Loki

I am Loki's Love Child

Just kidding! Hope I got your attention, though.

I can’t believe I’ve spilled so little ink (pixels?) on Loki with this little journal. If you’ve been following my writing for long you’ll know what a fool I am for the cheeky bastard. But how did I come to be a Loki lover? I mean, isn’t Loki, like, a BAD DUDE?

Well first of all we need to realise that his role in Norse mythology changes over time. For much of the myths Loki is a troublesome but sympathetic Puck, the partial outsider who initiates chaos but also fixes it in marvellously inventive ways.

Loki saves the gods from all kinds of messes (admittedly sometimes messes he created) and usually in doing so brings them all kinds of advantages. There’d be no Mjollnir, Skidbladnir, Sleipnir or Gungnir if not for Loki’s mischief and ingenuity.

Likewise, without Loki’s excruciating sense of humour the gods would have been thoroughly stomped on by Skadi (surely any myth involving goats and testicles has to be celebrated as a spiritual triumph!)

Not only that but for many adventures Loki and Thor are travel-mates and complement one another very well. The hammer god and the trickster are a perfect combination of character traits when you think about it: either on their own would have a much tougher time negotiating the dangers of Utgard.

And of course Loki and Odin are blood-brothers. Some people can’t understand this but I think they are forgetting that Odin is a lot more complex than just some boring “Our Father who art in Asgard” figure. People, Odin is not Jehovah! He’s a ragged, raging, womanising poet with a mouth filled with mead and veins filled with fire.

Of course Odin’s own ancestry is giantish anyway (like so many of the Aesir actually… this business about giants and gods being implacable foes is a myopic understanding of the mythology).

In fact if you think about it…Thor is the son of Odin and Jord – so he is himself of giant stock! Go on, someone tell me I’m wrong, I dare you!

Not familiar with these stories? Oh come on folks, I’m not going to retell these bloody myths here and now. Suffice to say, there’s plenty of hard mythic evidence to justify our celebration of Loki and his irrepressible spark. Go do some reading and drop a few blinders if you feel like it, too.

Ok, sure, so things go sour with Loki and the Aesir. Then again Ragnarok leads to rebirth and new life, and in a way even this terrible disaster makes ultimately for a brighter world.

I’m not necessarily defending Loki’s actions, but given that whole business with the gods chaining him down and dripping venom on him – well its understandable that he wasn’t a happy boy after that misadventure. Can’t have been much fun for poor Sigyn either, and she didn’t even do anything wrong!

So what about my personal relationship with Loki? You know, it was a gradual, bashful introduction. I got all curious about him, I guess because I myself have a very troublesome, cheeky streak. I like to “question authority” as Mr Leary would have it.

I might live in a glass house (don’t we all) but like Loki I still can’t resist chucking the odd stone or fifty.

That’s part of why we describe Chaos Heathenism as being internally contradictory. We rather figure that every other philosophy or approach to magic and/or Heathenism has its blind spots anyway so we might as well be up front about it. By embracing the attitude of a god of deception we actually end up being more honest. I hope.

I haven’t done it yet this year but usually around March I make an offering to Loki. Invariably he throws all sorts of trouble at me and I have to learn to laugh at my misfortune. On some occasions this has produced a string of events which – just like in the myths – have left me in a much better position for his machinations.

The thing is though – you can’t use Loki. I mean, if I did these offerings with the secret intention of getting something out of it, he’d shaft me for sure. And I wouldn’t blame him either. The motivation has to be one of reverence, respect and laughter. Loki kicks the asses of spiritual misers all day, every day.

I guess I also relate to Loki because I’ve often felt like an outsider, different, weird, strange – and in Germanic mythology he seems to occupy a similar role. At times Loki gives me courage to be myself, to stick it to the stiffs, and I really appreciate that gift.

It’s hard to be me sometimes, just because I don’t seem to play well with others in lots of contexts (though I think often that says more about them than about me). Loki has similar problem.

It isn’t malevolence – it’s just that when you can’t switch off your BS detector you can start to get a bit uppity. As I get older and braver I find it harder to silently choke on my troublesome instincts.

The danger is that this posture turns into an ego trip itself. “I am the great and mighty outsider, and all you sheep are just a bunch of worthless psychic wimps”. How many times have we all heard that little head trip? Sometimes these loonies even manage to accrue followers. Imagine – an army of perfectly uniform ‘individuals’. Classic.

Well I have no desire to be the next Heathen Osho (who seemed to have the spiritual goods even if he also developed a weakness for cult compounds, drugs and dodgy sexual manipulation).

But I still need to be careful because, as you might have noticed, I SOMETIMES FLY OFF THE HANDLE AND SAY STUPID, STUPID THINGS.

Ahh, that’s better. I hope you are getting a flavour for what Loki magic can be like. If you are a little horrified by your own antics then you are on the right track. Just don’t take it too far (except for when you really feel like it).

Loki can teach you a lot about your limitations, and about the limitations of others, if you spend a little time listening to his erratic advice. He can really help those of us who are deeply introverted to bust out and be ourselves.

The hilarious thing is that once you start acting out, you realise most people are too busy navel-gazing to notice you anyway. As Loko psychonauts Beastianity put it: “you’ll screw bars all over your windows and give thanks you don’t live in a prison”. Loki is great at shattering the mental halls of mirrors that we snare ourselves within.

Look, I am anything but an expert in the Loki way. I have so much to learn. I get so damn serious at times, so damn sincere that it hurts. I get really stuck in my little porthole into reality and I become an easy butt for jokes – but thank Loki I have friends willing to stick it to me.

It’s possible that some folks reading this article really might not know what the heck I’m on about. To these I invoke Loki – get out there and have some fun my troublesome friend!

The only way you’ll ever know is by giving Laufey’s son a go. So just call on him with honest passion and curiosity and a little love. He’ll take it from there.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Top Dog & Woki

Ok, so possession is a strange thing. When I think about the image of a berserker triggering a violent trance by biting at a shield, I guess I figure something more primal than the berzerker’s everyday personality is at
play.

You might have heard of a chap called Justice Yeldam, an experimental musician. He attaches microphones to pieces of glass, then manipulates the glass with his mouth. The sounds this creates are pretty wild, and his performances seem to involve a lot of blood.

The funny thing is, he says that despite how gory it all looks, he never really hurts himself very much. He goes into a very altered state and somehow in that state no harm comes to him.

In fact I recently I read an interview with him in which he laughs about the irony of a time when he badly cut his foot in a safe environment after a doing a performance that involved putting broken glass in his mouth for half an hour to no negative effect.

Think that sounds like berzerkergang? You bet, except this chap isn’t killing someone, he’s just putting himself at risk in order to create some very strange art. Which suggests that 1) violence is only one use for a berserk state and 2) berzerkergang has an awful lot in common with seidh.

The physiological science of all this stuff isn’t at all controversial – it has a lot to do with activation of the sympathetic nervous system, which regulates all the bodily functions you can’t consciously control.

In other words, back we go to my good friend and writing partner the unconscious. The Uppsala Berzerkergang article goes into all this stuff in a lot more detail.

This is probably part of why in historical battles it was very helpful to surprise your enemy. While your side has had plenty of time to get itself all riled up and psycho-physically primed for conflict, the other side is still in a more sustainable, everyday, vulnerable conscious state. It is anything but a fair contest.

Of course today warfare seems to be more about having lots of bombs that you can bravely drop on the foe from thousands of miles away.

My reason for recounting all of this is to underline very strongly that there are many, many different shapes in which altered states can manifest, and those shapes are highly plastic. Thus the practices surrounding Heathen battle magic and the practices surrounding modern experimental music produce some comparable psycho-physical changes.

Some folks in modern Heathen argue that we absolutely must reconstruct the archaic practices as closely as possible or else we are somehow letting the Heathen side down. Well I agree that this is a fruitful and inspiring thing to do.

But it is also pretty clear that if we have different (perhaps even more) options available to reach the desired conscious states then that is no bad thing.

It certainly lacks any historical validity for me to use black metal as a consciousness altering tool, but somehow I think my ancestors would approve (at least once their ears recovered from the onslaught).

These comments serve as a pre-amble to the introduction of two possession forms that have entered my life in the last few months – namely Top Dog and Woki.

Top Dog is – well, he is THE dog. Class all the way. People get out of his way in the street when they see him coming. He like sunglasses, expensive alcoholic drinks, walking sticks and snappy clothes. Its hard not to love Top Dog because, damn it, he just loves himself so much!

Top Dog entered my life to help me in promoting my business, since I am naturally an introverted and retiring person (unless I am screaming my guts out on a stage – see above comments about using modern contexts to produce ancient trance states).

Since I am not a typical sunny kind a guy who thinks nothing of telephoning one thousand total strangers a day in the chase for referrals and work, I prefer not to be involved. Top Dog very kindly shadows me when I have to do this sort of thing.

Since Top Dog is undoubtedly THE dog of dogs, the classiest of class, he has no problem in selling us both to potential referral sources. Top Dog used my anxiety about promoting myself as a door to take over the reins – it was that anxiety which put my bodymind into the appropriately receptive state the first time we met.

He is in fact quite subtle in his presence when I am working with him (after all they are ultimately buying my services, not his). But during times of recreation he loves to put on the whole show, dancing, howling and amusing my somewhat dumbfounded wife with his antics.

He also likes walking around the neighbourhood, just so he knows that people have seen him around. And when he wants he can effect a total submersion ofmy ego, whereas usually when gods or spirits ride me I retain some sense of separate identity, watching as it were from the back of my skull.

Don’t tell anyone, but Top Dog seems to me to be an Odinnic identity. In fact, not long before Top Dog arrived on the scene my wife and I both noticed independently in Simek’s Dictionary of Northern Mythology an intriguing Old Norse mythological name which I think is related to Odin – namely Hundalf/Hundulf.

There are debates about how this is translated – Dog-Elf or Dog-Wolf are the most common. I like to think Dog Wolf is the correct meaning – he is so purely Top Dog that one word for canine is not enough, so in Old Norse he gets two! I hope to get more of Top Dog into my life and to put together some really Classy
outfits for him to dress up in. It’s the least I can do in return for the help he gives me!

Oddly, Top Dog also reminds me of the Vodoun deity Baron Samedi, thought the Baron is admittedly a little more macabre than Hundulf is. Clint observed to me recently that there are many odd similarities between Heathenry and Vodoun. Weirder things have happened!

As for Woki – well let’s just say that WOden-loKI is a pretty natural concatenation is it not? But in truth I have had only limited experience with Woki thus far – though I must say that he turns up extremely quickly when invoked. He too is very energetic and a bit of a trouble maker.

I’m not sure how the deities in question arrange for this sort of alchemy to work out but I hope they continue with it. I love it! I also hope they teach me to get better at better at opening into their presence because really the average Odinnic or Loko personality is much more interesting than the average conventional me.

Or to refine that point – the most interesting parts of me get greatly amplified when these beings/patterns/mental states/trances/illusions/truths/insert-your-own-metaphyiscal-term start loitering around my bodymind.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail