Where I am Coming From

My surname, McDowall, is a Scottish variation of the Irish name Doyle. Originally Clann O’ DubhGhaill, the name means Dark Stranger or Evil Foreigner and refers specifically to the Danish Vikings who came down into Ireland raping, pillaging, plundering and eventually conquering and settling to found towns like Dubhlinn, Limerick and Cork.

The Scottish branch of the family were the Lairds of Argyll, for a time, and very briefly royalty on the Isle of Man. They fought alongside William Wallace against the English but then opposed Robert the Bruce for control of Scotland and lost. Exiled to Ireland, the clan became Galloglass, hereditary, professional mercenaries.

Now, my father was a soldier and his father was a soldier. I was an Army Reservist for a little while and later worked full time as a bouncer. But really, I’ve always been the black sheep of the family, the bookworm, the weird-o, the artist and philosopher. My grandfather once predicted that I’d “wear a collar one day”, meaning that he thought I’d become a priest. He may not have even been completely wrong, though I strongly doubt he would have guessed which denomination.

I spent the better part of my teens and twenties trying to force myself into the box of being a Warrior, and the worse part drowning the other voices in my head with liquor and beer. Now, at the age of thirty, I’ve come to realize finally that a Warrior can at best only ever be a small part of who I am.

I must become an Artist, a Philosopher, a Husband and Father and a Businessman. I must be true to myself and let the voices speak. But I can never forget where I came from. It’s where I come from that makes me who I am.

Clint.

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Altered States, Electric Bass

In amongst the rest of the chaos of my life one of my bands, Sword Toward Self, is in the midst of recording our debut full length album (my other main band, Ironwood, has a full length currently being mixed).

We commenced laying down the bass over the weekend. My goal was to finish half of the album over the weekend which I managed comfortably – there was even time to develop some new ideas for the bass arrangements and record some of the bass solos. I think we also managed to get just about the perfect bass tone, which is an ongoing challenge given the huge tonal range of the six string basses I play.

Recording is a very intense process, but I found this particular session to be the most full on recording experience I’ve had. And yet it went quicker and more smoothly than, say, when I recorded my vocal parts for Ironwood (of which there were a lot and often very challenging to get just right).

So if this weekend past’s recording session went so smoothly, why do I say it was so intense?

The music, the hours of intense focus on performing everything perfectly, sent me into an extremely altered state of consciousness. There is something particularly indulgent about recording. It makes one’s creative expression as a musician the absolute centre of the universe for a condensed period of time.

Even during breaks, having meals, etc, one’s mind becomes utterly captivated by the music. Music exists even when it is not being played, even when it is only being imagined. So during those moments of the process when I am not actually recording the songs play on, shutting down more and more of my higher functions, concentrating all of my faculties on the task at hand.

You might say that I take the task very seriously – and I really do. Particularly for a band like Sword Toward Self, where the music is so complex and often very fast. But this last weekend it felt like my deep mind was rising up through the strata of my being and consuming my entire being as it sought to grapple with the
creative process.

Perhaps part of the reason for this intensity is that I feel somehow spiritually connected to electric bass. That is an odd thing to say, but I really know of no other instrument that will ever feel as right in my hands.

I do play guitar as well, and I’m pretty good with finger-style acoustic guitar in particular. But I’ll always be able to do much more technical things and express more emotion on bass than on guitar (even things that conventional wisdom says should be easier on guitar because it’s a lighter, smaller instrument!)

Something I occasionally have pondered in my life, however, is the curious particularity of my connection to an instrument which, after all, was only invented some 60 years ago. I do have a great-uncle who played double bass (though I never met him), but there is a massive gulf between that and modern six string
electric bass guitars!

I often wonder: how many people never get the chance to find the medium that is perfectly suited to them? If I had been born in a third world country I would probably have never encountered electric bass. I might have played something else, but I would never have developed the level of skill or depth of musical connection that I find in playing bass.

Or if I had been born one hundred years ago? Again I would have missed out. This sort of invisible tragedy of possibility lost must be occurring all the time in all the arts, crafts and practices our species has invented and lost – or has yet to invent – or which are only available to some of humanity at a given time.

Or does the collective unconscious tailor the movements and motifs of its endless performance to the available resources and technology of the time? Am I so attuned to bass because, somehow in the infinitely complexity of wyrd, bass and I were made to be for one another? Perhaps some other instrument or art would have been the heart for my blood to beat in if things were different.

This still doesn’t guarantee that I was destined with any certainty to find my way into the world of bass. Yet it was a burning desire for it that drove me to take up the instrument, a fanatical love of bass which one rarely encounters in the guitar-obsessed silliness of most modern western music.

Coming out of the recording session I have found myself struggling to readjust to reality. I’ve been so deeply and completely dissolved in that world that this one suddenly seems totally ill-fitting. The last few days I have been struggling to recover my sense of drive and purpose. Perhaps there is a high cost to squandering so much of oneself on something so gratuitous and extravagant as artistic expression.

I am still not fully ‘back’ in this world, and I know that I will be finishing the remainder of the album this coming weekend. So now I feel like I am suspended in a valley between two dark and mysterious mountains.

These thoughts about the manifestation of zeitgeists in individual lives lead me to reflect on the philosophy of attempting to reconstruct specific magical practices from archaic times. If the seidh and rune workers of old were using what was available to them then perhaps it could be more important to feel into their mindset, regardless of the trappings and forms of one’s magical practice.

This psychological reconstructionism could never amount to more than arbitrary opinion, yet for each individual undertaking this challenge I suspect that rich veins of spiritual wealth might await.

So in this spirit I am going to attempt to use the massive and prolonged altered state that I am likely to enter again when recording this weekend. I will simply specify the particular performance of each song as a symbol of a magical intention. Every take, every time I retune, every time I finish getting a passage of
music perfect – this will be another trigger of the intention symbolised by the performance and the process.

And also, this time I am going to indulge in some measures to help myself adjust to consensus reality after the recording process is complete. Perhaps consume some raw sea salt for a start, and definitely get outside. It’s very painful to be caught between worlds and I need to prepare myself now for the realmshift that the recording process has so far involved.

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Somafera Journal

Let me start with a little history into my choice of practice.

I have always been involved on some sort of self defence art, whether it was boxing, Muay Thai kick boxing, or another form of martial art, mixed with a lot of weight pushing.

The biggest issue I had was when I did get into a situation where these practices could be used was that I would just black out, and when I came to the other person was not in any hurry to move. (I am not trying to blow my own trumpet here I am just making a ground point of how I first started this Journey).

One example of this really scared the crap out of me.

I was out with a friend and he had a scuffle with someone, anyway when we were leaving the guy ran up from behind and hooked my mate in the face with knuckle dusters, spreading his nose all over his face.

Then the guy ran at me. I don’t know what happened next I seem to have lost a few minutes which to this day I still can’t recall. The next thing I know there is the head light of a car about 30 cm from my head I am sitting on the guy’s chest beating his face in.

There was blood pouring out of this guy’s face, the guy was out cold and not moving, all the security were screaming at me to stop but they wouldn’t touch me.I ran off up the road I stopped about 50 metres away and the guy still hadn’t moved.

The next day I was freaking out what if I had killed this guy what was I to do. I even watched the news to see if they had said anything.

This wasn’t the first time this had happened though definitely the most serious so I started looking for a reason this was happening.

I happened to stumble across a site called Uppsala online; after reading the segment on Berserkergangr it all started to make sense. The berserker had always been of interest to me.

I read over this site repeatedly for a few months then I notice the link to something called somafera.

After reading through this site I could not stop thinking about what I had read, it really tripped something within me. Please read through the somafera site for a full understanding and description of what is involved.

The only thing that was missing to make this a full spiritual / physical training system was there was no set martial art to use.

I started asking around and the system I found to fit with the somafera training is a style of kung-fu called YANG MIAN where as you use internal pressure to create power.

You raise the pressure in your body by doing repetitive exercises while keeping your mind, breathing and muscles relaxed similar to raising the wode (check out their site it has some great videos on it).

Lucky for me a good friend of mine has been given permission by his Master (Master Yang) to start his own school. I have been training with him over the last couple of months to get my body conditioned and am now ready to tie Somafera and Yang Mian together in a experiment to see what can be achieved.

I will be keeping a monthly journal of my experiences on this page, it will be quite a journey.

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On Being Still

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer” – Albert Camus.

At the end of my recent article “On Being Stuck” I suggested that I would experiment with the application of the runes of Need and Ice (or Nauthiz and Isa in the Proto-Germanic) to deal with the feeling of stuckness, coldness and despair.

I’ve had recourse to these runes on three occasions since then. Each time they have indeed helped me to move from stuckness to stillness and from stillness to fluid action.

Each time I either thought about or chanted the runes. The first time I used them to help myself feel better the change was immediate. Just thinking about their significance, their power to pass through the constriction, the cold, the hard armour of the winter river – it made it impossible for me to stay in my corner of shadow.

A similar trick occurred next time, with the difference that this time I chanted the runes and pretty soon had a good spontaneous sway going too, a bit of seething-style seidh. I felt like a veil of cold poured backwards away from me and dissolved. I felt free, flexible, warm, my heart beating strongly again.

The third occasion was some chanting I did with Donovan. As always we explored some wild territory, rasping, singing, roaring, screeching, droning. Every time we do magic together we manage to get a little more relaxed, focussed, and intense. I think this bit of magic unblocked some things for both of us, psychologically speaking.

The speculative idea I had – that embracing Need and Ice, the vanguard of stuckness/stillness/coldness, can produce transformation where even transformative fire dares not tread – has born immediate fruit. One of the outstanding elements of this approach is that it runs with the direction that the pattern of wyrd is already headed. Instead of resisting the shadows and cold we turn with their tide. At their heart we find their negation and come forth out the other end.

There is not even the fear of going back that more obvious or pro-active responses to such spiritual coldness can create, forged partly from anxiety as such fiery responses are. I have found a way of walking frozen, subterranean roads with total yielding, yet without being destroyed in that yielding.

From these recent and promising experiences I must say that Need and Ice represent a kind of transformative passivity. They require us to respond to the circumstance – “in this weather we must build fire” (Neurosis) – but the response is founded on a acceptance of what cannot be changed, only turned with. Even a negative wyrd can be ridden to a positive outcome, like tacking against the wind to take your ship home to its port.

Ice offers the illusion of immutability, but now I see the illusion as illusion as well as an invitation to despair. The two forces cancel one another out when we embrace them, leaving us, slightly dumbfounded, in the clutch of spring.

I started this article with a quote from an existentialist philosopher, Albert Camus. Apart from the immediate relevance of the quote I chose it deliberately because I see heathenism as being an existentialist spirituality.

For all the belief in gods, giants, elves, other worlds, magic, mystery and the unknowable order of wyrd the heathens of old were necessarily very practical, this-worldly people. I suppose living in old Europe with limited technology, close to the earth and the seasonal cycles, you just had to be to survive. They seemed to regard one’s actions in this world as more important than any particular afterlife or cosmic plan.

They might have been animists – recognising the living spirit of all things – rather than materialists/nihilists as the existentialist philosophers tend to be. But the same attitude – that this life is what matters – is shared by heathen and existentialist.

So the idea that we can overcome shadow, ice and despair by following the path of Need and Ice into their heart – rather than resisting, fleeing or bowing down to some transcendental ideal – well, I guess this recent foray of mine into Need and Ice magic is a kind of existential rune magic.

I should add that although here I am celebrating a this-worldly, existentialist attitude to heathenism, I am by no means dismissing the other-worldly aspects of Germanic mythology/folk lore, nor the otherworldly and transformative magical elements of heathenism.

Indeed my own native tendency is towards otherworldliness – even as a child I identified with the changeling folk stories of the Brother Grimm, in which an elven or otherwise otherworldly child is mistakenly left with human parents to great anguish and difficulty. It has been a long struggle to even become as this-worldly as I now am, and I am a long way from where I would like to be.

So I am certainly not arguing for the more boring, anti-spiritual model of heathenism in celebrating a kind of existential approach to heathen spirituality. Rather I am finding with relief that as I embrace this life I slowly discover the ways that I can exert power in this reality, to make at least some part of it turn to alignment with my own nature and being. The magic of Need and Ice represents a powerful step for me along this path.

Of course, most people must struggle with the question of their own power to effect meaning and change in the world. Indeed, Alfred Adler’s model for the cause of psychological problems was the “inferiority complex”, which occurs because when we are children we really are mostly powerless in this world of adults. To lead happy and successful adult lives we need to unlearn this powerful lesson of growing up so that we can act with strength and confidence.

Perhaps Need and Ice could offer an initiatory doorway for those of us struggling with this-worldiness (whether due to our age, character or fears). Face death without struggle and who knows what might come of it?

Give up what thou hast, and then thou wilt receive” (Jung).

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Chaos Heathenism

We here at Elhaz Ablaze have been reflecting on the purpose and theme of our website and have concluded that there needs to be a slight change in emphasis.

All of us have interests and experiences outside of heathenism or which, while connected to our heathenism, would not be regarded as “authentic” by the more orthodox heathen crowd.

On the other hand, it would be false to ourselves not to include these reflections on this website. They are part of who we are. Our gods and ancestors do not ask us to deny aspects of ourselves as the Christian god asked of the early heathen converts. Indeed one of the main points of polytheism is to acknowledge the full spectrum of beings and realms – as Phil Hine put it, “a god denied is a devil created”.

So in this vein Donovan has a developing practice exploring Somafera and internal kung fu from the point of view of a natural berserker; I have been having spontaneous experiences in the last year that could only be described as alchemical (even though prior to that I’ve never even had any interest in alchemy)! Clint has always had his own idiosyncratic take on these issues which I’ve not even encountered in anyone else that I’ve met. If we were to force ourselves into the one-dimensional oafish heathen mould then we’d soon shatter it.

On the other hand, there are some areas where we feel great care must be made not to blur important distinctions. For example, I have come to feel that greater clarity around the use of terms like seidh is necessary.

To be really strict, the term seidh refers to archaic magical practices for which we have only the most elliptical evidence. While it is possible for modern folk to create seidh-inspired practices, I do not believe it is strictly possible to practice seidh in modern times because we just do not know enough about the past. There is neither a substantiated unbroken living tradition, nor a collection of Dark Ages ‘how to’ manuals left behind for us to follow.

This isn’t a bad thing necessarily, and I still think learning as much about history as possible is vital to inspire us. But I think we need to be realistic – no matter how ‘accurate’ our reconstruction of seidh, or rune magic, or whatever, it will not be what went before. There will always be room for disagreement and any single piece of evidence will likely be able to generate a number of equally valid interpretations.

This is not some kind of post-modern “its all the same” attitude. It is a recognition that we just don’t know enough and the evidence we have is scanty and ambiguous and covered over by at least ten centuries of dust. We might look to our own personal experiences for confirmation or inspiration and this is a fertile approach. But it is no basis for objective historical research or making objective historical claims.

I therefore will be (and I guess already have been) writing with the understanding that unless I make it otherwise clear, I am using the term seidh to refer to modern practices which may or may not bear resemblance to the historical practices which are their inspiration. I think Clint and Donovan will be taking a similar line on these sorts of issues.

We want to avoid leading others down confusing paths by pretending to be evidence-based or historically authentic when there can be only limited authenticity in some areas. All of us struggled with this when we first became interested in heathenism because so many supposedly reputable authors make just this deception (even if sometimes with good intentions).

We still believe that trying to understand and recover the old ways is essential. We still believe that the spark of our original ingenuity is essential. And we believe that it is good ethics to make the distinction clear.

We also want to be free to document and explore the full range of our magical/psychological/spiritual/physical/martial experiences and ideas so that Elhaz Ablaze is a genuine reflection of who we are and what we are doing. In that vein, we’d like to think that chaos magicians and other magical/spiritual/martial types as well as heathens might be interested in what we have to say.

“Chaos Heathenism” is our philosophy. Heathenism is the spiritual harbour from which we sail, but like chaos magicians we are creative and irreverent and are not afraid to explore all manner of strange new oceans. In this we identify with the spirit that inspired so many Viking expeditions, as well as the far-reaching web of our ancestor’s trade routes and travails.

In that vein, we do not believe that our ancestors were as hermetically sealed in their culture and beliefs as the more conservative end of heathenry believes – and from what I can see archaeology and history are on our side.

We therefore do not wish to indulge in the separatist charade when there are for more nuanced understandings to be had. All too often we have found that the self-proclaimed “true heathens” are just as dilute as everyone else – their only distinction is that they are hypocrites as well. We believe that by accepting the world’s (and our own) complexity we will express our ancestral worldview more fully than by clinging to simplistic and narrow-minded dogma.

Perhaps part of the reason for our perspective is that all three of us are Australian (even though Clint now lives in the States). Australian heathenry faces unique challenges because of the nature of this land and the importance of its traditional custodians.

European-descended people have been in this ancient place for so little a stretch of time and the question of our relationship to spirit of place is much more challenging than, say, the question faced in Europe where heathenism was born or even the U.S. which at least shares some climate and ecosystem similarities with Europe.

Consequently some of the questions, ambiguities and mysteries that are more easily ignored by heathens from other parts of the globe are inescapably scored into our psyches and it would be self-deception if we did not engage with them.

So where this will lead us I cannot say, but hopefully our plan to go a-viking will take us to places we could never have previously imagined!

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Rune Magic Adventures and Reflections

runemagicadventuresandreflectionsimage1This 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.

runemagicadventuresandreflectionsimage2I’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!

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On Being Stuck

(Note: I have offered some interpretations of a few rune poems which are my readings only and should not be seen as “what the poems really mean.” I think my interpretations are reasonable, but I cannot read the minds of their long-dead authors).

So it should be clear by now that for me changeability is an important spiritual pursuit. A shift in consciousness is only a moment away (if only you decide to throw a spanner into the works of the current state you are in).

Of course, its very possible to get stuck. People do it all the time. Sufficient trauma, fear, anger or confusion can trap you in a very restricted range of conscious states for years. Your ability to connect to any kind of magical consciousness is severely inhibited by this restriction. Writers on runes/seid/magic/etc don’t often write about the parts of their lives that aren’t filled with magic, joy, ease, power, spiritual insight, and the rest of it. I think that is dishonest. I think our short-comings and our failures are also a part of our being and deserve to be acknowledged just as much as our wisdom and our creative wealth.

As I’ve discussed before, the root meaning of ergi, appears to be related to trembling, dancing – with a spontaneity so deep-rooted as to be organic. This is any state in which the socialised norms you live by, the defined identity you function within, are scattered to the wind by your pulsing flesh and its ability to shake, sway, hover and shudder.

So the opposite to this embodied magic, this “shameful” seethliness (again see that earlier post) is stillness. Stuckness. Predictability. A human body that is not moving. A body that is completely subservient to the abstractions of ego mind. A body that acts to serve linear, boring, obvious objectives. A body which dwells in the illusion that life is predictable.

For long stretches of my life I lived out stuckness and stillness. There is a particular coldness that can seep through your bones and into your heart. I still go back there fairly regularly, and although it usually doesn’t last long at all, while this stillness is in charge it lays claim to infinity.

That’s right, for all of my celebration of the bodymind’s ability to spontaneously transform I still sometimes allow myself to be fooled by the mythology of ‘everything is always going to be like this’. And of course the more you are convinced that this is the case the more you will act it out, creating a feedback loop filled with lonely despair.

In the Elder Futhark rune row we find two runes, Nauthiz and Isa, lined up consecutively. Nauthiz, Need, is “a difficult circumstance and drudging work”, for in the face of Nauthiz “the naked will freeze in the frost”. Then on the heels of Nauthiz comes Isa, Ice: “a river’s bark, and a wave’s thatch, and doomed men’s downfall” (these quotes are from the Old Icelandic and Old Norse Rune Poems, translated by Sweyn Plowright in his Rune Primer).

The stuckness I speak of, this state in which the magic of both embodied and mental spontaneity is suppressed, is the frost that kills the naked. Exposed to the elements, without protection and without the ability to act, to change, to move, to create safety, to build body heat, to alter circumstances, we are very much needful. As the still coldness comes over us our need becomes greater but it takes more and more effort to spark the fire of change.

The above-quoted Ice poem then expresses, at least in this particular thought experiment, the deception of the stuckness.

On the surface of the ice, freezing to death, there seems no motion, no change, only a stagnation that spirals closer and closer to death. Yet ice is the “river’s bark”. It forms a hard crust but beneath it the water still runs. Beneath the veneer of stillness (dare I say the illusion of a continuous ego?) the reality of change continues on regardless. What a shame to let the smallest and most illusory part of the river, its hard ice surface, determine the needy stagnation and demise of a being once trembling with life force.

The trick is even more wily than this! Perhaps ice is “doomed men’s downfall” because some folks, fooled into thinking its hardness is eternal, suddenly find it gives way and drops them into the roaring currents beneath! What a shock, to have built yourself a psychological ring wall, only to have the ground give way. These are the risks we run when we forget that belief is cheap and change wins.

There is, therefore, a tragic air to the rune poems connected to Need and Ice. An atmosphere of suffering, freezing, dying, through the acceptance of simple illusions.

I am no stranger to these worlds of icy need. I have spent years frozen solid in their depths, or thrust with violence beneath the surface, struggling not to drown as change sweeps me away. It is easy to fear change, especially change that you must create yourself. AS hypothermia begins to kill us we feel the illusion of comfortable warmth. Hence it can sometimes seem that freezing naked in the frost is preferable to taking the risk of breaking the ice and breathing in life.

But I am still here, and so many times I have found my ability to transform and been rescued from the clutches of mono-consciousness. Yet still I have my time in the frozen cave, still I have my times laying out on the bark of the river, cold and shivering.

Perhaps what saves us when we are freezing to death in the rigidity of single-minded consciousness is shivering. If our power to change can be accessed at any time with the shaking, swaying and trembling, then perhaps shivering is the door through which we might escape the seemingly infinite halls of icy despair. We find, in the gateway to the ice-world (Niflheim?), that again our body tries to remind us of its powers. We shiver, our body vibrating and shuddering to generate new warmth and life and change.

Perhaps then Need and Ice also offer a gift – the opportunity to remember our transformative powers. To remember the infinite creativity of the flesh, its embodied spiritual riches. Perhaps those of us who often find ourselves exposed and freezing are being offered a valuable lesson, spiritual instruction.

“Need is tight in the breast; but it often
happens for humans’ children to help and to save
each, if they listen to it early”.

“Ice is over-cold, extremely slippery;
it glistens glass-clear, most like gems;
it is a floor wrought by frost, fair to look upon”.

These are from the Old English Rune Poem, again Sweyn’s translations.

If we listen to the tightness in the breast early it might save us. And as slippery as ice is, nonetheless it is fair to gaze at. Compelling though the illusion of being stuck is, we may find beauty even in the threat of stagnant and rigid death.

Perhaps there is another path into the realms of altered consciousness that seid opens up for us. Perhaps instead of seeking the change, the shift, the movement into other worlds, we could embrace and pursue stillness, rigidity. Perhaps by carrying this intensely icy needfulness to its very end we can pass through it and into the heart of the seething fire. Perhaps we can subvert the seemingly involuntary law of hard ice armour by volunteering for it. Perhaps we can dissolve its unconditional rule by choosing it instead of unwillingly and wretchedly submitting.

“Need is tight in the breast” – perhaps it calls us to recall and rekindle the fire in our hearts, reminds us of the pulsing rhythmic law that rules our blood and our body and the roads of all the worlds. Perhaps there is no need to lament the hard gauntlet of psychophysical rigidity, of illusory ego, of our forgetting of our powers of seething transformation. Perhaps Need and Ice deserve gratitude.

I have ridden far on the back of my horsely unconscious this morning. I have let the waters of reflection spill out into words. Am I cold? Does my frostbite ache? Most certainly. Does my heart feel the weight of constriction? Sadly it does.

But have I recovered my imagination, my flexibility, my memory of the worlds beyond the domain of ice-clad death? I have. When we pass into the lower worlds without guile or motive we sometimes find new roads and camp fires tended by the welcome sight of a one-eyed wanderer. There the naked, freezing in the frost, beguiled or betrayed by ice, might find healing with the hospitality of a god of change. Woden is a god who frees us of fetters (so the Eddas tell us). Perhaps he has power even to dissolve the tightness of cold on the heart that lives to sing.

I am going to start a little experiment of chanting, either inwardly or outwardly, the runes of Need and Ice (you can use whichever of their archaic names seems right) when I find myself struggling with the forces of these runes. Embrace their presence. And see what comes of it.

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Easy as Falling Off a Bike

So I have a confession to make – until last week I couldn’t ride a bicycle.

How could this have happened? You might well wonder… the story behind why as a child I never mastered this almost universal skill (at least here in Australia) isn’tall that interesting so I won’t bore you.

I will say that for the longest time I felt like a bit of a failure because so much of my immediate family is Dutch – and the Netherlands are the spiritual home of thebicycle. What kind of Dutch descendant can’t even ride a bicycle?

Well all that has changed very swiftly I’m pleased to say, and my Deep Mind can take a fair bit of the credit.

When I bought my new (well, second-hand) bike, the woman at the shop had a great perspective: she told me she’d love to be able to experience the challenge of learningto ride as an adult. Well, that was sure encouraging.

One thing I did know was this – no way I was going to be able to nut this particular challenge out with my conscious mind. One thing I know about my conscious mind is this: it is awfully lazy. Way more than most people’s. Its almost like a stupid slug that just wants to hide under a branch and gorge on leaves. We really don’t get on very well.

For example my conscious mind doesn’t like doing anything physical, like pruning the bushes in our garden, or vacuuming the floor, or typing up these journal entries. It really hates it when I do work on my private practice to improve my therapeutic skills or drum up some business. It hates looking after my belongings, even prized belongings such as my basses and guitars. It just wants to crawl under a mountain and sleep until Ragnarok. Then it will sleep through the death of the gods and happily snore on as the world is reborn.

But I do know that once I get past my sluggish conscious mind I start to have fun. Take that bush pruning I was doing today. “Oh no!” said my conscious mind before I got started. “It will be horrible! You’ll hate it, it will take hours with no reward, it will stop you from doing more important things!”

And yet once I get started, the task becomes fun, energy and blood flows around my body. My mind becomes calmer and things start flowing onward. The rhythm of the work becomes my lord. The slug is covered in a pillar of salt and my whole being begins to make sense again.

Given that this is how I work, I right away had a chat with my unconscious mind. “Unconscious”, I said, “I’m handing this learning to ride a bike thing entirely over to you, because I know that you will do a much better job of figuring it out than I will”. I’m a bit vague on what my unconscious thought about this arrangement but either it was happy to get stuck in or else it quickly came round to the proposition.

Right! So the first ride was at night (to avoid the gratuitous humiliation of having small children utterly outclass me on their two wheeled machines of doom). There is a small car park near where we live and this was to be the practice ground.

Getting there was a nightmare. Even getting started on the thing was almost impossible for me and I couldn’t focus enough to control the pedals, the steering and the brakes all at once. There were lots of very sudden starts and stops, lots of painful jolts, lots of near crashes. And the frustration! I was getting more angry, feeling more incompetent, by the second. My conscious mind was beginning to crawl out from the salt wasteland and suggest, quite forcefully, that I was never going to learn and that I might as well give up.

Well! After a very trying, exhausting and rather embarrassing ride/walk/stumble/crash/fall to the car park, I was feeling pretty tender. At least I’d managed to survive this far.

What followed was really a conversation that went something like this:

Conscious Slug Mind: You can’t do it. Give up.
Me: No.
Conscious Slug Mind: You aren’t fooling me. This is a waste of time. Take the bike back for a refund and stop eating salt.
Me: No.
Conscious Slug Mind: Hah! You fell off again! See?! No chance. None at all.
Me: Maybe this time it will work.

And so on.

Then I find myself managing to ride a full circuit around the car park without going flying. Maybe losing control here and there, maybe giving myself a bit of a chaotic death-spill scare. But getting there.

I’ve never experienced Bike Consciousness before. By this point I am really starting to love it. Its all about the motion, the rhythm, the movement. Its the ultimate anti-conscious mind, anti-slug state.

So! First attempt was a smashing success. By trusting in my unconscious mind I had the basics down in about 10 minutes (even though it seemed like endless hours).

The next night I went out riding and got a lot more adventurous. Too adventurous. I managed to go soaring through the air and smashed myself to smithereens. Blood, bruises and battered ego all over the place. Worst of all I knocked the chain off my bike and, in the darkness, couldn’t see to put it back on. Yep, I had to walk back home with tail between legs. Despite that the night had still been a success – and it was probably good for me to hurt myself.

I took a few nights off, but on ride number three I learned two important lessons.

1) Few things beat conquering a hill on a bike. The hill I took down would probably be scoffed at by any ordinary rider, for me it was a victory. I am already on the hunt for bigger challenges to surmount. Slug mind doesn’t like rehearsing for victory in this way – more salt on its rubbery skin.

2) My unconscious mind likes to remind me who is in charge. When I started congratulating myself on how clever it was to give over the task of learning to ride to my unconscious, it suddenly stopped helping me. I almost went straight into a tree. Right! Have to remember not to let my ego mind take credit for what my unconscious has achieved.

Well today on my fourth ride I had a great, easy time, and really proved to myself that I can do this. I am now a confident explorer of Bike Consciousness. I like Bike Consciousness. Its a feeling of Going Places that beats Car Consciousness, which is heavily mediated by the chassis, the glass, and the fact that your motion is a product of an engine and not your own bodily strength.

What lessons can be learned from this in terms of trance, altered states, and seidh?

1) Resistance is easy to defeat if you can resist getting intimidated by it. Take small steps into new territory and you can’t go too far wrong.

2) Slug mind hates the salt of action.

3) Pain is your friend. Humiliation and feeling over your head are good helpers – they let you know when you are onto something worth doing.

4) Your unconscious mind wants to help you explore new states of being, but you have to trust it. And give it its fair due. Oh – and you should ask for its help. It won’t know that you want its help if you don’t pay it the courtesy of asking.

I’m planning on using the lessons I’ve learned from my bike in other areas of my life. Fingers crossed that bike consciousness can inspire other ways for me to salt the hell out of my sluggish conscious ego mind.

Incidentally, the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem for Raido reads something like this (depending on the translator):

riding is easy in the hall
but hard for the one who rides
on a powerful horse on a long road

There’s really no substitute for getting out there and taking on the salty challenge of doing. You can interpret the rider as the ego self and the horse as the unconscious or Deep Mind if you like (though I have no idea if that is what the poem’s author had in mind).

Getting out there IS hard, but I really recommend learning how to expand/contract/mutate/dissolve/multiply/unify consciousness with the expert help of your horsey unconscious. Boy, I look forward to taking my own advice more, too.

Slug mind – you are on notice! Hiding in the cozy warmth of the homestead might seem like the perfect plan for your life, but it breeds stinky stagnant mollusc-mind.

I’ve had this growing relationship to salt for a while – salt as a kind of alchemical agent, a producer of transformation. I think about salt a lot in terms of its role in the Norse creation myth (I’ve even written some lyrics about this!) Writing this little piece has brought into focus for me one more aspect of why salt is a friend of consciousness transformation. Shake it!

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Recent Rune Magic Adventures (and some Seidh too)

morerunemagicandsomeseidhtooimage1Well I’ve been firing off a few more sigils, so here they are. I worked out a whole stack of runic combinations for various purposes and am now working through designing them and activating them. As this post is pretty much a report on recent activities it should be classed as mostly UPG, albeit UPG informed by knowledge of historical sources.

The first I sent using the drumming approach again, in particular letting cross rhythms and the drone of my de-tuned drum carry me into strange new worlds to lay the seed of the sigil.

It seems to me that the designs I am making bear the influence of Jan Fries’ Neolithic magical focus, working them up feels a bit like doing cave art. I guess there is a really primitive aspect to rune magic, the crude act of inscribing images. It cuts through endless layers of surface rubbish. We use words now for so many purposes and it feels good to use letters (runes) as ambiguous symbols rather than very finite fragments of meaning.

There is also an honesty to using runes as symbols for magical purposes – it seems to me like the direct opposite of the way that politicians, corporations and so forth abuse language to distort perception and avoid responsibility.

recentrunemagicadventuresimage2The magic to release this sigil into the world got a bit crazy.

I started by calling on ancestors, gods and goddesses as a way of opening the magical space. The response to my call was rather abrupt – “we are always with you, idiot!” came the words from my mouth. They told me to abandon the drum this time around, got me to lie down.

Next thing their collective voice says “be like the dead” and I find myself covering my eyes. Then “be like the living” and I am covering my ears. There is some humour in these postures. Then the idea occurs that I could use my ear plugs (a metal musician’s best friends). I cover my eyes and become neither dead nor alive.

Ear plugs change your experience of sound, in particular any sound you make, because you hear less of your actual vocal utterance and feel more of the vibrations in your body from speaking. Being in a magical context this very promptly put me in quite an isolated state. When we clear a magical space to do work this usually involves visualisation of some sort and calling on whatever beings seems appropriate. The idea of making everything beyond the immediate situation inaudible is pretty alien to this, but I like it!

Next thing I am communicating with the Celtic goddess Brigit, who for some reason has had a connection to me for a very long time despite my general lack of interest in Celtic mythology. I tend to neglect her because I do not know how to fit her into my generally Germanic spiritual interests/practice. She has been getting progressively more grumpy about this for a while, demanding among other things that I publicly acknowledge her before other heathens. Well, here she is folks!

She soon had me falling through worlds, having basically taken over the show. I found myself by the well of Wyrd, conversing with the Norns. I have often journeyed there before and they have some memory of me, though this time their world seemed altogether more dark and ambiguous. Its hard to hold onto their words but the main theme was related to where Annalise and I live at the moment, an area with a very odd spiritual lay of the land. Spirits around here don’t like humans much (with good reason), and the built environment has had little of the emotional investment and artistic flourish that brings forth the magic of dwellings.

The Norns advised me to perform a kind of reverse Nidstang. Rather than turning spirits again their human neighbours, as Egil used the nidstang in Egil’s Saga, they described a kind of pole magic to invite and make peace with the local spirits, to change my personal relationship to them. They gave me some runes to carve on a staff and suggested that I raise the staff at a particularly loaded bit of land near the ocean.

They advised me that if I do not do this then we should move to a different locality because its not good to have local land spirits that just don’t want to know about you. I’ve known that this is how things have been here for a long time so its good to have some sense of a possible way to bring about some change or improvement.

After that journey I was still in quite a state. I could feel a pressure at the back of my head, a sensation that usually goes with riding states. I have not had a really strong co-mingling experience in a long time and it was quite a joy to feel it coming on. I’m a bit out of practice with letting it happen, but Brigit came through finally. She pulled out the earplugs and the world seemed to open up into sound.

I am pretty vague about what happened after that. It wasn’t the strongest horsing I’ve ever done but it opened up the channel which has been somewhat closed recently. There’s going to be more of this in future I hope! She has quite a sense of humour. Often in this situation the riding god/dess likes to make good-natured jokes at my expense to others, cutting me down. I think its good for me to get the perspective of a consciousness unfettered by general human limitations – to them my hang-ups and ego armouring seem completely absurd. Annalise was quite happy to hang out with her fortunately so things went smoothly.

I’m certainly going to start employing sensory deprivation more for these purposes in future. Its pretty much pure UPG, but I feel it was directly shown to me and it certainly proved effective. That’s about all I have to offer for now.

Hail Brigit!

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The Seething Unconscious

In my last piece I had a bit to say about the conscious and unconscious minds. Specifically, I suggested that the unconscious mind is much more powerful, more creative and generally wiser than the conscious (ego) mind. I also suggested that trance – be it seidh related or something else – helps us to disable the conscious mind so that the unconscious mind can run the show for a while.

But I didn’t exactly define what I mean by unconscious mind, and this term is not exactly something which I’ve prized from historical seidh lore.

Before I answer this question I want to take a moment to reflect on various authors’ attempts to reconstruct a map of human psychology using old Heathen terms. Folks talk about the fetch, the hyde, önd, ödr, the hamr, and so forth. There is hugr (mind), related to Old Norse hugrunes, and it is tempting to speculate about Old Norse minni (memory) too.

Edred Thorsson even constructs a whole model in his book Runelore that is based on Jungian ideas. This approach gets some flack from other Heathens for quite shamelessly crossing different traditions/ideologies, but you have to admit it has a daring ambition to it – and some of Jung’s ideas are not so far from Heathenism, either.

Bearing all this in mind, I am personally hesitant to speculate on what a full ‘Heathen psychology’, cobbled together from old words/concepts, might look like. There are a few reasons for this, but the main one is that in modern Western cultures there are a vast number of ‘psychologies’ and often they use the same terms in different ways. Given how varied the religion and culture of old Europe was I am a little hesitant to say “this is how these old psychological terms fit together”. I’d rather give myself the freedom to be a little open-ended.

You find a useful analogy with the runes. We talk about Elder, Younger, and Anglo-Saxon Futharks as though these were very clear, discrete scripts. Nevertheless, no two Futhark carvings from days of yore that I have seen have been exactly the same. There are general trends over time and space of course (e.g. Younger Futhark scripts appearing in the latter Dark Ages in Scandinavia), but not the tight delineations that only really make sense if you are used to a mechanised and fairly abstract modern world.

As a result it’s easy to spot modern rune authors (or modern speculators on Heathen psychology) who are just making up a load of codswallop – but very hard to decide who is right about specific details when comparing authors who have done their homework. I don’t want to spend my time splitting hairs, I want to spend my time doing rune and seidh work!

In any case, all reconstructed systems are likely to fail sooner or later. There is almost always going to be some kind of exception or ambiguous circumstance and we easily risk trying to force reality to fit our (more or less) abstract model if we only have one set way of understanding things. Of course, it is very helpful to learn about as many different models as you can – you’ll have access to lots of different perspectives. This goes for both modern psychology and for reconstructing Heathen psychological ideas.

So having cleared the ground, what do I mean by the unconscious?

I’m using the term unconscious in a very broad way. It can refer to any of the following, and lots of other things
too:

* Autonomic nervous system
For example regulating breathing and heartbeat.

* Immune system
Did you know that hypnosis can significantly improve your immune response? Its been clinically proven over and over again.

* Sympathetic nervous system
For example the fight/flight reaction which can put you into some very interesting states in which you can do things you normally wouldn’t be able to.

* Digestive system
In fact I’ve read that the area around your gut lining has the most neural connections of anywhere in your body other than the brain. This might be why constipation and other stomach problems are often associated with depression or (in my and a few other people’s subjective experience) with magical/spiritual ordeals.

* Subterranean reasoning
I sometimes solve answers to rational problems by asking my unconscious to figure it out. When it is ready I just get an ‘aha!’ moment and there’s the solution. This might not work for everyone; and for some, such as my brother who is a mathematician, the conscious mind might well be able to get to the answer easily enough without deeper assistance.

* Subterranean skill development
When I want to learn new musical techniques, for example, I rarely practice much. I instead strongly intend for the skill to develop, then forget about that intention. It tends to organically emerge in the course of my usual jamming and rehearsing of existing material. In this way I’ve learned to do quite a few things as a bassist and guitarist that at first seemed impossible.

* Root source of inspiration
That part or aspect of my brain and body which can make me see new wholes out of fragments, new angles on old problems, or synthesise music in ways that I can subsequently analyse to see how it works but which I could never have consciously invented

* Intuition
For example, when I was younger I had several very bad experiences with manipulative magical demagogues. I started to realise that each of these people caused a sense of unease in my mind when I first met them. Since then I’ve learned to listen to these kinds of messages. Sometimes they’re wrong; other times they’ve given me valuable fore-warning and I’ve been able to avoid or minimise a lot of pain. Also, people that emit these warning signals tend to recognise if you’re picking up on them and that can also help keep you safe because they can tell you are onto them.

* A source of meaningful or prophetic dreams

* The parts of me that don’t over think things and are therefore much better at designing and activating magic spells (with runes this is assisted also by spending many years chanting runes, meditating on runes, memorising rune poems, etc, so there are plenty of seeds buried in my mind).

* The part of me which dips into the web of Wyrd and provides a rope up which gods and spirits can climb; and which can interface directly with the imaginal realities of the world around me while my ego just spins around in a stew of its own garbage.

* The part of me that can draw strange non-rational (as opposed to irrational) patterns in the shape of my life at times, and which helps me therefore to understand my place in the web of Wyrd.

Ok, so it’s evident that some of the things in this list I could refer to by archaic or mythological names if I wanted to, and that in fact might be an interesting way to make richer magical practices. But I am resistant to just labelling these various aspects of my unconscious for fear of limiting myself and for the reasons already discussed above.

I do think about and seek out experiences characterised by önd and/or ödr – but I wouldn’t declare these to be the only real or true experiences of such things because there is no unbroken tradition for me to draw upon to make such a claim. There’s just my subjective experience which seems to fit with what these words might have meant to my ancestors.

Laterally-minded (a sign of a well-fed and active unconscious!) readers will be wondering how all of this fits with the debate over whether gods and the like ‘really’ exist as independent beings with their own agendas or whether they are part of some kind of collective unconscious, archetypal structuring principles of human experience.

I think this whole debate misses the point personally.

The thing is that archetypes in Jungian and post-Jungian theory seem to have independent wills of their own, just like gods. Conversely, gods affect the individual psyche in a way very similar to the way archetypes do.

Jung offered various definitions of “archetype” but I’m sure that at least once he suggests that they are not just structures of human consciousness or experience, but indeed are inherent structures of reality (or if you are a transcendental idealist, perhaps they are some kind of formal structure which comprises enabling conditions for the existence of consciousness in the world). In any case saying that the gods are inherent structuring principles active throughout reality seems like a pretty ‘hard polytheist’ description to me. So the debate could well be just a dispute over arbitrarily assigned names.

Jan Fries wins the prize for me (he often does). Considering that even recently invented deities can have a good deal of power (witness the Wiccan Goddess), he suggests that things are much more complicated that we can really understand and that while the gods might in fact be illusions, we humans are nevertheless still more illusory. Actually I should clarify – Fries attributes this point of view to something Loki suggested to him. It does sound a lot like something Loki would say. I think Fries is less interested in virtually irresolvable abstraction and more interested in spending time going to meet the gods, whatever their ontological status might be. What a great role model!

One of the richest explorers of ‘polytheistic consciousness’ I have encountered is the post-Jungian psychologist James Hillman. Hillman’s writing is astoundingly deep. I daresay he understands and feels the character of divine beings much more deeply than most hard polytheists (or even most theists), despite the fact that from his point of view he is ‘just’ taking about archetypes.

The lesson on this front is once again that belief is cheap (see my previous post)! Do your opinions help you
understand and relate to the gods, or hinder you? Learn all you can about archaic Germanic psychological lore and learn all you can about your own seidh/magical/trance experiences. Explore your consciousness and unconsciousness. But make sure you spend more time practicing than you do theorising (at least once you have sufficient grounding in the mythology and history). You’ll have a lot more fun, and frankly our ancestors probably spent more time practicing than theorising too.

Jan Fries has popularised the term Deep Mind. This can refer to any of the aspects of the unconscious I have suggested above, plus it can refer to the imagination, to spirits, to gods, indeed to the Axis Mundi itself. It is a psychological term which opens up into things that are far beyond the merely psychological. I think this is a really helpful concept. It keeps us on the path of opening into magical experience and new horizons of consciousness.

Given the extent to which I’ve been assassinating the reputation of the conscious or ego self, I feel I should mention something about this. Its not that I think the conscious ego self, which finds itself in its feeling of subjective separateness and language-bound narrative, is all bad. Following Nietzsche, however, I regard it as the more recent part of human conscious and consequently the least well developed. I think the only way to develop it is to get it into a harmonious relationship with both the unconscious and the world around it (remember that natural world thingy outside our smoke-choked cities?).

This will eventually lead to the conscious/unconscious split dissolving. At that point we might get to dial direct to the well of Mimir via the graceful branches of Yggdrassil (see Bil Linzie’s amazing writings for more on this). Sounds good to me.

Also, your unconscious is sensitive to what you feed it. If you feed it a steady diet of bad TV, fast food and consumerist “I want it yesterday” mentality then it will get sick and your conscious ego will suffer too. It might be helpful to treat it like a high-maintenance and very loving pet which can nevertheless eat you if you mistreat it.

Well this has been a lot of pontificating now and I really should be practicing what I preach. I’m going to try to discipline my garrulous mind and make the next few posts specifically practical in character. Of course for me writing can easily slip into a flowing, inspired consciousness in which one word leads to another word. So even this pulpit sermonising silliness is a kind of magical experience and practice. Jormangand, I suspect, likes to gnaw on his own tail when he gets the munchies.

Til next time!

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