dreams of ‘eternal progress’ and a condition where all disease, probably even death, is cured. For those who haven’t been so optimistic, it has created nihilism. And what is the story of nihilism? It goes: “The story is pointless. It all makes no sense. End of story.” But we Need a story. A brighter story, a greater story, a hopeful story!

But what can a story do on an individual level? Isn’t a story just a story? Well, yes and no. For example, what is the ego? From a meditative point of view, my ego is just the stories I tell myself about myself. But some stories are charged with a very high emotive energy. So, before my ego would give up its ‘core’ stories, it would probably run mad & defend them from extinction like a religious fundamentalist would protect his belief in God, just because the ego consists of these stories. Probably that’s why it’s so hard to ‘Cross the Abyss’, as Crowley has put it. Probably that’s why most humans fear death! Probably that’s why it’s hard to change at all! Because, you know, ‘that’s just the way I am!’, so I won’t give up this-or-that habit or such-and-such a way of thinking or repetitive emotional pattern, even if it’s bad for ‘me’. Because ‘that’s me’! You get the picture… The ego will all-ways convince you with its stories, why you shouldn’t change, why meditating is boring, or why you have the right to behave angry, feel depressed or be xenophobic. So, in a fundamental way, it’s of great importance what story dominates you, what story you tell yourself about yourself. This, probably, is the reason, why meditative systems of the East have only little use for ‘developing a strong personality’ etc. and focus very much on developing ‘egolessness’, developing equanimity towards life, pain & death and fostering devotion towards the God/dess or the guru, who represents the God/dess and, ideally, works as a ‘mirror’ for the apprentice. Our Northern Tradition fosters instead the development of a strong Hamingja (cp. Sweyn’s True Helm) and of courage towards life, pain and death (cp. Dave Lee’s Bright from the Well: Northern Tales in the Modern World).

On a more profane level just consider what psychotherapy basically does to people. It just gives them a story, a meta-narrative, that makes sense out of all the shit that went wrong and by explaining why this shit has led the individual to feel ‘so-and-so’ about himself. By giving sense to that which seems senseless, by explaining the pain and giving it a meaning, and by telling the person that s/he is not defined by its past and that s/he can now choose to do better. Basically, it creates a better story and thus a better ‘self’ – the stories, of which the ego consits, are changed! (‘Change all memory. And change your ways to perceive.’ TOPY proverb) In a way, the therapist is a modern echo of the storyteller, as is, of course, the priest. But finally that’s not enough, because today, if you are a genuine member of the holiest of all holy orders, the COT (= Club Of Truth-seekers :-), the truth of someone else won’t suffice. The shamanic storyteller from 10,000 years ago is dead and gone. The only one who can ‘replace’ him today is not a politician, priest, psychotherapist or some self-proclaimed guru, but it is you. 

Remember You Are Made Of Star Dust

So creating your own story is a good starting point. The chaos magician Andrieh Vitimus suggests:

“The imagination is more powerful than merely the facts. An idea backed by emotional responses can be seductive enough to enslave many to its cause, whether the idea is a spirit, a piece of art, a cause, or a concept. The majority of people seem content to give away their imagination and creative power. Often, this manifests in letting other forces (advertising, religion, ideas, spirits, whatever) decide what they should do and what they can have and be. This is the power of imagination. It can free us or be our worst prison.” (Andrieh Vitimus 2009: Hands-On Chaos Magic , p. 365, my accentuation)

In days of yore Imagination was a natural part of daily life and regarded as valid as any other human faculty. Walliam Blake, whose Poetic Genius has created a unique poetry (see ‘The Proverbs of Hell’), embraced Imagination as ‘the Body of God’. Today our Imagination, our visualising asf., is ‘stolen’ by the story-sellers, who created the ‘Body of (Pavlov’s) Dog‘.  Advertising is a good example. It sells ‘imagination’. So you buy the ‘myth’ surrounding the package, not the content itself. You don’t buy a perfume, but the ‘imagination’ that it makes you more erotic, attractive, seductive asf. Today we have no genuine storyteller except, probably, the artist. For example, artists who sing about the way they experience truth, like this one: “Waking sleep, cocooned within a veil of fog, Sight no further than my hand, Tearing at this web spun through reality … Through the sacred dance I Awaken, Through faith in myself and my rhythm, Conscious for the first time…” (Ironwood – here’s a fantastic German review). But today such artists are rare. Because in these modern days even the artist has become a whore of capitalism and thus he turned from a genuine storyteller to a storyseller – a faker, a peacock, a good-for-nothing. Mehr Schein als Sein (‘More Appearance than Being’). And stories they sell, packaged in a ‘consumer-friendly’ form, devoid of meaning and any real depth. A true storyteller, shaman & madman, Jhonn Balance (now dead dead dead – may he be blessed by all horned animals!), has warned our culture by proclaiming that Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil! The German artist and shaman (of sorts), Joseph Beuys, has said once: Every human is an artist. I would like to add: …and a storyteller. At least s/he should be. POMO theory started out when it proclaimed that there is no ‘grand narrative’ anymore (that the ‘scientific myth’ of modernity of eternal progress & secularization has kind of come to an end – that’s why post-modern). So, after Nietztsche proclaimed that ‘God is dead’, now the ‘grand narrative’ is dead, too. But I believe that we, as individuals and as a folk, need a narrative again, a story. And, in this globalized world, we need also a story for the earth community – a story that makes us aware of the interconnectedness of everything on this green-blue and fragile planet. Because when I poison the air over here in Europe, your air will be finally poised over there in Australia, too. So what could this story be about? Well, I’m not wise enough to answer this question, but we can silence our minds and listen to what the voice of our hearts has to say (what our ancestors called ‘High Rede’). And surely we can look with confidence to the wisdom of our ancestors and apply it. If the climate catastrophe shall be anticipated in time, science must be part of the solution, I believe. As the Permaculture slogan goes: ‘The problem is the solution.’ Mid-gard – Middle-Earth must be guarded, and it can only be guarded by us humans.


Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Baum Und Teufel

1. The Devil Is A Jerk

So if everything is one, a single manifold consciousness of pure benevolent love, a single infinitely recursive web of time, causality and spirit, well that’s pretty good, right? Sure there is death and destruction, but change is a gift: from fallow fields rise fertile crops. And, luckily, from fertile crops fall fallow fields.

It works in both microcosm and macrocosm. The totality of Being is a vast interconnected tree, water coursing up from the wells at its foot, spilling from its branches, back down again – thus time unfolds ecologically, spraying out in simultaneous yet mutually exclusive patterns of probability. Everything is and is not.

Likewise, down the scale a bit, earth’s weather patterns work like this: an endlessly referential and super-complicated web of matrices which are infinitely predictable after the fact; but utterly mysterious when viewed from the eternal crest of the present horizon.

Because of the absolutely uniqueness of every abstracted moment in the matrix we find that the whole system is simultaneously perfect/ideal and imperfect/debased. In the absolute individuality of each moment and phenomenon (which is derived from the absolute dissolving interconnecting oneness of the whole system) consciousness emerges.

Every cloud is spirit; every drop of rain a quicksilver thought in the mind of God (or whatever you choose to call Him/Her/It).

So it goes – fractal geometry replicates down and up infinitely from a set of finite premises – a kind of mathematical, cosmic perpetual motion machine. As we approach nothingness or as we approach Being the ratios contract or expand exponentially.

This is why, as Heidegger says, Being conceals itself. The closer we get to the big picture the harder it is to get close to it. This is why he teaches us to stand back and listen and shelter and think and dwell. Only in this way can we come to Being as a whole: by realising we always already start there.

If I understand correctly (which is unlikely), an analogy can be drawn to Einstein’s point about light speed – the closer we get our spaceship to light speed, the harder it will be to get there because of the geometric ratios at play. But if we could start ourselves off faster than light speed (which might possible?) – well, no problem!

Thus we find ourselves in the gorgeous voluptuousness of the oneness and difference of all things. I am every other being that exists by virtue of the fact that every other being is shaped by its relationship to me just as I am shaped by my relationship to every other being.

The preceding sentence can recurse forever, like the two serpents of a Caduceus; like DNA.

Difference and non-identicalness are real but are also the necessary conditions for the absolute non-difference and identicalness of all Being. There is no “synthesis” of these seeming contradictions that can be expressed in a linear logical way. Only poetry does the job. Thus Rumi teaches: “sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment”.

As manifest fragments of cosmic consciousness (can I really say that with a straight face?), human beings lose perspective all the time on the Big Picture. It doesn’t help that modernity tends to efface all the reminders that pre-modern cultures build into daily life, either.

For the old Germanic tribes lineage was important because one’s descent runs back all the way to the Wells at the foot of the Tree. Cut off the connection and you die. Separation is inevitably fatal, even if total dissolution all the time is a bit pointless.

We need to ride the crest of Verdandi, the present: as individual beings which are non-separate from wyrd. Otherwise? Well, otherwise we become parched vessels, cracked and crumbling in the desert of our ignorance and amnesia.

The devil is a jerk.

Why is the devil a jerk?

The devil is a jerk because he is the agent of amnesia. The devil wants you to forget that everything is One. The devil wants you to think that you alone own your existence, your actions, your will. He wants you to thumb your nose to the infinity of creation that you owe your whole existence to.

The devil tells you that you are isolate, absolute, self-created, a source of meaning which manifests ex nihilo – from nothing. The devil says that reality is fundamentally disconnected, discontinuous.

The natural state of being is not the cycle of life-death-rebirth as in the cosmic tree. No, the devil reckons that the natural state of being is kill or be killed. You can be immortal and moreover you should want it and you should want it at the expense of all other beings.

Sure, some weak-kneed apologists for the devil have proposed the notion of enlightened self-interest – namely that if I help people out they’ll help me out. That if I do my bit to make the world a better place I’ll benefit in unpredictable, rich, non-linear ways.

But implicit in this idea is the notion that the rule of Being is the oneness as well as the difference of all things and a real devil-worshipper will have no truck with this.

The devil says that your actions are your own, your ego is the only thing of value, that you can control anything and everything, that allowing things to be what they are (instead of what you will) is weak and contemptible.

Ironically many people under the devil’s sway are unequal to this dare and challenge and become depressed, lost, confused, somnambulant, pathetic, lonely, powerless, numb, etc, etc, etc.

Only by recovering their connectedness to the horizon of Verdandi, the present (which is to say: the horizon of mystery [which is to say, RUNA]) can such folk be healed.

By giving ourselves to the infinity of the unknowable grandeur of Being we are given back to ourselves as finite but unbounded, as individuated and interconnected. Whole, as the old Germanic tribes would say. Heilige. Holy.

The devil does not want this; he wants us to fight our true nature, to use force of will no matter how much it poisons us and those around us and leaves us, ultimately, empty and cauterised. The devil is a jerk.

2. The Devil is a Champ

The sum total of your domain ends at the surface of your skin; at the limit to which your voice is audible; at the limit to which your words can expand; at the limit to which you can use violence to achieve your ends; at the limit to which you can impose order on the infinite chaos of existence.

Sure, give in to chaos. You’ll be torn to utter shreds. How will you cope if you dare to gaze into the infinite reaches of Being? You won’t. Like the cosmic lamb to the cosmic wolf, you’ll be ripped to pieces, bleating like the pathetic domestic beast that you are.

The chaos doesn’t hate you (although it might) and it certainly doesn’t love you. It has no intentions toward you, no will. It is chaos. As soon as you start to talk about it in coherent language you are projecting human (all too human) characteristics onto something so fundamentally alien that you’ll never even begin to understand. Fall silent!

Ahh, but can you endure being enslaved to ignorance of the true nature of things? We flee into the cloying smell of wool and lamb shit, bleating like wimps. This is it folks – this is all the existence you’ve been given, will you squander it like a chump?

God is the Law of utter Chaos, and he lives inside you and is telling you to bow down and shut up and blunder through the meaningless Brownian motion of your existence. You think it means something? You’re ignorant and blind and stupid and even death is too good for you.

Nothing is connected, coincidence is purely random, the stars haven’t been talking to one another since the big bang and meaning is an illusion created by dumb-ass ape-like mammals that are far too convinced of their own importance. Wake up, you bleaters: we will come and go in the blink of the eye from the point of view of Chaos!

Only the brave win. Only the evil, the cruel, the self-obsessed, the masterful, the bloody, the vicious, the conniving. Only those who instinctively steal from the sheep around them, the wolves in sheep’s clothing, will ever get anywhere.

You think there is meaning? Unless you personally made it, it doesn’t exist. ME is the only important bit of the word MEaning. Well, not quite. MEAN is also pretty damn important.

This is not an easy challenge, to do battle as the isolate being you are with the endless tides of ignorance and ultimately of the contemptuous and mediocritising gravity of the Law of Chaos. The Law of Chaos wants you to be small and weak. You must fight it, you, alone against the cosmos. Alone against the cosmos, you, the true hero.

Not a hero for the people, not a saviour, not a healer or helper. But a hero for villains, liars, betrayers, murderers – all those with guts in this world of cowards. You must steal power from everything you encounter, stuff yourself with it, bloat yourself with it, create of yourself such mass that you exert a gravitational pull on the chaos, until your will orders the space around you.

Then the sheep will flock to your cause, your side, to serve, safe in the harbour of will and gravity that your iron-fisted desire has created. The more that flock to your banner, the more powerful your momentum. You are becoming a god.

The Law of Chaos – the ultimate cosmic deity – will try to stop you with misfortune, conflict, struggle. And others like you, other wolves in the land of sheep, will fear and hate you and try to steal from you to feed themselves.

But you love it, you love crushing your foes. You love crushing anything precious, powerful, beautiful, gravitational. Why? Because it feels good. Power is its own end.

The devil teaches the way. Reject the status quo (except the one you seek to forge yourself, of course). Reject the pathetic order that the Law of chaos has bequeathed you.

He leaps forth recklessly, one flickering spark against the entire ocean of chaos, to declare his will and desire and determination and fire. He smashes the illusion of interconnection, which is actually the armature of psychic bondage, which keeps the lambs bleating and stupid.

You don’t worship the devil. Why would you? Then you’d be placing something above yourself. Sure, you might pretend to worship the devil or any other being, but you don’t really.

You don’t worship the devil but you have to respect the old bastard, even if you’d happily destroy him and take his place at any moment. You copy his way of being, his mastery of fear, violence, theft and isolated arrogance. The devil is a champion of your cause, even though you’d happily knife him to get a leg up the ladder of your will.

3. The Devil Needs A Noose (The Devil Is A Noose?)

Secretly you hate mystery (that is, Being [that is, Runa]) because it refuses itself, and you seek to dominate it at every turn. In a way you love its endless new mysteries because this ensures you never run out of territory to conquer.

But the more you conquer, the more you secretly face how vast it is. Ever more desperate, caught in a vicious, inwardly tightening spiral, you lash out.

Mystery is mystery however. Mystery always wins.

Mystery always wins.

Mystery always wins.

Once, in an altered state, I declared:

RUNA, I give myself to you completely. Take me! I’m yours!

Runa responded:

But my dear boy, I already own you and always have. And you are a part of me and always have been. And so you seek to give yourself to myself, sjalf sjalfum mer as dear Yggr declared on his steed, the Tree. You give yourself to me but you always have been part of me. Give yourself to me and you give yourself also to yourself. Give your isolation to me and I will give you a lineage.

That’s what Runa said as she gently laughed at my expense and loved me all the more for it.

Mystery always wins. I have written two stories about the devil. Is the devil a champ or a jerk?

My experience tells me he is a jerk, but I love him anyway. I love his reckless hilarity, his passion and fury. His simultaneous hatred of injustice and perpetuation of injustice. What audacity to be so unevenly even-handed! What courage to tilt at the marvellous cosmic windmill!

If the devil did not make me forget the wonder of Being then I would not get to endlessly re-experience the ecstasy of remembering it again.

Therefore: thank you, Mr Devil, for my dark valleys – they are the necessary condition for my mountain tops and blessed isles, for my eagle and my serpent. If only Nietzsche had possessed the good taste to worship the natural majesty that nourished him without so much as a please or thank you!

But to those who emulate the devil, those provincial misers of spirit, those who never squander themselves as Nietzsche implores us to do, who erect crumbling towers for their empty egos – to these I say: you would settle for so little and think yourselves so rich.

Thus I declare: tie yourself a noose and break on the tree.

On the tree called by men Laerad and gods Yggrdrassil.

On the tree called by some Ash and others Yew.

On the tree that ever is destroyed and ever renewed.

Break on the tree, friends.

Break and become whole.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail