I have a few threads I’d like to tie up before I document any further ideas and experiences in my journal.

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First up, you might be wondering how the second half of the Sword Toward Self bass recording (see Altered States, Electric Bass) went.

Well, I didn’t go into as deep an altered state – or perhaps because I was already part way there it just didn’t seem as dramatic. As such it didn’t take as much effort to come back to earth after we finished.

Of the three songs that I needed to record, I only set up two as sigils. The reason was that, true to chaos magic principles, I became quite amnesiac about the intention behind each sigil. Consequently I forgot temporarily which two songs were sigils and which one was not. I didn’t want to double load one song accidentally so I held off on setting a third intention.

I later remembered which song had no sigil. Funnily enough, that one song proved monstrously hard to record. I spent the whole first day on it. Somehow even the simpler passages proved very difficult to execute cleanly. It was with relief, not accomplishment, that I finished it off.

The second day proved quite different – indeed, I breezed comfortably through the material, recorded great solos, and we were done much earlier than I expected. Those sigils flew into the ether without a hitch – nice. All in all I think this little experiment of using the act of recording a song as a sigil went well. Certainly the degree of focus required in recording is as intense as any magical trance I’ve ever had.

In future I intend to find ways to weave in the intent of the sigil with the lyrical content of the song. Another trick would be to set up the act of listening to the recording as the trigger for the sigil. That way any time anyone listens to the song – bang, there goes the sigil again.

I should probably randomise which song symbolises which intention to avoid over-thinking things for myself – in other words, even I won’t know what magic folks will be triggering when they listen to my recordings. Fun, fun, fun.

The theme of psychological reconstruction in heathenism that I alluded to in the Altered States, Electric Bass post needs more explication and exploration. I promise I’ll come back to this sooner or later. In the meantime if you are curious to hear the final product then keep an eye on the Sword Toward Self website or Myspace page for news on when the album will be released.

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Secondly, here is another rune sigil I recently fired. It has a meaning somehow related to digging deep and finding new magic. Or possibly to do with ego destruction. Or consciousness transformation. Or connecting to divinity. In any case, I fired it off with singing and was soon possessed by One Eye, who I think was called by the sigil. It certainly seems to be triggering various positive changes.

I rather feel that I’d like to start doing some more adventurous magical rites. This journal spurs me on with doing magical things, since I want to keep up the standard of writing and keep people interested enough to come back and read more.

In particular I’ve been reading a lot about High Seat style seidh – particularly on the SSeidh Study email list, which has proved an excellent forum in the time that I’ve been subscribed. I think it might be time to work out a plan for doing this and get on with it.

Following the description of seidh in the Saga of Eric the Red, modern folks seem to be into their staves and cloaks. I’m normally more of an “empty handed magic” kind of guy, but for this I might just have to make an exception.

Oh and here’s a bind-rune I’ve been experimenting with recently. Imagine a Sowilo rune with a Teiwaz rune growing out of one end of it (I’ll have to make up such a sigil and fire it so I can show what I mean).

I’m finding that visualising this, and in particular holding a burning hot image of the bind rune in each hand, helps build my energy, motivation, resolve and imagination. It’s the classic Sig-Tyr victory combination.

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Thirdly, I wanted to offer a word about Hex Magazine. The next issue, which will be coming out in approximately a month from what I understand, will feature two articles of mine about direct experience of gods and/or ancestors.

I wanted to take this moment to give Hex Magazine a huge plug, simply because it’s the classiest heathen publication ever, hands down, no competition. It is presented with such spirit and heart and a lack of pretence that is rare and precious in the heathen world.

The articles on history, mythology, DIY living, art, human experience, interviews, stories and the gods know what else are of a very high calibre; so is the artwork and design. I never fail to feel completely refreshed and inspired after reading through an issue of Hex.

Furthermore, Hex Magazine is not some huge commercial undertaking. The folk that run it do so with great love and passion, and if any magazine could be described as “hand made” then this would be it. I know that they put in a huge amount of energy to keep Hex happening and the heathen community should respond by supporting them 110%. We’re so fortunate to have Hex and we owe it to the editors to show our appreciation.

Oh yes – and from memory they’ve already sold out of Issue 1 in the hard copy edition and I think are running low on copies of Issue 2. So if you want to get your hands on these beautifully presented journals (and not just the PDF versions) then you need to move fast. They’re worth the cost (which is very reasonable) many times over.

I’m not really sure just how many readers we have here at Elhaz Ablaze (from what I can see it might be a few hundred). Regardless, I encourage you all to go out and buy the soon-to-arrive fourth issue of Hex Magazine as well as the back issues (hard copy or digital) and the limited edition cover prints.

Oh yes, and I should add that the Hex Folk had no idea that I would make this little plug – its entirely of my own initiative and I don’t get anything for doing it other than the satisfaction of knowing that I might have helped their fantastic magazine out.

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Finally, I’m curious to know what folks out there have enjoyed of the posts I’ve made so far, what they’d like more of, what they’d like less of, how I can improve my articles, and so forth. More importantly, I’d like to know why. So if you have constructive suggestions or feedback then please send me a message or comment.

This first rune sigil is one of my “don’t remember what it means” specials. I used an Indian snake skin tambourine to send it off, dancing, singing, drumming, you name it, until I was frothing and spasming and seething madly. Odin appeared at various points and lectured me about various things I didn’t understanding – perhaps related somehow to the meaning of the bind rune.

At the end of the magic I came under attack by a spectral serpent. I’m good at putting magical attackers in their place and this was no exception. But now I feel rather bad because in hindsight that spectral serpent was probably the snake who once owned the skin on the drum I had been banging.

I think that’s pretty bad form for me to have treated it so poorly (although drumming with mammal-hide drums has never produced a similar reaction for me). I’m not quite sure how to make amends but I’d like to make it some kind of offering since it presumably didn’t like being used for magic or perhaps used in the way that I used it.

The second rune sigil I fired off by reaching a state of intent focus using a tambourine. Tambourines offer an infinite array of musical possibilities when played in the style of Greg Sheehan, a brilliant Australian percussionist who plays them like a tabla or darbuka.

I’m no Sheehan but I have a few tricks up my sleeve. The magic kicked in really hard once I got my feet stamping in 4:4 time, then my left hand cutting across that on the tambourine in what I think was a 12:8, and then my right hand banging away on the tambourine for a while in 5:4, then 7:8 and 9:8. I used my forearms to loosely hold the tambourine across my chest as I did this so that the rhythms were very physical, tangible, for me.

Well! All those poly-rhythms rather did my brain in and so I stared intently at the sigil, drumming and stamping, dissolving deep into the magic and releasing the spell like seed to fertile ground.

I’m not really sure what to call the rune sigil magic I’ve been doing recently. It seems to involve runes, dance, trance, seething, chanting, drumming, you name it. If anything, the thread seems to be a chaos magical attitude – namely that technique and practice are what matter, not dogma or even consistent ideology.

The Old Norse word Galdr is often used to refer to rune magic by modern authors. I’m not sure what actual evidence there is for associating it with runes as opposed to verbal magic in general (Galdr means magic and its root meaning is something like “crow’s call”). On the other hand, we are told, there is seidhr, which is in some sense “shamanic” (but that can be debated from what I’ve seen on the very excellent Seidhr Study email list!)

I accepted these definitions and the hard distinction between galdr and seidh for years but now I am coming to believe that it’s a limiting and difficult to (historically) justify distinction. As far as I can tell it was promulgated by Edred Thorsson, whose runic theology seems to have its own, ahistorical, reasons for wanting to make a strict separation between runes and seidh.

Well that’s fine but had he (and other authors) been clearer about where history ends and personal opinion begins my own explorations might have gotten much more interesting much sooner.

Perhaps Jan Fries’ philosophy on the subject is more fertile. He sees runes as being part of a continuum of symbolic representation that goes back into pre-history (and quite possibly starts with the Neanderthals and not our own species). Certainly archaeologists have found some very ancient rock carvings that look like they could be straight out of a Futhark-literate rune magicians’ arsenal.

Of course the integration of the runes into an alphabetical format does come later, probably a century or two before the birth of Christ, but the psycho-spiritual heart of the runes goes right on back, well before tenuously fine-spun distinctions between rigid ‘types’ of magic would be plausible or even possible to establish.

The runes have a strange sense of being like proto-sounds or proto-words in my own personal experience. They somehow reach across ages and speak straight to the lower brain, to the spinal cord, to the tongue, the ears, the nose, the skin. I am beginning to think they are very happy to be related to in chaotic, atavistic ways – this is probably how the symbols that evolved into the runes got treated by our far flung ancestors were used to being treated, and I’m guessing they liked it.

In the big picture there really isn’t much difference at all between a modern human, a 10th century heathen and a 30,000 year old human from prehistory. I think the crucial distinction is that the prehistoric human would have the most intimate relationship to mystery – if only by dint of living closer to death and change on a daily basis. The more abstract and disconnected your way of being in the world becomes, the less you are able to stand in the eye of the infinity of mystery (and Runa means mystery!)

In a sense then I hope that I am forging a new kind of magical technology, one which is moulded specifically to my needs and desires, and which reflects my unique idiosyncrasies. One which reaches into the history of human psychology (albeit from a subjective point of view) – not just through to heathen times but also earlier.

The purpose of this is not to establish some orthodoxy, nor to promulgate a school of thought or practice. Rather the purpose is to make myself more at home in the world of mystery, of Runa.

The Rune Gild motto is Reyn til Runa – Seek the Mystery. I think this is a pretty cool motto, but it doesn’t really fit for me, since mystery is here, around us, right now, and to me it does not need to be sought out like gold or wisdom. The more we attempt to uncover reality, the more it slips away from us.

For me then, the challenge is a little different. I want to conserve the mystery, to provide it a home and dwelling, a comfortable space where it might unfold according to its own unknowable devices. I want to invite the mystery into my life (where it already is, though obscured). We need but recognise what is already true in order to forge a relationship to mystery, to Runa. There is no need to search either within or beyond. Everything else then becomes a simple challenge of making oneself as welcome a ve (a sacred/secret temple), for Runa as is possible.

Is this all as speculative and subjective as heck? You bet. What fun!