Dedicated to all those who came before us in this work,
and all those who will follow.

NEOLITHIC

SHAMANISM

“Our modern world is hungry for Spirit, and this hunger leads to some dark places if it isn’t met by Spirit. The shaman’s path is the strongest means we have of addressing this hunger in a meaningful way. Kaldera and Krasskova offer a grand mix of tradition, magic, and reconstruction in service to a broad community. Those with a genetic, cultural, or spiritual link with northern European culture will find this book especially satisfying.”

KENN DAY,
AUTHOR OF DANCE OF STONES

“Neolithic Shamanism is a primer in the finest sense; it will prime you to get well started on this path. It is so thorough it can well be the first book of any you read about shamanism. It is also primary in a touching, inspirational sense: Raven and Galina have an almost childlike belief in the work and spirituality they love and teach, and they have the simple courage to tell us all, ‘This is For Real.’”

CROW SWIMSAWAY, PH.D.,
AUTHOR OF SPIRIT KNIFE,
SOUL BONE

“Neolithic Shamanism approaches an ancient practice with modern sensibility; it is both a restructuring and reimagining of tribal practices for a modern world. Still, it is based on techniques as old as the human race, hallowing life in all its forms. I find that the book inspires hope as the authors gently lead their readers to one conclusion—there is no part of life that is not sacred.”

ÓCHA’NI LELE,
AUTHOR OF SACRIFICIAL CEREMONIES
OF SANTERÍA

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction: The Ancient World of Northern Shamanism

1. Common Questions about the Northern Tradition

How to Use This Book

1. Gods and Spirits, Spirits and Gods

2. How This Book Will Use You

Chapter 1. The Beginning Place: Earth

1. Land

2. Soil

3. Mountain

4. Seed

5. Forest

6. Salt

7. Body

8. Stones

9. Pottery

Chapter 2. The Golden World: Sun

1. Dawn

2. Morning

3. Noon

4. Evening

5. Winter Solstice

6. Spring Equinox

7. Summer Solstice

8. Autumn Equinox

9. Sundial

Chapter 3. The Silver World: Moon

1. New Moon

2. Crescent Moon

3. Waxing Quarter Moon

4. Gibbous Moon

5. Full Moon

6. Disseminating Moon

7. Waning Quarter Moon

8. Balsamic Moon

Chapter 4. The Green World: Plants

1. Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris)

2. Juniper (Juniperus communis)

3. Nettle (Urtica dioica)

4. Elder (Sambucus nigra)

5. Leek (Allium porrum)

6. Flax (Linum usitatissimum)

7. Birch (Betula spp.)

8. Alder (Alnus glutinosa)

9. Fir (Abies spp.)

Chapter 5. The Brown World: Animals

1. Squirrel

2. Boar

3. Bear

4. Reindeer

5. Goat

6. Horse

7. Crow

8. Seagull

9. Salmon

Chapter 6. The Blue World: Water

1. Ocean

2. River

3. Fen

4. Well

5. Lake

6. Waterfall

7. Rain

8. Blood

Chapter 7. The Red World: Fire

1. Making Fire

2. Need Fire

3. Smoke

4. Steam

5. Embers

6. Consecration

7. Dance

8. The Fire Within

9. Glassblowing

Chapter 8. The Gray World: Craft

1. Drum

2. Weaving

3. Mask

4. Stone Knife

5. Iron Knife

6. Staff

7. Brewing

8. Bone and Horn

9. Spirit Home

Chapter 9. The White World: Air

1. Breath

2. North Wind

3. East Wind

4. West Wind

5. South Wind

6. Snow

7. Frost

8. Ice

9. Flute

Chapter 10. The Black World: Ancestors

Epilogue: Broken Promises

Appendix: Elemental Disasters

1. Fire

2. Water

3. Air

4. Earth

Footnotes

Resources for Further Study

About the Author

About Inner Traditions • Bear & Company

Books of Related Interest

Copyright & Permissions

Introduction

The Ancient World of Northern Shamanism

Most of the ancestors of people of northern European descent lived in a harsh, uncompromising world. Battered by snow and ice for much of the year, tearing a living from the land by hunting, herding, fishing, and what agriculture could be managed in the cold North, they survived and so did their descendants. They began during the Ice Age at the bottom of the great glaciers and followed them north as they receded. They continued on this course until the glaciers stopped receding, in the Arctic areas where they remain today. Some lived in thick forest-covered mountains, some on ocean fjords, and some followed the reindeer across the frozen fields. They revered the Gods and spirits of their legends, of their people, of their ancestors, of the local place and the natural world around them.

Mostly, though, they asked those spirits to help them survive. The animal and plant spirits assured them of a reasonable food supply. The spirits of oceans, lakes, and rivers gave them fish and drinking water. The spirits of weather helped them to know when to sow or harvest and when to stay inside. The spirits of fire kept them warm, and the Sun and Moon gave them a sense of time. The spirits of the land itself helped them to find their way around, if they were nomadic, or to give them energy and fertility if they were settled. Somewhere along the line, during the Ice Age (which took place approximately 110,000 to 10,000 years ago), people began to appear who had the genetic gifts of a particularly clear line to the spirits. We call these people shamans. While each culture had its own name for those people, we don’t know for sure what northern European people called their spirit workers, so we’ll go with shaman for now.

The shamans explored and orally documented—in myths and fables—the natures of the spirits they worked with, how to find them, and, more important, how to behave toward them. They created a “technology” of altered states in order to hear them better and channel their energies more smoothly. They used their techniques to help their people, and their skills quickly became an evolutionary advantage. Shamans created relationships between the people and the spirits, and the spirits took an active interest in the welfare of the people . . . which meant making more shamans.

The spirits chose people according to their inborn psychic gifts and interfered in ways that made those gifts stronger, that bred more of those qualities into the genetic bloodlines. Some people they invited and coaxed into practicing; some they took without their consent and forced into the job, for the good of the ones they would help. Some were taken to the very brink of death to be repatterned for greater energy channeling. Some of those went over the brink and did not survive. To be a shaman was to risk death, possibly multiple times, and to be set apart from the rest of the people. It was to be sacrificed to improve their odds of survival.

Not everyone who had gifts went down the shaman’s path, which in our tradition, the Northern Tradition, always means a fairly extensive brush with death, usually through a serious illness from which shamans have to bring themselves back. Some people might forge alliances with a few spirits and do good for their tribe without being fully sacrificed to the shaman’s path—and this, too, is true today. Others fulfilled roles that supported the shaman, and these vocations were considered every bit as important. More than ever, we need to help people forge alliances with the spirits of Nature, if only to increase their love and appreciation for Nature itself. We’re not saying that everyone should be a shaman—it would be impossible—or even a shamanic practitioner. We’d just like to make it easier to access the most basic level of this tradition, no matter who you might be, because our world is terribly and dangerously out of balance. We need, desperately, to get right with the spirits; we need it more than ever before. We need to restore those ancient contracts, take up the unfinished work, and rebuild that community of reciprocity, respect, and right relationship.

This book began as a discussion between us—two Northern Tradition shamans—when we were sitting around talking about what we wished we’d had in the beginning. When the spirits—divine and otherwise—came for us, it would have been great if we’d had a primer about what to do first, which basic skills to master, how to handle our spirit relationships, and how to avoid accruing spiritual debt or giving offense through our ignorance. We’d found some books on shamanism at the time, but they were all either anthropological and theoretical (which wasn’t useful for the practical side of becoming a shaman or shamanic practitioner), or they were based on Native American practices or a vaguely spiritual worldview with little or no cultural context. While it is true that many (although not all) techniques are found in shamanic practices all over the world, we eventually discovered that cultural context was actually very important. There were rules about interacting with Gods and spirits who we needed to know, and finding out from the Gods and spirits themselves through trial and error was effective, but often frustrating and confusing (and sometimes painful). If our tradition had not been stamped out more than a thousand years ago, if there had been elders to pass down the information instead of our creeping painful attempts to reconstruct the practices of our ancestors from spirit messages, we would have been taught these cultural rules—and we would have learned them before ever being taken up as shamans.

Raven had written a series of books already—the Northern Tradition Shamanism series, put out by Asphodel Press—but they were more advanced books for shamans already partway down the road. Confused readers asked for something simpler, something that could be used by someone who had never done any of this before, but who was mysteriously drawn to it anyway. The training of a shaman in our tradition takes decades even with human aid, and longer without it. The training of a shamanic practitioner takes years at least. This book contains enough lessons for the first year or two. After that, consult the Resources for Further Study section at the end of this book, or, even better, find yourself a human teacher.

Welcome to our world. It is a place of fire and frost, snow and storm, briny seas on rocky shores, and briny blood spilled on growing grain. It can be a frightening place sometimes. It is also a place of profound beauty, eye-opening knowledge, and soul-shaking awe. We may not have chosen it, but it’s now our home. We wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Common Questions about the Northern Tradition

First, a disclaimer. All the shamanic techniques and information in this book are specific to our tradition. There are many other shamanic traditions in the world, and they may have quite different practices, policies, and spirits. When we talk about our practices, we are not speaking for any other shamanic tradition but our own. We couldn’t—we don’t do them! So if you have studied other shamanic practices and what you read here doesn’t match in every way, put that down to cultural differences. We are all very different, and that’s a good thing.

What do you mean by Northern Tradition?

The Northern Tradition is an umbrella term for the ancient religion of the Norse, Germanic, and Anglo-Saxon peoples. Under this umbrella are a variety of sects or denominations, including Heathenry/Asatru (a scholarly reconstruction of Iron Age Northern religion from primary texts), Northern Tradition Paganism (a Neopagan non-reconstructionist sect), Norse Wicca (a Wiccan offshoot that uses Northern Gods), and probably others. If you’d like to know more about Northern Tradition religion in general, please check the Resources. Just as indigenous shamanic practices are embedded in the religious worldview of the people who first passed them down, Northern Tradition shamanism is the practice of the people of northern Europe from the late Paleolithic onward, seated within the worldview of their cosmology. It is the shamanism of our ancestors—meaning the ancestors of the two authors of this book.

Some elements and practices in this shamanic tradition are the same as or very similar to the shamanism of the Saami people of northern Scandinavia, and that of western Siberia. At one time there may have been one overarching circumpolar shamanism that split into different pieces . . . or our ancestors may have borrowed heavily from their nomadic neighbors. Since we know that they engaged in extensive trading and sometimes intermarried with the Saami at least, the sharing of spiritual ideas would not be terribly surprising. There are also more “general” elements that are similar to many shamanic practices all over the world, and that’s probably just because when something works, people figure it out independently . . . or, perhaps, the spirits who inspired them happen to share knowledge with each other.

What do you mean by shamanism? Why do you use that word?

Our definition of shamanism is “a spiritual and magical practice that involves working with spirits and is designed to serve others.” It is distinct from thaumaturgic magic, which is working magically with directed energy, or theurgic magic, which is working with divinely inspired symbol systems like Kabbalah. Shamanism is working with entities, and that’s a whole different system. The word shaman is borrowed from the Tungusic languages of eastern Siberia and Manchuria, but it fills an important hole in our language, which no longer has a good term for what we do and who we are.

Shamanism is also distinct from religion proper, because while it is certainly a spiritual practice and has traditionally been embedded in a religious cosmology, it is a practical discipline that serves people in concrete ways—healing, divining, channeling spirits, and generally enhancing people’s lives. Shamanism can be compared to monasticism in that while it is almost always embedded in a religious context, it is not a religion per se. It could also be compared to spiritual scholarship, which is similar to but distinct from nonreligious scholarship, and also cannot be called a religion.

Shamanism is also distinct from mysticism in that it is goal oriented and work focused. Basically, being a shaman is a job. The primary duty of a shaman is to maintain balanced relationships between the community and the entities (Gods or spirits) involved, and between individuals and their Holy Powers. Everything else flows from that. The shaman is the servant of the holy, a mediator and diplomat. In this day and age, with so many of our indigenous ways destroyed, lost, or forgotten, the shaman is tasked with helping to reconstruct, renew, and restore not only our own tradition, but the ancient contract of respect, reciprocity, and honor that existed between our ancestors, their spirits, and their Gods. That is no small or easy thing.

Mystics may share many of the same techniques, especially the altered-state techniques, but their focus is on pure experience. If you ask them “What good is this? What’s it useful for?” they will probably just smile and tell you that it has its own goodness, which you have to experience to understand. For mystics, it’s between them and the Universe. For shamans and shamanic practitioners in this tradition, the question “What’s it useful for?” is all-important. As servants of a tribe, rather than as sole questers for oneness with the All, shamans have to stop short of entirely merging with the Divine Web and instead find ways to utilize these experiences for the betterment of their people. In some ways, it’s much more of a bodhisattva than a Buddha path, although the point is not getting everyone off the Wheel of Life and Death. Shamanism is set in a context that values all worlds equally, one that sees body and flesh and blood and Earth as sacred; the point is to make things easier for people here and now. Therefore, shamanism is intensely practical, making use of every tool of ecstasy, as the anthropologists like to call it, in order to make actual change in the world. (An excellent comparison of the Path of Mystic Quest with the Path of Shamanic Mediation, as the author refers to them, can be found in the book Six Ways of Being Religious, by Dale Cannon. While the book uses only Christian and Buddhist examples, the projected paths can easily be applied to other spiritual contexts as well.)

Many outside observers and peripheral practitioners of shamanism over the past century have been distracted by the tools of the practice, especially the techniques designed to create controlled altered states. They have seen the toolbox and missed the thing that was being built, and thus decided that these tools were the central feature and main point of shamanism. To us, that’s rather like saying that the main point of carpentry is to hammer nails into wood, with the corollary assumption that someone who sat around every day merely hammering rows of nails into random pieces of wood was a carpenter. In this tradition, at least, that’s not the case.

At its core, shamanic practice creates a network of relationships with spirits. These are not metaphorical archetypes. They are living beings, entities of many kinds who can do things that we can’t, and if we are in good relationship with them and with our world, they may consent to do those things for us. We are not their superiors, and in some cases they are ours. The tools—and especially the altered-state techniques—are simply the means by which you communicate with the entities with whom you have formed relationships. These relationships can be very different, depending on who you are and the spirits you work with. In our tradition, any given spirit worker may have a variety of relationships, as different as the myriad beings available for such interactions.

Some of those relationships may be akin to spiritual slavery, in that one deity (it’s usually only a God or Goddess who has the power to lawfully do this) has chosen you and made you his or her tool, while granting you certain powers and protections. (The word for this in our tradition is godatheow, which means “god-slave,” and usually happens with only some—not all—full-fledged shamans.) Some of these relationships may look like consenting alliances between a superior (deity) and an inferior (mortal), in which each agrees to provide certain favors in an exchange. (The word for this in our tradition is godathegn, which means “god-servant,” and there are usually negotiated boundaries and limitations on the situation.) Some of these relationships may be alliances between equal powers. (An example of this might be working with animal or plant spirits, who can’t make you do anything, but you can’t make them do anything either.) Regardless of the level of power exchange, it’s all about keeping those relationships well greased and humming along.

Shaman, shamanic practitioner, spirit worker: What’s the difference?

First, before we define these terms, we need to reiterate the disclaimer that we’re speaking only for our own tradition. Other groups may define these quite differently, but if you want to work within this tradition, you have to go with these definitions.

A spirit worker is someone who works with spirits on a constructive basis. It’s an umbrella term, and we use it for people in any tradition who do this, regardless of their ethnicity.

A shaman is someone who has been seized by the Gods or spirits (or both), sometimes without their consent, and is irrevocably changed on an energetic level by them in order to do work that would fry the circuits of anyone unaltered. This is usually accomplished through a “shamanic death,” a long illness (sometimes of many years) that can be physical or mental but is incurable by modern medicine and eventually bring the person very close to actual death. This is necessary because the energetic modifications can take place only when individuals are near death after having been “broken down” for many years, or it will kill them. After the threshold is passed, shamans find a way to get a handle on their illness with the aid of the spirits; they may not heal themselves entirely, but they do heal themselves back to the functionality needed to undertake a complicated service job. Anthropologists have often found that in spite of the bizarreness of shaman sickness and the odd appearance of spirit rituals, the healed shaman is usually one of the most stable and functional members of the village. For an interesting source of information on this topic, check out The World of Shamanism: New Views of an Ancient Tradition, by Roger Walsh (Llewellyn Publications, 2007), and Witchdoctors and Psychiatrists, by E. Fuller Torrey (HarperCollins 1986).

Only the Gods or spirits can select someone to be a shaman, because they can see who has the best psychic gifts and the greatest chance of actually surviving the shamanic death, which has an attrition rate even today. Shamans will do this job for the rest of their life, and it will be the central overriding fact of their life. (Moreover, the job may not end with the shaman’s death. Corporeality is not an absolute necessity for this work.) It will determine everything from what they eat to what they wear to where they live to whom they are allowed to have sex with or marry. If they refuse, they will be driven mad or killed. (Yes, this is exactly what happens. We are not exaggerating. This tradition grew out of the harsh and unforgiving circumpolar climate and geology, and it is also harsh and uncompromising, as are its Gods and spirits. Anyone who is interested in this tradition needs to think about this very carefully: can you deal with a tradition that is this uncompromising? Even if you are not chosen by the Gods or spirits to be a shaman—which is likely, because it’s very rare—there are still a lot of rules about how you interact with spirits, and you will not be able to put them aside without retribution. What you feel about something may not be relevant in the face of how the spirits want something done, or how something should be done for the greatest safety of all involved.)

Shamanic practitioners have trained in as many techniques as they have the ability to learn, with what psychic knack they have and what energetic “wiring” they have, without the trauma and “rebuilding” of a shamanic death. Some use those techniques as a service profession to help clients. Some simply use them to better their own lives and those of their loved ones. If they make bargains with spirits, they must keep them or suffer consequences from their angered former allies, but aside from that it is their choice as to what they wish to do or how far they go. If they have no lifetime bargains, they can quit with impunity. They have the right to accept or reject taboos when they are offered by the spirits in exchange for power; they might not get the power, but the taboos will not be forced on them. They may marry who they will and decide what to put on their breakfast cereal. They may not be able to accomplish many of the advanced techniques, but generally they can become extremely competent practitioners if they apply themselves.

Where did you come up with this information?

This tradition is entirely resurrected from communications from the Gods and spirits. We don’t claim otherwise. We did not find an ancient scroll in a cave or in someone’s attic; we did not find an old man or woman in a hut somewhere who had preserved this knowledge over the centuries. This is the shamanic tradition of our ancestors, and it was quite thoroughly lost hundreds of years ago. As Norse and Germanic culture evolved from small local tribes to large towns, the religion of the North lost much of its shamanic side. By the Iron Age—which is the era recreated by Heathen reconstructionism—there was no longer a shamanic culture. (Actually, by the end of the Iron Age, there wasn’t even much of a Pagan culture anymore—it did not survive the conversion.) There were certainly examples of it in myth—the central god figure Odin, for example, is clearly a shaman—and a few practitioners may have kept it alive well into the encroachment of civilization, but the onslaught of Christianity wiped out all of that. Fortunately, our Gods and spirits did not forget these traditions and our attendant technologies.

At some point, the Gods and spirits of this cosmology began to contact a handful of solitary people and teach them this lost knowledge. After many years, we began to meet each other and compare notes, and discovered to our amazement that we had a great deal of information in common. (We’d all thought that we were the only ones, you see.) We compared and contrasted ideas, and are slowly recreating this tradition as best we can. As our information is validated by our peers, we write about it.

The Buryat Mongols have a word for shamans whom are spirit taught—it’s bagshagui. Usually this happens when the shaman’s lineage or clan dies out and the spirits who have worked with them all move over to another line or clan and pick some poor slob who they have decided would make a decent shaman. Bagshagui don’t have the benefit of the old guy in the hut to teach them. Everything has to be learned from the spirits themselves, who are wonderfully effective but extremely frustrating teachers who give information that is sometimes jumbled and vague. That’s why we are continuing the process of comparing and contrasting information, to make sure that we get it right.

Aren’t you ripping off these ancient peoples and their cultures?

Because these are our ancestors, we would say that we have a fairly solid right to do what we’re doing, if you use the argument that one’s ancestral traditions are an inheritance. Frankly, though, we’d do this even if they weren’t our ancestors. Political correctness aside, we do this because that’s what the Gods who own us and the spirits who work with us say that we have to do. If we had been grabbed up by, say, Native American Gods and spirits, we’d be doing that path even though neither of us have a drop of that blood, and we’d just have to find a way to pay back the lineage that was not ours by birth and deal with the opprobrium that would be heaped upon us.

What style of shamanism is taught in this tradition?

Today there are a number of new shamanistic traditions created by people who have learned something about aboriginal shamanic practices (whether through actual apprenticing or reading and experimenting) and want to bring this information to the Western masses, often without the “burden” of the tribal culture and religion surrounding the practices. There are also a variety of people from indigenous cultures teaching the shamanism of their tribe. However, when we combine all these very different teachings and look at how they function, it becomes clear that they tend to fall into one of two stylistic groups, regardless of their origin.

We call these two styles empowerment traditions and specialist traditions. In empowerment traditions, the ritual leader teaches certain basic shamanic skills to a group of people who need have no previous experience with shamanism or any specific inborn psychic powers. These practices may or may not be seated in an ancient or indigenous religion, and one need not necessarily adhere to any specific faith in order to practice it. The skills taught to the students enable them to do things such as enter a trance and journey into one’s internal depths or into archetypal-level Otherworlds, and occasionally (though rarely) into actual Otherworlds. Empowerment shamanism teaches people—any people—how to use these techniques to find answers for themselves, resolve internal conflicts, find soul healing, and stimulate spiritual growth. It also teaches them how to find their place in harmony with Nature, in a world that is more than just soulless modern society. If the students stay around, some may eventually become permanent members of the group and peers with the leader, while others take the skills and leave, using them to better their own lives. Most empowerment traditions are modern, although a few are traditional. Some tribal societies have both, existing alongside each other, as both a way to allow more community participation and a stopgap for when no specialists are available to the tribe.

Specialist traditions—and most (though not all) indigenous practices fall into this category—are designed to create highly trained professional service providers. Many of the techniques take years (or even decades) of training and practice to master, and require the memorization of huge amounts of data, usually related to the specific ancient or indigenous religion in which the specialist tradition is almost always ensconced. A significant percentage of the techniques are quite dangerous to the practitioners unless they have had those years of training, and a few are dangerous no matter how much training they have. (In our tradition, the higher levels of specialist training are open only to those who have gone through a shamanic death, which is sometimes achieved through an actual near-death experience.) Some advanced techniques cannot be successfully learned at all unless you have been born with a specific psychic gift. If you visit a specialist practitioner, you as the client will sit or lie as you are told while the practitioner goes into a trance and does what is necessary to diagnose and treat you. Some practitioners will explain what they are doing, and some won’t. In many tribal societies, they don’t explain, and it may be considered rude even to ask.

Empowerment traditions and specialist traditions have separate functions, and neither could be said to be better. They are apples and oranges, useful for completely different things. If the desired goal is gaining insight into oneself, developing empowerment to achieve one’s goals, and bringing oneself into better harmony with the Earth, the Universe, and one’s wyrd (spiritual destiny), an empowerment tradition is exactly what is wanted. Really, the only reasons to pursue a specialist tradition are (1) you have a strong calling to serve others as a profession and you want this to be your career, (2) it’s the tradition of your people, it’s in danger, and you have a strong calling to learn it, if only to pass it on, and (3) it came and got you and now you’re stuck with it.

Take, for instance, a group of people who come together every week to learn about alternative medicine from books, visiting speakers, and shared experience, and work toward making themselves and their families healthier, and compare them with a trauma surgeon in her final year of residency. Both are valuable and necessary, but there’s really no rational way to compare them as categories. The alternative health group can alleviate a huge amount of collective suffering in small doses by making even a limited group of people healthier, but if you are in a car accident and need someone to put your leg back together, they aren’t going to be able to do the job. You might, if you are lucky, go through your entire life never seeing a trauma surgeon, but when you need one, you need one badly, and that surgeon must sacrifice a great deal to go through stressful years of medical school, internship, and residency in order to give you the highly technical care that you need. However, if you’ve only got a cold, seeing a trauma surgeon is not the appropriate course of action; you would do better to visit the alternative medicine group’s weekly meeting and be taught how to mix tinctures into a cough-and-cold mixture for your symptoms. Conversely, if you asked trauma surgeons to run a class for average people with no training on how to do trauma surgery, they would probably be horrified; nor would they give out scalpels for people to try DIY amputations. Only a small percentage of people would do well as a trauma surgeon; most should not even consider it. On the other hand, most people could definitely do with becoming healthier in a way that harmonizes their bodies with the Earth.

Northern Tradition shamanism has been primarily a specialist tradition. Certainly the advanced work is entirely geared toward specialists, with all the attendant dangers. The authors are both specialists with more than fifteen years of training apiece; as mentioned, Raven authored the Northern Tradition Shamanism series of books, which is entirely advanced techniques for full-fledged shamans, and Galina contributed numerous articles to that series as well. However, we have recently been pushed by the Gods and spirits to find a way that some part of this training can be shared with people who are not destined to be highly specialized service providers but are simply drawn to this cosmology and some of these practices. After a period of praying and talking, we wrote down all the basic-level skills that don’t require someone to become a shaman in order to do them . . . and this book is the end result.

An example of both empowerment and specialist traditions in the same spiritual context is found in the work of Waldemar Bogoras (The Chukchee, Leiden University, 1917), who writes about Chukchee shamans. He also says, “Besides this, every adult Chukchee will occasionally take his drum, especially in the winter, and beat it for awhile in the warm shelter of the sleeping-room, with the light or without it, singing his melodies to the rhythm of the beats.” Marie Czaplicka (Shamanism in Siberia, 1914) comments on his writing: “We see from the above that one member of the family has the duty of beating the drum during certain ceremonials, and amuses himself sometimes by shamanizing just as he amuses himself by beating the drum at any time, apart from ceremonials. Of course, we cannot call this member of the family a shaman. . . we can call shamans only those individuals having special skill and vocation, whether or not they are shamans by heredity.”

It seems that the Gods and spirits would like to extend Northern Tradition shamanism from an exclusively specialist tradition to evolving an affiliated empowerment tradition. It may be that it was originally this way, although our communications with Gods and spirits do not seem to support this idea, or it may be that the Gods and spirits are not static beings. They are active in the human world and they understand the need to change with the times. However it goes, we started receiving the push to begin this just before we started receiving a wave of correspondence from strangers who were drawn to the shamanic side of our religion. They had read our more advanced writings and wanted something more basic . . . and so we give it to them.

While I like the tales of the Gods of your religion and your descriptions of the spirits, I’m not sure that I believe in them. Can I still practice this tradition if I believe that they are archetypes or energy forms created by human attention?

No. You cannot. Sorry, we’re going to have to be hard-line on this one.

This is an ancient shamanic tradition embedded in a polytheistic religion. That’s fundamental. There’s no way to get around that. Not only do you have to believe fully and thoroughly in these spirits in order to really practice it, but if you come at them with anything less than complete faith in their existence, they may be offended and refuse to deal with you . . . and for this tradition, it’s all about working with the spirits. No spirits, no luck. Not only are they all real, but they are all distinct from each other as well.

While we aren’t going to be discussing the Northern Gods in this book—and we’ll explain why shortly—it’s absolutely necessary that you believe in them, although you need not worship any or all of them at first. However, if you begin working with the nondeific spirits in this tradition, there is a chance that you will attract the attention of the Gods, and they may speak to you, and it would be dangerously rude at that point in the process to decide that you don’t believe in them. (If you believe that you have been contacted by a God, but you aren’t sure if it was real or your own mental sock puppets, the best course of action is to get a reading on the matter by a shaman or other professional diviner who specializes in such questions.)

In other words, yes, you have to have some level of spiritual belief in the Northern Tradition to successfully partake in the entirety of this practice. That doesn’t mean that you have to be solely invested in this religious worldview. You can believe in other Gods and hold other faith practices, and you don’t have to be involved with any Northern Tradition religious groups. You just have to understand, deeply, that this is all For Real.

If you are not comfortable with polytheistic belief, perhaps you might prefer working with a more ceremonial magic system. If you are drawn to Norse stuff, there is a sect of Norse-style ceremonial magic that combines the two. However, it is not shamanism. I realize that some shamanistic systems downplay the literal existence of spirits and allow people to reserve their disbelief. That’s fine for them, but not for us. If you can’t fully embrace the religious and devotional aspects of this tradition of shamanism, don’t practice it. Find something that fits better with your worldview; there are plenty of them out there.

Can I practice this tradition if these are not my ancestors?

Yes, you can. We’ve asked, repeatedly, and it turns out that regardless of how the Gods and spirits of other traditions may feel about it, ours are happy to snap up likely people of any ancestry if they take a shine to them. They don’t mind at all. They seem to feel that enriching the shamanic “gene pool” of this tradition is rather like marrying worthy outsiders: it brings in good, strong blood that adds to the power of the existing pool. However, we’ve found that even with supposedly completely nonwhite folk who are strangely attracted to this tradition, there is likely a tiny amount of northern European blood in there somewhere. Ancestry isn’t always as straightforward as the homogeneity people would have us believe. In the end, it isn’t important where your ancestors come from, but that you honor them. But in short, yes, you don’t have to be northern European or even Caucasian to do this. And anyway, it won’t be any human being who decides whether the exercises in this book will work for you.

What sorts of things did Northern Tradition spirit workers do in ancient times? How is it different from what they do now?

In ancient times, spirit workers did a variety of things to help their people survive. They called the wild animals for hunting and the reindeer for herding. They called fish into rivers and close to seacoasts. They made sacrifices to ensure the crops grew. They undertook healing of various sorts—magical and herbal together—for the sick. They performed divination for individuals and the tribe, especially when things went wrong, and figured out who had to be propitiated in order to set things right. They guided leaders in tribal decision making and warfare. They named children. They put people through ordeals of passage and purification. They altered the weather. They made women and men fertile. They blessed those who needed blessings. They cleansed evil places. They protected the tribe from destructive spirits and the shamans of other tribes. They talked to the dead, and to the Gods and spirits, and they mediated for the community and these worlds.

They also did a lot of destructive things. They fought in battles, charming weapons and calling in spirits to aid their side. They helped warriors shape-shift into fierce animals. They magically attacked the other side’s warriors, and sometimes the members of neighboring tribes who were encroaching on territory. They left their bodies in order to perform reconnaissance for their chieftains. They drove people mad. They made vengeance magic and curses for people who paid them, and this, too, was accepted and considered right and loyal. In fact, they probably did as much of the latter as of the former types of magic.

Today, many of these things are no longer useful, which is why neither of us owns a hunting drum. However, many of things that our ancestral spirit workers did we still do, including performing divination of all sorts, untangling people’s bad luck and fate, carrying out protection rites, healing, undergoing and supervising ordeals of passage, cleansing bad places, and talking to the Dead. Like our predecessors, we still fare forth on errands to Otherworlds, and we still mediate between the inhabitants of those worlds and this one.

How to Use This Book

Each section of this book deals with a particular type of spirit, large or small. Some, like the chapters on Sun, Moon or Fire, cover a variety of ways to interact with one larger spirit; others, like the chapters on plants and animals, deal with several smaller spirits of the same kind. Since we decided to limit ourselves to no more than nine subsections per chapter (nine being the sacred number of the Northern Tradition), or the book would have gone on forever, your favorite animal or plant is probably not in here. However, the same rules apply, and if none of the plants or animals here will connect with you, try the techniques on other ones. (And, for the record, some practitioners will connect only with animals, and others only with plants.)

No human being works well with every spirit. Some will form an instant connection with you, and some will never speak to you. That’s quite normal! Both of us are shamans of many years’ experience, and while we have many spirit allies, we also have plenty of experiences with spirits who weren’t interested in talking to us, or who took a firm dislike to us from the start. Remember that these are people. They aren’t human people, but they are People. Like all individuals, some will take a shine to you, and some will prefer someone else. Don’t take it personally. In addition, don’t be upset if the spirit you had romantic ideas about doesn’t connect with you, and don’t scorn the one who does just because it wasn’t what you wanted. It’s altogether possible that your romantic illusions about what a particular spirit ought to be were strong enough that the actual spirit, with its own reality that didn’t match yours, wouldn’t speak to you. It’s also possible that a spirit you hadn’t imagined in connection with yourself wouldn’t have to plow through your illusions in order to get to you. Again, as with human friends, be glad for the ones you’ve got.

We do encourage you to go slowly through this book, trying out the different exercises, and see what works for you. We strongly suggest that you start with the exercises in the Beginning Place chapter, and do them in order. Those are your basics. It’s really necessary to get the exercises in that chapter down before proceeding onward. From there, you can do the rest in any order. Doing all the exercises in the whole book should take you a minimum of a year, but most people will not do anywhere near all of them—the affinity or the skill isn’t there, and that’s all right. If a particular smaller spirit (animal, plant, craft, etc.) is not connecting with you, feel free to move on.

However, if one of the four basic elements—Earth, Air, Fire, and Water—isn’t connecting, make sure that you come back to it after a few weeks or months. It’s important for a shamanic practitioner to have at least some kind of relationship with each of the elements, although everyone does better with some than with others. Most of us, even experienced shamans, find ourselves cycling back to the individual Elemental Powers and to the lessons of our allied spirits again and again throughout our working lives, because we don’t ever get it all in one go. We learn and grow and our understanding grows, and then we learn some more. So much of this practice isn’t about what you can get, but what you can learn and thereby give: to the spirits; the Gods; the tribe; the community; or the aching, hurting, terrified person who comes to your door.

While we have provided an entire chapter on shamanic crafting in this tradition, we have also included a craft geared toward the elements in each of the other chapters. Unfortunately, we don’t have the room in this book to teach how to do each of these crafts; if any of them appeal to you, please find trained crafters to learn from. The exercises for these crafts assume a basic knowledge and skill, but getting those is up to you. The Resources is a good place to start for book knowledge.

Gods and Spirits, Spirits and Gods

We have a variety of names for spirits. In Old Norse, one of the most common words for a spirit was vaet, with the plural vaettir, and we will make numerous references to vaettir in this book. In addition, you may also see the word wight, which is the Anglo-Saxon version of the same term. It is pronounced “white” but has nothing to do with that word or the color. Another Old Norse term for generic spirits is náttúrar, and another generic Anglo-Saxon term is gæst, from whence comes our modern word ghost. (If you are interested in further detail about the many different kinds of spirits in our cosmology, check out Raven’s book Wyrdwalkers, listed in the Resources.)

Those of you who are familiar with our other works on Northern Tradition shamanism or on the Northern Tradition in general will probably be surprised when you read this book and see that it has very little mention of the Norse or Germanic Gods. There’s a reason for that—actually, a few reasons. First, when Raven was told to write a book on Northern Tradition shamanism for beginners—and for people not specifically chosen by Gods—he prayed about what it should contain, and the Northern Gods themselves told him: “Don’t write about us. Go back further. Go back to the very beginning, before humans in northern Europe made our acquaintance. Go back to the age of stone and fire, of survival in the snow, of the first shamans. Start where your ancestors started—fire and frost, plants and animals, Sun and Moon, the ancestors.” So we did. This book harks back to shamanism from the Paleolithic Age to the Bronze Age, or, rather, our extrapolation of that given that we are modern people who do work with the same spirits, and those spirits haven’t changed much even though we have.

Second, working with Gods as a shaman (or even as a shamanic practitioner) is different from working with elemental or animal or plant spirits. It’s also different from simply worshiping them as a religious practitioner (and if you want more information on that nonshamanic angle, we suggest that you look into our book Northern Tradition for the Solitary Practitioner, published through New Page Books). Doing shamanic work with the Northern Gods (and the Alfar, Duergar, and Jotnar—elves, dwarves, and giants—that intermingle with them) is much more dangerous, and we consider it a more advanced level of shamanic practice. It can also, in some cases, become very nonconsensual very quickly. While elemental spirits will expect you to keep the agreements that you’ve made with them (and have the right to punish you if you break your word), they generally won’t go snapping you up and making you into a servant—or, in some cases, a shaman-slave. Some of the Northern Gods have far less compunction on that score. Similarly, while trekking through real Otherworlds is part of the shaman’s job, it’s an advanced and damned dangerous job, and often requires a patron deity to watch your back . . . which, as we’ve just said, creates its own complications.

This means that if you’re completely new to this and you don’t know yet whether it’s for you—much less whether you want it to become an integral part of your life, for the rest of your life—we feel that it’s best to stick to the spirits outlined in this book and become proficient with them. After all, the elements, plants, and animals are all around us, and your ancestors are always with you in your blood. You don’t need to journey to Otherworlds to access them. They are a part of you, every one—it’s just a matter of magnifying and becoming acutely conscious of that connection. If you do eventually end up being sought out by the Gods, having gained some measure of mastery with the techniques in this book will stand you in good and useful stead.

However, some will ask us what the difference is between a deity and a spirit, anyway. Well, obviously, it’s one of magnitude (kind of like an earthquake), but where do we draw the line? We don’t know, and neither does anyone else. We both like to quote a friend who says: “If it’s bigger, older, and wiser than I’ll ever be, I put it in the God category and give it the requisite respect.” So, yes, there is a gray area between them, but even so we’re going to stick to spirits who are less “personified” (which doesn’t mean that they lack personalities).

Those who are students of Northern mythology will notice that the structure of this book does reflect and honor the Nine Worlds that spin around Yggdrasil, the World Tree. That’s deliberate; some truths are found everywhere. However, this is not a book about the shamanic practices of the Nine Worlds; it’s a book about the shamanic practices of this one. If you are already called by a Northern god or goddess, we suggest checking out the list of advanced books in the Resources. But if you’re not—or even if you are—don’t jump the gun. Become knowledgeable and proficient with the spirits of our world first. To dismiss them because you have some romantic (and probably dangerously false) ideas about how the Gods and spirits of the Otherworlds are more exciting, or because you don’t like this world much for purely human reasons, is a crucial mistake.

How This Book Will Use You

Which brings us to another point. Humans don’t like this world much. We give lip service to the beauty of the Earth and of Nature, but we often dream about being somewhere else in some human-created fictional world. Many of us also resent the fact that we have bodies at all. Our culture denigrates the Earth and the physical body as far behind the work of the mind. If you begin shamanic work, however, the first thing that you will do is to connect with the natural world—what we call the Real World, not the human-created social world—and that includes the flesh world that you currently inhabit. This is so important within Northern Tradition practice that the physical body in each incarnation is even viewed as part of the soul. Yes, you read that right: our physical body, our flesh, is one piece of our soul.

Eventually the shamanic path does take you to a place of altered consciousness, of getting outside your body. That’s part of the practice, and we do talk a great deal about that in this book. But before you go there, you have to understand the physical world on a deep level. If you can’t connect deeply and physically with the Earth and your own body, and really know the spiritual connection between them, your various altered-state journeys will not take you out of yourself. Instead, you’ll just dreamily explore an inner world of your own deep mental meaning, populated by your own mental sock puppets. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—internal work can be useful in dealing with your issues and making you a more whole person—but it is not spirit work . . . and if you are disconnected enough, you might not know the difference. That’s a pitfall of beginning spirit work, and one that requires practice to solve—practice at being fully in the natural world and in your body that is part of that world.

Don’t like human culture? Fine. That’s not the Real World. Go look at a patch of dirt with ants crawling on it, or the moss at the roots of a tree. That’s the Real World. (In fact, there’s more life in a tablespoon of good soil than in a major metropolitan city.) Be in it, wholly and fully. Of course, part of how you know you’re fully in it is when you begin to want to protect and care for it, when its value has shot up past that of your own comfort and convenience. The Real World is under constant attack by the Unreal World, and if you consciously let it, it will use you to protect itself. Letting it use us in this way is how we pay for the privilege of living in it . . . and even further, making alliances with the elemental spirits who rule the Real World, and sharing in their power, requires more of us.

Spirit work of any kind changes your values, your lifestyle, your ethics, and your actions. It requires a high level of mindfulness in order to work, and that mindfulness will remake you life whether you like it or not. Working with plant and animal spirits will make you look long and hard at where your food (and clothing, paper, furniture, etc.) comes from. Working with the Sun and Moon will make you look at how you use your limited time. If you’re looking for power at little cost, or spirituality at little inconvenience, you’re looking in the wrong place. Shamanic practice of any kind requires great effort and thoughtfulness, and being in harmony with the Real World as much as possible. To get even halfway through this book will change you and your life in innumerable ways. You have now been warned.

1

The Beginning Place

Earth

Hail to the Earth, to the dark below,

Hail to the mountain and the grain of sand,

Hail to the standing stone in the fertile field,

Hail to the Mother who gives us life.

In every craft, in every discipline, there is a starting point, a place at which everyone must begin. This point becomes one’s foundation, the solid support upon which all other work will be built. In many respects, it is very much like building a house; the foundation must be carefully built and must be strong to support the rest of the structure. After that, the process of creating a home within that structure begins. This metaphor is particularly apt for Earth; the virtues of Earth include patience; discipline; structured, step-by-step work; and, above all else, consistency. Part of working within this world is learning to develop those habits within oneself. They then go on to inform the work that will be done in every other place within the Nine Worlds. These are important lessons, important pieces of power, and without them, excellence and true skill are impossible.

Earth is about fruition. It is about abundance and wealth, within oneself as well as without. This is the place where one enters into the long process of becoming a shaman or shamanic practitioner. Earth has a certain flow to it, but it’s the flow of allowing resources to flourish, of sharing them properly, and conserving them when necessary. There is a practicality inherent in Earth that might at first seem at odds with the idea of spiritual accomplishment, when in reality it lies at the heart of what we do.

We cannot overemphasize the importance of mastering the skills of Earth first and foremost, especially grounding, centering, and shielding. It always comes back to Earth: to the limits of our corporeality, the lessons of our skin and bone and blood, the wisdom acquired through patient toil, and the knowledge that everything, absolutely everything, is alive.

The exercises provided in this chapter are absolutely fundamental first steps toward becoming a competent shamanic practitioner in this tradition. If you do nothing else, learn these techniques. In fact, while the other chapters of the book can be dealt with in pretty much any order, this chapter should be attended to first. It’s not only impossible to progress properly without having mastered these techniques but also dangerous to try.

Land

Galina: I began honoring the vaettir, the land spirits, very early on in my work. I keep a pretty bowl in a corner of my kitchen, and at least once a week, I pour out offerings of sweets, food, or drink—whatever I think they will like. Sometimes, if I am cooking something interesting, they will clamor for a bite, and I usually acquiesce. I began doing this long before I became a shaman. I’m not much of a Nature person, but some vaettir choose to inhabit homes rather than the outdoors, and it was with these spirits that I first developed a relationship. Living in New York City at the time, it took me a little longer to learn to sense and interact with the vaettir of the city and also the primary city spirit. I began with the vaettir in my home.

I think my real epiphany came when I attended an outdoor ritual at a local Pagan shop, a location that accommodated many different types of Wiccan and Pagan rituals each month. Many ritual facilitators pulled energy from the land without thought, calling on the elements, raising energy, but never, ever giving anything back. It felt horrid, really sickening. I looked around and the grass was brown, the trees and shrubs were ragged and dying. For the first time, I was bombarded by a sense of the land spirits: parched, starving, and in pain. I was so horrified that I stalked out of the ritual to the corner store and came back with bread and beer. Ignoring the ritual in progress, I went to a corner of the space and set out the bread and poured the beer over it in an offering to the vaettir of that place. They swarmed in hungry desperation. Somehow that was even more horrifying than sensing their initial deprivation. While it was all I could afford at the time, the bread and beer hardly made a dent in sating their starvation. It was a huge lesson for me in right relationship with the land, and it confirmed that the responsibility of any energy worker (as I would consider a ritual leader, priest, or priestess to be) extends far beyond simply themselves and their congregations. I learned that we have a responsibility to those beings whose homes we inhabit and tramp across daily. It was a lesson in respect. For a shaman or shamanic practitioner, that responsibility triples.

When I bought my house, one of my requirements was that the land spirits be healthy (and they were). One of the first things I did was pour out offerings to the land spirits, the house spirits, and the spirit of my home itself, which is a separate entity that rules the energy of my dwelling place. I continue to do this at least once a week as part of my regular practice. This is not burdensome, and the rewards are manifold. I find that when I am ill or exhausted, my house spirits support me. The primary genius loci of the dwelling itself has actually protected me from injury, cushioning a fall that should have broken my ankle. She quite literally caught me. If I lose things, I often ask the house vaettir for help finding what I’ve lost (and I give them something nice to drink afterward), and I rely on the land spirits outside to help protect the land.

The downside is that more and more, I dislike traveling or being away from my home and little plot of land for any length of time. I find it immensely draining. When I do travel, the first thing I do upon returning home is feed my ancestors and my vaettir. I suppose as with any spirit relationship there’s very much a quid pro quo in play; we relate to each other through a mutual enjoyment of each other’s company, gratitude, and an ongoing process of gift giving. This is the way that relationships are negotiated in the Northern Tradition, especially with spirit allies, and I learned how to do this responsibly and sensibly from the land spirits.

Raven: I have a chronic illness, and on top of that is all my high-energy shamanic work. If I didn’t have a good relationship with the landwight of my eighteen-acre farm and woods, things would go far worse for me. When we first took possession of our farm, my wife and I bonded to the landwight by giving it a few drops of our blood, as well as some dinner offerings. When I am ill, I go outside and lie on the Earth (assuming it’s not the middle of winter with three feet of snow on the ground) and ask the land spirit to give me extra energy. It has never failed me. I found that it was eager to bond with a human being who would recognize its presence and its sacredness. It is very protective—in fact, when a visitor pretended to threaten my wife with a spear that he didn’t know was actually sharp, the land spirit rose against him and broke his leg. “The ground just seemed to rise and trip me!” he complained later.

Of course, the price that I pay for this loyalty and aid is that I can’t really go away for more than a few weeks, perhaps a month at most. I will be buried on this land when I die. My body will go into its earth and become part of it. When I leave for trips, I’ve taken to bringing along a small plastic bag of home earth inside a leather sack. I place it under my motel pillow at night, and the land spirit can reach me, a little, just a thin thread through space, but it’s enough to give me a trickle of energy and help me sleep better. My family makes jokes about coffins and “native earth,” but it’s worth the price for one of the best allies I have, one whom I feel touching the soles of my feet as I go about on my land.

The ancient Romans developed the concept of genius loci, the spirit of a place, which Galina mentions in her writing above. As we explained earlier, this tradition has vaettir, or wights: spirits of the land. Celtic traditions speak of the little folk, and Shinto has its kami in every stone, every tree, every blade of grass. This awareness must inform your practice: everything is alive; everything is sentient; everything has a spirit. Our tradition is very much an animistic one, and spirits who inhabit the places we walk and, most important, the places we live, must be honored.

If you want to do any type of shamanic work, one of the first things you need to do is engage in some way with the vaettir of the land. This isn’t particularly difficult, but there are major differences between land ownership and renting. If you own the land, the obligations can be much more pressing.

Exercise: Connecting with the Land Spirit

If you live in an apartment, you will focus on getting to know your house spirits only. If you own your own property, you will need to work both with the household vaettir and the external land vaettir.

Begin by going into your kitchen. The kitchen is really the heart of the home energetically, so it’s a good place to make contact with your household spirits. Take a bowl and fill it with either milk and honey or good beer. Verbally introduce yourself to the house spirits. State your intention of getting to know them and your commitment to feeding them regularly. Ask them where they would like their bowl to go, and then quiet yourself and listen. You’ll likely get a sense of where to place the offering bowl. Once you’ve initiated the relationship, thank them, and then keep to a consistent schedule of offering. Consistency is actually better than quantity. You don’t have to bankrupt yourself in making offerings. Just share a few bites of whatever you have once a week or so.

If you own your own property, it is incredibly beneficial to develop a relationship with the land spirits as well. You may, if you are lucky, even encounter the dominant land spirit. Galina recommends preparing a mixture of good-quality tobacco, cornmeal, and blood meal; Raven uses homemade stew. Go outside and trace the perimeter of your property. Introduce yourself to the spirits of the place and sprinkle the offering mixture along the perimeter of your property. Then pour out a bottle of good, dark beer in offering. If you get the feeling that there is one specific location where you should be placing the offerings, then do so. Otherwise, continue to make regular offerings.

Alcohol is always good. Galina finds that her land spirits absolutely love spiced rum, and Raven uses his wife’s homebrew. Other offerings might be burying coins or small stones that you have imbued with good energy, or singing to them, or even giving sexual energy—lying on the Earth to do some pleasant sexual act and giving the orgasm to the land spirit. As with your house vaettir, consistency is important. Once you begin making offerings, you should make an effort to continue.

Soil

Galina: Right around the time I began to explore polytheism, a few months before I had my conversion experience (what else can I call a deity showing up?), I also began to study magic. This later came to serve me well as a shaman, but at the time I was just trying to find my way in what was a very overwhelming world. I moved from a small, relatively rural town to New York City, and suddenly every moment of every day I found myself bombarded by other people’s thoughts and emotions. It was the emotional bombardment that was the worst; walking into a store or down the street, or into a restaurant, often felt like running a gauntlet of physical blows. I didn’t know it then, but moving to the city triggered a rapid development of my strongest psychic gift: empathy. This is the ability to intimately experience the emotions of others, and untrained, it is both dangerous and painful.

I really think the Gods were watching out for me, though. I was very fortunate to find the right books, the right groups, the right teachers at this crucial point in my studies, and I really think that made all the difference. My teachers were smart enough to teach me centering, grounding, and shielding immediately. Having suddenly realized through this training that I could control my gifts rather than be at the mercy of them, I blossomed under this tutelage. I really don’t think I would have survived those early years with either sanity or emotional balance intact without having learned these very basic exercises when I did. Now when I teach, I present them first and return to them again and again as absolutely necessary fundamentals. It really doesn’t matter whether a person wishes to study magic, or become a shamanic practitioner, or learn meditation, or engage in devotional work, or develop his or her psychic sensitivities; the basic exercises are the same, and until they are mastered, it’s utter foolishness to go any further. This is the technical foundation of everything else one will ever do. Over the past decade, I and many of my students have heard of teachers and groups who either didn’t teach these things or, worse, declared that they weren’t necessary. This is utter bullshit, and I can think of nothing more damaging to the next generation of practitioners than to be without the very tools that will help them succeed.

There is more life in a tablepoon of soil than in the average major metropolitan city. Civilizations are birthed, grow, flourish, and die in hours, days, or weeks, all within the rich blackness, of the Earth’s soil. Wars are waged there; and we scurry about far above its blackness, effectively oblivious. The lesson of soil is one of humility. It reminds us that not only are we dependent on something bigger than we ourselves could ever be, but that this is a good and necessary thing.

Symbolically, soil roots us. It is a rich bed of life into which we can pour out energy and from which we draw sustenance, very literally in the form of food. If we don’t take care of our bodies (which we’ll talk about later on in this chapter), then we can’t progress to taking care of our souls or to minding our energy. A classical metaphysical maxim proclaims, “As above, so below.” The logical corollary to that is “As within, so without.” As we feed our bodies from the blessings of the soil, so too must we feed our energetic bodies. This is where grounding and centering come in.

Exercise: Grounding and Centering

Centering and grounding are immensely important exercises. We were taught to center first and then ground, but there is an argument for the opposite. In the end, it doesn’t really matter, so long as both exercises are practiced daily, preferably several times a day for the first few months of training. If working with the land spirit is your foundation, these two exercises are your metaphysical backbone. They are oxygen. They are essential.

Centering serves three purposes:

1. You are clearly delineating and defining the boundaries of you: where you begin and end and also where the outside world begins and ends.

2. Having located your physiological center, which in women tends to be at the sex chakra (roughly three inches below the navel) and in men and large-busted women at the solar plexus, you are collecting any tension or stress (which is blocked energy), jagged emotions, or excess energy in what can be felt or visualized as a glowing sphere.

3. You are ensuring that your energetic body and your physical body occupy the same shape and space. (If there is too great a disparity between the two, a certain level of dysphoria and physical illness can result.)

NOTE: Many esoteric books focus extensively on visualization. Do not worry if you cannot visualize. There are many ways of sensing energy, and seeing it is only one of them. Some people will feel energy much easier than they will ever see it. This is equally valid. Just as we all have different learning modalities, so too energy can translate differently to different people. If you can neither sense nor see, then imagine. Imagination is a powerful tool. Thought follows imagination, and energy follows thought. Then one learns to harness all of that to the will. That is one of the keys to all effective work. So see, feel, sense, know. It doesn’t matter how you’re negotiating the exercise as long as you’re making the attempt to do so consistently.

The easiest method of centering is something called the fourfold breath. To do this breathing exercise, simply inhale four counts, hold four counts, exhale four counts, hold four counts. Do this over and over for about ten minutes. This will center you. Altering the breath can have a tremendous physiological and energetic effect on the body. For that reason, this is particularly good to practice when you’re learning, because even if you can’t see or sense anything, this pattern will center you anyway. Raven, who is a singer and musician, likes to make the out-breath a single deep note.

Galina recommends practicing this several times a day. The good thing about this exercise is that you can do it while going about your daily business and no one need be the wiser. She likes to give herself a mnemonic to remind herself to practice. For instance, you might say, “Every time I see a silver car, I am going to center, ground, and check my personal shields.” That would not be too frequent, by the way. The key is consistency and regularity of practice.

In time, as you breathe, you want to feel all the breath, all the energy in your body gathering about three inches below the navel. Eventually, as you breathe, you want to feel the energy gathering in a glowing golden ball at this location. A student of Galina’s once put it this way: “Basically, centering is contemplating your navel!” She was right, too. Be sure to breathe through your diaphragm, taking deep, even breaths. Don’t rush, and don’t worry if your mind wanders. Just gently bring it back to the breath.

Centering can be very calming when under stress. If you find yourself in an emotionally stressful situation, it may help to fall into this breathing pattern. There are, of course, many ways to center, but this tends to be the easiest and most adaptable. A person’s center is based on where the center of gravity is. Some larger or large-busted women and most men center at the solar plexus or in some cases even higher. (Energetically, we do not recommend centering above the solar plexus. It’s not particularly stable.) For the best effect, try to do the breathing exercise for at least ten minutes a day.

Grounding also serves multiple important purposes:

1. It connects you to something bigger than yourself, creating energetic stability and resiliency.

2. It provides you with a lifeline through which you can draw sustaining energy, if need be.

3. Most important, it provides you with a shunt through which you can drain off excess energy.

In many respects, centering and grounding are one single exercise divided into two parts. Like yin and yang, these two elements work together to form a cohesive whole. If you’re grounded but not centered, something will be missing, and vice versa. (We’re not even sure it’s possibly to be fully grounded and not centered!)

As a student recently said to one of us, think of grounding as watering the soil. This is very apt because once you’re centered, you’re essentially “peeing” your gathered energy into the ground! This may not be a particularly elegant image, but it is effective when it comes to understanding what grounding is all about. Once the energy in your body has been collected (i.e., centered), it has to go somewhere. This is where grounding comes in. Basically, grounding is just sending all the energy, tension, and emotions that have collected in the body down into the Earth. (Science tells us that everything is energy in motion, which means tension, stress, and emotions are energy too, and energy can be worked with. You have the power to manage the energy in your body to a greater or lesser degree depending on your focus and skill.) Don’t worry if you can’t see or feel anything; start with the mental focus, and eventually your awareness of the internal flow of energy will increase.

The easiest grounding exercise to begin with is also, like centering, a breathing exercise. Inhale and feel the energy gathered in your center. Now, as you exhale, feel that energy exiting the body through the root chakra (located in the perianal area) or, if you happen to be walking, through the feet, though we find the root chakra is the more stable point. On the second exhale, feel it entering the Earth and branching out into a thick, sturdy network of roots. Continue this imagery for as long as you need to, using each ensuing exhalation to take you farther and farther into the Earth, until you feel fully grounded.

You can actually first spend time creating a single taproot that reaches all the way down into the fire at the center of the Earth. Then, once that has been mentally established, you can work on creating a network of strong, solid roots reaching out before and behind you and to either side. Galina likes to make a two-chambered taproot, so that she can send energy down one chamber and draw energy up through the other; Raven prefers to use one root system and bring the energy up and down by turns. All of this is accomplished through that combination of seeing, feeling, imagining, and knowing, over and over again, until the energetic body adapts to the habit. That is what you are doing when you learn grounding and centering; you’re developing a necessary habit of practice in which you’re teaching the energy to flow differently (and more healthily) in your body from what it might initially be doing.

A note of caution: You must, above all else, keep your grounding channel strong, clean, and in good working order. This is very, very important because if that channel becomes damaged, blocked, or corrupted, you may become ill or develop severe pain.

In time you will want to learn different ways of grounding, and you will find that many of the exercises are primarily visualization exercises. Don’t worry if you’re not good at visualizing things; that too is a skill that comes in time. Galina always had difficulty with it. You may find that the image comes through feelings instead of sight, and that’s acceptable as well. The idea is that you’re connecting yourself to something bigger than you are, and that something (the earth beneath your feet) can support and sustain you. It gives you a focal point upon which you are an axis.

The standard idea with grounding is to be a tree. Once you’ve gathered the energy at your navel, send it down through the root of your spine. This is your point of connection to primal life energy. Send all the energy down, timing it to each exhalation, into the Earth. See it streaming from your root chakra in a solid golden cord of energy. This cord goes down through the floor, through the foundations of the house and into the Earth. With each exhalation, see it branching off like roots of a tree, tying you tightly to the Earth. This is the corollary to the silver cord that some people see when engaged in astral travel. As above, so below, in all things.

These two exercises are prerequisites to shielding effectively. The only requirement to gaining excellence is practice. As Galina’s Russian teacher told her when she was in high school: repetition is the mother of learning. That holds especially true here. There’s no way around it but practice.

Mountain

Galina: Every night I sleep in the belly of the mountains. They rise in lush magnificence around the valley in which my home rests, watching over those of us who live in their shadow. Morning and evening I look to that great dragon, the spirit of the mountain, giving thanks for the shelter and security he provides. He is my touchstone, both visually and energetically. I, who come from mountain-etin bloodlines, descended on one side of my family from Gymir’s get, find immense comfort in knowing my world is ringed about by that immense, watchful presence.

I’ve traveled extensively in Switzerland, partly to visit the places my maternal ancestors hailed from and partly to experience the glaciers and massive mountain ranges that so defined their awareness of their world. The presence of the Mountain spirits is so strong in parts of Switzerland that, if one is unprepared, it’s almost smothering. Sometimes, you can even actually see their faces, etched in bold relief in the sides of the stony cliffs, highlighted by the jagged peaks and deep ravines. Then there is the sound. It’s not a sound heard with the ears so much as a resonance that moves through one’s entire body. Glaciers sing, and the song is the sound of earth and stone and the passage of ice kissed by breath of fire. It’s older than we shall ever be, and it echoes through all the worlds with equal power. It is a very shocking experience to be recognized by the Mountains, to know that you are being watched and seen and known. They miss nothing, you know, and there are no words for the respect and awe these spirits engender. I am grateful to have been allowed a connection to them.

I did find that grounding was difficult in the passage between the mountains. In Zermatt, as I was paying homage to a very old, very gruff Mountain spirit, I actually feared I would not be able to tolerate staying overnight in the town. For the first few hours there, I felt as though I could barely breathe. My mom, with whom I was traveling, told me I looked dead white, as though I were on the verge of becoming ill. The problem was that I couldn’t ground. In fact, I found it almost impossible to ground at first. It was as though I had been cut off from that connection almost completely. After a couple of hours of disorientation, I actually asked the Mountain spirit for help, after setting out offerings for him, and I was told that grounding in the presence of the mountains is not like grounding into the soil. Theirs is a harder way. Mountains teach you to ground in stone.

I took an hour or so, sat down, and under the guidance of Zermatt’s Mountain powers, extended my awareness down, not into the earth but into the stone that rested beneath the soil. I learned that there are many types of grounding and that to ground in stone one must patiently reach deeper, open further, stay the course longer. That’s when I began to understand working with Mountain spirits. That’s when I began to understand my own ancestry. Stone does not yield. Stone does not move, and the heart of the Mountain powers will never be breached.

Mountains are powerful beings. They’re powerful and ancient and very, very protective. They are the ancient guardians of the land from which they rise. Not only are Mountains powerful, but they are said to contain many magical secrets. Some are even doorways to Otherworlds. Of course, Mountain spirits know how to guard their riches well, and those doorways may not be crossed without permission.

In the Northern Tradition it is said that the first mountains were created from the bones of the proto-giant Ymir. Ymir, along with the mighty cow Auðumla, whose name means “wealth,” were the first beings to evolve out of the primal clash of fire and ice. They birthed themselves from the synergy and protoplasm that resulted from that awesome collision. It was from this big bang that all life, and all the worlds, eventually evolved. Ymir was later slain by his descendants, and from his body the human world was created. The bones of his spine became mountain ranges.

Like the spine within the human body, the wisdom of the mountains sustains and protects us on all levels, but especially energetically. Mountains teach us the power of endurance, of holding one’s own despite any assault. A mountain stands tall and proud and is not affected by any storm winds raging around it. Mountain spirits may be very, very dangerous if their boundaries are crossed. Their anger, once roused, is ferocious. Their anger results in the roaring, unstoppable rush of the avalanche that destroys or devours everything in its path. It results in destruction that cannot be outrun or warded against.

Mountain spirits will teach you how to rise above the inessential, how to maintain yourself and the integrity of your boundaries against any threat. They will teach you how to become unmovable as they are unmovable. It is to the Mountains we turn to learn how to shield.

Exercise: Shielding

Knowing how to effectively ground and center is an absolute prerequisite to learning how to shield. Those techniques are the framework upon which a strong, effective shield matrix rests. They are the foundation, and without them the shield will not hold, just as with building a house, if the foundation is weak, the walls of the house will not stand.

There are numerous ways to shield. Galina highly recommends the book Spiritual Protection, by Sophie Reicher, which includes an excellent chapter on building and maintaining personal shields of all sorts. To get you started, however, it’s important to realize that a shield is a filter. It can be as hard or porous as you determine. It is a vehicle powered by your own focus and will. It is a tool to help make your life and work better, safer, and more efficient. This means that because you create it, you can alter it to suit any situation. In fact, most skilled spirit workers and magicians of our acquaintance maintain several different, well-integrated layers of personal shielding.

To raise a shield, first make sure that your grounding and centering are solid. If they’re not, address this before you attempt to craft a personal shield. When you ground, you create a channel through which you can shunt energy into the Earth. Using your taproot, locate a source of energy. Eventually, you may gain permission to draw from many of the realms that we will be exploring in this book, but first and foremost you must be fully grounded in the mundane, human world. So we recommend drawing energy from the Earth itself.

Once you have determined an energy source, draw energy up through that grounding cord. It can take time to really learn to sense or see energy, and that’s all right. If you can’t do either at first, imagine that you are drawing energy up. Imagination is a powerful tool; it’s often the key to unlocking our talents and learning to circumvent internal censors, the little voice that tells us “that’s not possible” when in fact it is.

So draw up that energy and do one of two things, either: 1) draw it up inside you and feel it moving up the center line of your body until it exits the crown and flows over you, at which point you can give it texture, shape, and purpose; or 2) draw up the energy around you, forming it and giving it texture, shape, and purpose.

It doesn’t matter which way you do it, but ultimately you are creating a force field around yourself. This is the purpose of a shield: to create a barrier between you and any nearby energetic and psychic garbage. Ideally, you don’t want your shield to be too flashy, because it will advertise to anyone or anything with the Sight that you are a person of burgeoning power. Therefore, Galina recommends raising a second shield around the first as camouflage. Its intent should be to make you look like a perfectly normal person. This can take a little practice, but it is essential before doing any other type of work.

Eventually, as you gain in both confidence and skill, you will be able to cut the shield’s connection to your grounding line or taproot. It’s much better to make shields self-sustaining than to have them pulling constantly from an energy source. It is possible to create a shield that will feed on incoming or ambient energies to sustain itself. Ideally, while it’s acceptable to have one of your shield layers connected to your ground constantly, it’s best if the others are in some way either latent until needed or self-sustaining. Again, we highly recommend Reicher’s book for an in-depth description on just how to manage this.

As always, when shielding, remember the strength of the mountain. Think of how immovable it is, how impervious to the small annoyances of life. When you shield, you are that mountain: impenetrable and strong. Practice is the key to proper shielding. As with grounding and centering, repetition truly is the mother of learning.

Seed

Raven: I have been a gardener since my grandmother first let me plant seeds in her garden. I keep a vegetable garden and an herb garden, and I never lose the excitement of seeing those first seedlings break soil in the spring. Really, it isn’t spring unless I plant seeds and watch them come up. A seedling is a child, a delicate child, and it is also one tiny part of a huge mind that is all the collected entities of that variety of plant, and on a larger scale, all plants. Look at a seed—whether it’s the large, sturdy scale of a pumpkin, the spiky ball of a beet, the powder that is chamomile. If you told someone who was alien to this planet that everything required to order the growth of a plant hundreds of times larger was in that tiny capsule—that you only had to add water and dirt and, eventually, some sunlight, would that entity believe you?

Galina: Prayer is essential; it truly is. It’s the lifeline for any mystic, shaman, or spirit worker. It has the potential not only to keep us going when the work becomes personally grueling, but also to to keep us clean and well connected. It teaches us humility and helps us find and maintain right relationship with the Holy Powers. Moreover, it is the best way to maintain those relationships in a healthy and mutually beneficial manner. At its core, it’s communication, after all, and just like any other relationship, the connections that we maintain with our Holy Powers should ideally be grounded in clear and consistent communication. If you want to work in this tradition and you do not have a relationship with a god, goddess, or family of deities, you should look into that. This work isn’t about you. It’s about being of use to beings far bigger, older, and greater than we will ever be. It’s about cultivating service-oriented spirituality, and nothing brings that home on a more fundamental level than prayer.

I am very fortunate. I was a priest long before I became a shaman, and I have had some very good mentors and teachers in my life, most notably my adopted mom. I learned about prayer very early on. Becoming a shaman or even a shamanic practitioner can be personally wrenching. Becoming a spirit worker is an immensely difficult endeavor. Sacrifices are necessary, and sometimes people are forced into growth without their consent. Prayer has the power to sustain us when everything else falls short. I pray every day. Sometimes I use formal prayers; more often, I talk to my Gods as though I am seeking out a wise and loving elder. This is the essence of a personal, intimate relationship: What could I ever be that the Gods do not already know? What could I ever say or do that would surprise them? They know us and cherish us despite ourselves. That can be immensely freeing when one begins to struggle to develop in relationship with the Holy Powers.

My prayer practice is the foundation of my work. It has carried me through when everything else in my life seemed as though it was turning, quite bluntly, to shit. I belong to a very challenging god (Odin), and he has pushed and honed me in ways that I often found terrifying. He demands complete vulnerability to his presence and power, and sometimes, as I grew into my relationship with him, I doubted my own ability to survive. Prayer carried me through. It’s the best gift you can ever give yourself. It should precede any other work.

While we will describe bonding with plant spirits in more depth in the Green World chapter, the best way to begin the process is to plant a seed and watch it be birthed into the world. However, seed growth is as much about Earth as it is about seed. (It is also, although less so, about water and the warmth of the Sun.) Since this chapter is about beginnings, the basic skills you will need to practice shamanic work in this tradition, we will be using the seed as a way to practice the art of prayer.

But, you say, isn’t that about religion? Perhaps you associate prayer with large houses of worship, and to pray under other circumstances makes you feel uncomfortable. Perhaps you feel uncomfortable with it no matter what, because you see it as supplication, as putting you in a lesser position than something else. Leaving aside the fact that this tradition acknowledges that there are many presences out there who are actually bigger and wiser than us, prayer is not limited to any one goal. It can be about asking for help, without any sense of entitlement, just sincere pleading. It can be about gratitude, thanking the Gods or spirits for all they do and all they have given us. It can be a special song for one spirit whom you have grown to love, made to express that emotion directly to him. It can be about praise, because what the Gods and spirits do is wonderful, and they like appreciation, and no shaman or shamanic practitioner should be too proud to give them their due. It can be about apologizing when you promise and fall down, when you err—and this, too, we should not be too proud to do, especially to those who see with vision that goes further than mortal eyes.

There is no shame in any of this, no lessening. There is no shame in being mortal in the face of the immortal. And beyond that, prayer is a part of what we do in this shamanic tradition, so now—as you begin—is a good time to get over any residual discomfort you have with praying, because you will not go down this road without it.

Praying can be spoken or silent—although most people find that vocalizing a prayer makes it more “real” for them. It can be sung or even danced. It can be any words that work. The Northern Tradition is especially fond of alliteration in poetry, because there is a power in alliteration that “locks” energy in (which we’ll explore in the White World chapter), but anything that rolls off your tongue will do. Ancient prayers often sound simplistic to our modern ears, “like children’s nursery rhymes,” one friend commented. They make your inner child sit up and listen, though, and for people who are stuck in their “monkey mind,” obsessing about rent and jobs and last night’s date, sometimes enlisting the inner child can help. Simple rhythm changes mood and head space, and repetition slowly drives an idea deep into the subconscious over time.

Exercise: Praying the Seed

This one is easy, or at least the first part is. You just put a seed in dirt. Then you pray over it every day. Yes, really—pray over it. Your prayer should contain a blessing for the seed, some kind of gratitude to the Earth that sustains it, and—ideally, although this is optional—a statement of hope that something in your life will also spring forth and grow. While we encourage you to create your own prayer, here’s a possibility for those who are drawing a blank:

I lay a blessing on this seed

And may the Earth push it toward heaven.

May heaven’s blessing fall on the Earth,

Which sustains me and is the ground beneath my feet.

May Earth lay a blessing on me

That I may burst forth and grow like this seed.

We are all connected,

And my eyes are filled with wonder and gratitude.

What’s the point of this exercise? Many things. First, you are learning how to pray for a particular thing every single day for a time. Few people today have that experience—but it’s one that you will need to master in order to do shamanic work in this tradition. Second, you are practicing the art of realizing that everything is not only alive but also a person, an intelligence that is capable of sensing you and, in some cases, communicating. Third, you are relearning wonder, because part of your assignment is to see that seedling as a beautiful child that has sprung forth, a child with a destiny, even if it entails not living very long. Fourth, you are learning to get over any residual embarrassment you may have about talking to (or singing to or praying to) nonhuman things such as plants, stones, or the ground. You’d better get over that, because you are going to be doing a good deal of it in this tradition, and it’s best to learn now that what other humans think of it doesn’t matter.

When the seed has grown into a plant, transplant it outside if you’ve been growing it in a pot and then name it. Sit with it for a while and ask it what name it would like—don’t just pick something you think is cute, unless the seedling really has no preference. Then, when you see it again, say hello to it. When it dies (unless it is a tree who will outlive you), sing it a mourning song. Do not ever let yourself feel embarrassed. You are practicing creating allies and interacting appropriately with spirits.

Once you’ve done this exercise, the next step is to use what you’ve learned to create a regular prayer practice for yourself. Prayer is a celebration, a joyous outpouring of the reality of the deepest, innermost chambers of the heart. It forges connections, acknowledges kinship, and grounds us consciously in our spirituality. Even the most formulaic of prayers, like the dancer’s tendu and plié, form necessary building blocks to spiritual expression. In many respects, the comparison to the discipline of a dancer’s daily practice is quite apt. Prayer, as any mystic knows, is a discipline that trains the mind, heart, and spirit in attentiveness, mindfulness, and devotion to the Gods. Anyone can move to music, but very few people can suddenly, without any practice or training, put on a pair of pointe shoes and pull off a flawless Swan Lake. In many respects, it is the same with meditation and prayer—these things pattern the soul to the touch of the Gods in the same way daily ballet practice develops a kinetic memory in dancers. It provides structure, context, place, and an expansive vocabulary by which we can express those experiences of the spirit that often resist the clarification of language.

Additionally, prayer prepares us to encounter what Rudolf Otto, in his seminal work, The Idea of the Holy, called the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the awesome and terrifying essence of divine presence. Prayer can teach you how to do that safely and well. So, in honor of seed, the gift of the Earth and its promise, commit to praying every day. Set up an altar to the Gods and spirits who call to you, or if no specific ones call to you, build it to the Universe and its greater powers, or to Nature itself. Light candles, make offerings, make it a living, physical place of invocation and welcome. Use it as a focal point to remind yourself each and every day of your place in the world. Use it as a place to center yourself and engage in the magnificent discipline of prayer.

If you are working with Norse or Germanic Gods as part of your practice, you’ll be building altars to them. If you are unsure of how to begin, we recommend Northern Tradition for the Solitary Practitioner, which we published through New Page Books. There is an extensive section just on prayer alone that talks about how to pray, why to pray, and how to do it well, as well as how to set up altars to the deities who are interested in you. In the end, it doesn’t matter how you do it, as long as you are doing it. Reach out and work hard at forming a connection to the Holy Powers, and nurture and nourish that connection with prayer. It is to the spirit what water is to the planted seed: nourishment and essential.

Forest

Raven: I am lucky to have a patch of forest right behind my house where I can go whenever I want (well, assuming it isn’t twenty below zero or pouring buckets of rain) and sit to go into trance. I know that not everyone lives in an area where forest is available, but in ancient northern Europe, the forest was traditionally the place where one went to get away from human society and all the constraints that it put on a person. Old faery tales are full of references to the dark and frightening forest, which at one time covered most of Europe, full of wolves and bears and strange spirits. It was also the place of witches, the people with strange powers who lived on the outskirts of society rather than in the communal warmth of the village. It was considered strange and nearly unthinkable for someone to eschew the patterns of the village in favor of the howling darkness of the forest . . . and it still is.

The village has become huge and complicated and even more absorbing, and the bewilderment of the people ensconced in it is still just as real as it was when our spirit-called ancestors made their way out of the circle of light and into the shadows of the wild. Yet some of us are still called, and just like the ancestors, we sometimes find that moving into the forest means building a hut there and never coming back to the village. They may come to us to ask for our help, but if we stay in the wild place too long, we may never be able to really return. That’s a warning. Shamanic work can do that to you.

On the other hand, the forest—or any wild, undisturbed place—is the best place for stepping outside of oneself through the techniques of using altered states. That’s why the forest exercise is about that practice. Once you’ve grounded and centered and learned to protect yourself, once you’ve established right attitude toward the powers you will interact with, you are finally ready to journey outside of yourself.

Galina: Going into trance is a basic skill for competent spirit work, but I caution against investing it with anything more than the respect one might have for an essential body of techniques. There’s a regrettable tendency in some circles to elevate the ability to enter a trance to remarkable proportions, and it’s at best misguided and foolish, and at worst the dangerous disregard of a dilettante. This is one of many different techniques that will be useful to you, but it’s only important for where it can take you: it’s a way of getting from point A to point B so that you can do the necessary work that you’ve been assigned to do. It is not the end point.

I actually learned how to enter a trance during my training as a priest. To lead a good ritual or meditation, it’s important to know how to enter a light trance in order to follow what’s happening to the energy of the people with whom you’re working. Going into a trance is a way of moving inward in order to move outward. It’s a method by which the spirit worker can banish all external distractions in order to better approach the work that must be done. It’s also a prerequisite to traveling the Otherworlds. Learning to enter a trance is a way of learning to make of your mind and will a vehicle of transportation: out of purely mundane consciousness, out of Midgard, into the realms of the spirit.

The ancient Norse had a practice called utiseta, which literally means “sitting out”—sitting in a wild place where one will be undisturbed and going into trance, and then going either inward to the depths of the self or outward to another world. In its more extreme form, it was referred to as “going under the cloak,” an advanced practice in which trance workers literally wrapped themselves in a cloak and stayed there for hours or days without food or water until the answer to their question came. The most famous recorded example of this occurred in 1000 CE, when the Icelandic lawspeaker Thorgeirr “went under the cloak” to determine whether Iceland should convert to Christianity. He sought inspiration and advice from the Holy Powers through this ancient technique. He stayed in a trance for a full day and night, and in the end it was decided that Iceland would officially become Christian, but that people were free to practice whatever they wanted in the privacy of their own homes. In this way, the original practices and beliefs persisted to some degree, at least long enough for some of them to be recorded by Christian writers.

Other records speak of people going out to the grave mounds of specific ancestors and spending the night under the cloak there, in order to gain discernment, knowledge, blessings, or power through communication with the dead. The commonalities that the many accounts share lie in the solitude and removal of the person from daily patterns and activities. The use of a veil or a cloak to cover oneself is yet another means of creating a separation between oneself and the mundane world, of blocking out all external stimuli.

Exercise: Utiseta

Before training in trance, we must first learn to still the mind and emotions. In many respects, trance work is an outgrowth of meditation. Breath is the best tool of meditation. As we have already learned in grounding and centering, meditation and energy work can very successfully and productively be meshed with the rhythms of the breath. A good place to begin is to spend ten or fifteen minutes (set a kitchen timer or alarm if you must) sitting comfortably and focusing on your breath. Really feel the gentle expansion of the lungs, chest cavity, and intercostals that occur as a result of inhalation and exhalation. Feel the breath entering and flowing through your body and feel the release and cleansing power of exhalation.

Once you have mastered this and have practiced doing it daily for a couple of weeks, then use the breath to completely relax. Starting at the crown of your head and slowly working all the way down to your toes, sense or imagine the breath moving into each part of your body, teasing away the tension, seeping into the muscles and bones, undoing the knots, releasing the weight of any stress the body may hold. A very useful technique is imagining and trying your best to feel as though you are actually breathing in and out through specific points of the body. For instance, if your shoulder is tight and tense, imagine that you are inhaling and exhaling through your shoulder, and allow the breath to flow into the joint. See it gathering up the tension there, and upon exhalation releasing it. Tension is the enemy of effective work. It exhausts the body; it eats up energy; it blocks the clean and clear flow of energy. Just as we must learn to still the rampaging cacophony of our thoughts and emotions in order to have good “signal clarity” (to hear the Gods or spirits effectively and clearly), so too in order to properly enter a trance, we must rid ourselves of as much tension as possible. So as you do this exercise, try to go into the various layers of your body and get into the deep tissues of muscles, tendons, and ligaments. Use the breath as a vehicle through which your conscious attention can move. This is a very good exercise to do before going to bed, but Galina would caution that it should be done sitting up, otherwise the tendency is to fall asleep almost immediately. At the end of this exercise, center and ground as described previously in this chapter.

Part of learning to practice utiseta effectively is, first, having a connection to one’s ancestors (which we discuss in the Black World chapter) and, second, removing oneself from all external distractions. That’s why there is so often the mention of going away from one’s community or even one’s household, and of covering oneself with a cloak or a veil. Thus the practitioner enters a head space that allows coping only with oneself and one’s internal distractions. Today we live in a frenetic world of noise and almost constant stimuli, to a degree that our ancestors could never have imagined. For many of us, even learning to be with ourselves in silence is a huge undertaking. That brings us to the final exercise for trance work: the silent fast.

Just as people can fast from food and water, it’s also possible to fast from noise and distraction. In many ways, given our cultural conditioning, silent fasting is more difficult than abstaining from food. After all, when we avoid food for a set period of time, we have only the protestations of our physical bodies to contend with, but when we abstain from external stimuli and noise, we must deal with ourselves and all the internal distractions the mind throws up. We are our biggest blocks to effective work, and an important part of doing shamanism is learning to overcome the roadblocks we semi-instinctually throw up.

With that in mind, set aside a weekend when you will be undisturbed. Turn off the phone. Disconnect the computer. Turn off the TV. Unplug as many appliances as you can (they provide ambient noise that most of us don’t even recognize until it’s not there anymore). Turn off the cell phones, the BlackBerrys, the iPads and iPods. Allow yourself a notebook and a pen. Eat lightly and try to prepare your meals yourself. Bathe twice a day, focusing not just on cleaning yourself physically but on removing esoteric grime as well. Pray several times a day. Meditate. Do anything you want but don’t make a sound. Don’t speak to anyone. Don’t answer e-mail. Don’t distract yourself from yourself. You may use the time to tend to your ancestor or deity altars, to write in your journal, to work on crafts—anything that doesn’t involve engagement with another person or noise. You may not do anything that enables you to escape the sound of yourself. You are creating the essence of the deep forest, where the only sensations are wind through the trees and the rustling of creatures who have nothing to do with your daily life.

Repeat this every few months. This sounds deceptively simple, but in over twenty years of teaching, we’ve rarely had a student successfully complete this on the first or even the second try. With these three exercises mastered (and mastery of them can take months of daily practice), you will have a good, solid foundation for trance and journey work.

Salt

Raven: I collect salts—pink rock salts from Tibetan or South American mountains, sea salts from different continents that partake equally of the nature of Water and Earth, black lava salts that contain the energy of Fire, salts with sulfur in them that make the head rear back when they are smelled. Before I do a healing in which I might become contaminated by someone’s energetic parasites, I wash my hands and any part of the person that I am going to touch with saltwater. I take a mouthful of saltwater before I lay my mouth on any part of an individual to suck out the blackness. I clean my tools with saltwater, and anything that has been energetically contaminated goes into saltwater first, and if that doesn’t fix it, it is packed into a bucket of rock salt and ashes.

Galina: One of the things I’m afraid I had to learn the hard way about spirit work was the necessity of properly maintaining one’s space, in other words, warding it and keeping it clean before, during, and after esoteric work. It goes without saying that people doing this type of work should shield their homes thoroughly (again, I recommend Spiritual Protection, by Sophie Reicher, for an in-depth look on how to go about this), and that’s not too different from shielding oneself, which is Mountain work. Over and above shielding, however, is something called warding. For our purposes here, this is a (usually) temporary protection or consecration laid upon a place or space. I learned to do this as a priest because when doing any type of ritual work it’s of utmost importance to know how to create the sacred space, manage the sacred space, hold the sacred space, and bring people in and out of the sacred space—as well as keep everyone protected and safe while you’re doing so! Despite that rather daunting list, it’s not as difficult as it seems, but you can’t remain clean and open and safe in space that is cluttered, unprotected, and filthy. Psychic bottom feeders are attracted to that type of thing, as well as bigger entities that might be worse. We are not the center of the Universe. The Universe and all its many denizens are not here to take care of us. Many nasty things are out there that can indeed inflict real-world harm on a person, and as shamanic workers, we’re statistically more likely to put ourselves in positions where they may want to. Learning how to ward the places in which we work is a matter of common sense.

Exercise: Warding

There are, as Galina noted, two types of wards: wards that protect and wards that consecrate. Regardless of the type of ward you are working with, a couple of preliminaries must be attended to first, before evening thinking about casting a ward. First and foremost, physically clean your space. Cleaning is a way of energetically fighting entropy. Clutter attracts negative energy; it creates pools of stagnant energy, and it can turn your home into the energetic equivalent of a malaria-filled swamp. By regularly cleaning your house on a purely physical level, you will create a space in which negative or stagnant energy simply cannot thrive, thereby rendering it one step closer to being the type of workspace in which you can most effectively work. Get into the habit early on of cleaning your home regularly and keeping clutter to a minimum.

After you’ve physically cleaned your space, energetically clean it. There are several ways to do this. For us, the most common are as follows:

1. Smoke the room with a sacred herb. We call this recels (pronounced ray-kels), and the verb form is
recaning (reek-an-ing), which is derived from old Anglo-Saxon, a cognate of our modern word
reek. Just as Native Americans use white sage or sweet-grass to smudge a space, the traditional plants for recaning in this tradition are mugwort and juniper. We discuss them in depth in the Green World chapter.

2. Perhaps the most traditional way of energetically cleaning a space is to carry fire around that space, asking that the spirits of Fire drive out any negative energy or beings. Fire by its very nature cleanses, devours, and transmutes. That is what makes it such a powerful ally in the warding process, something we’ll learn about in the Red World chapter.

3. The simplest of all: sprinkle the space with saltwater. This combines the elements of Water and Earth, along with salt’s purifying properties. You can mark runes and sigils on the wall with saltwater—and also on windows, on mirrors (which are spirit windows), on door lintels, and on light fixtures so that light will shine through the purification. Saltwater is psychic purification on a very basic level. Essentially, it is psychic Betadine. If you are outside, carry some salt with you and sprinkle it in the four directions. If possible, sprinkle it on spots that are already barren so that foliage will not be harmed. While fancy salt has different variations on purification, ordinary table salt will do in a pinch and can be found in tiny portable packets in any fast food restaurant.

4. Make a prayer to your spirits and ancestors, and ask for their protection.

Consecrating a space as sacred, a unique type of warding, is a means of clearly rendering the space free of taint and clearly creating a boundary between sacred time/space and profane or mundane time/space. In many esoteric traditions, this is done by honoring the four directions or elements (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) and then drawing energy up from the Earth, extruding it through the filter of the will, and physically inscribing the border of the space. We personally feel it’s best to do regular inside work in space that is properly shielded, for then warding would be redundant. However, because this isn’t always possible, to consecrate a space, light a candle in each of the directions, honoring the appropriate element: East/Air, South/Fire, West/Water, North/Earth. If you don’t have a candle, your words and respectful Intent will suffice. A consecrating ward is a means of creating a borderland where others, unprepared and untrained, can be brought in for very carefully crafted engagement with the sacred. While this is primarily priestcraft, there are times when a shamanic practitioner will have to do it too, so it’s good to know.

The other type of warding is not a consecration or creation of sacred space. It is a means of protecting the space wherein one is working. This is, more than the first type of ward mentioned, a temporary shield. There are several ways to do this. You may shield a space just as you would create a personal shield. The difference is in the way the shield draws its power and how long it’s designed to last. Most wards are designed to last only for the amount of time it takes the practitioner to go in, do what he or she needs to do, and go away again. With that in mind, it’s possible to utilize a number of useful charms—herbs, stones, or resins—to assist in keeping a space protected. (Galina highly recommends Cat Yronwode’s basic hoodoo and rootwork course available through correspondence at
www.luckymojo.com.) It’s extremely useful to have a working knowledge of the esoteric properties of various natural substances: stones, herbs, flowers, trees, and so on. For instance, combinations of herbs—such as rue, agrimony, and sage—are particularly useful in cleansing and blocking negative spirit manifestation. (For an in-depth list of protective herbs used in this tradition, see Raven’s book The Northern Shamanic Herbal.) A good ward uses as little of your own personal energy as possible while getting the job done effectively. The cleaner your space is, physically and esoterically, the easier it’s going to be to ward.

Try casting a ward this way: Ground and center. Draw up energy from the Earth, allowing it to flow through you and out your hands. Visualize it, with Intent and mental focus, flowing around the perimeter of the space in which you’re going to work. Be sure to shield the ceiling and floor as well. Basically, encase the whole room in a little force field. As you do this, focus your Intent and “tell” this energy that its purpose is to protect the space from any unwanted incursions. Then “tie off” the energy flow (which we explain how to do in the next paragraph) and get to work. As you’re casting this, it may help to walk the perimeter of the room.

There are many traditional wards. Ceremonial magic has its Rite of the Lesser Banishing Pentagram. Heathenry has its Hammer Rite. (The former can be found in Spiritual Protection, by Sophie Reicher, the latter in The Nine Doors of Midgard or Futhark, by Edrid Thorsson.) It’s often helpful and energy efficient to use a stone or physical object as a focal point for the energy. You can actually charge a stone or other item with energy, patterned using the mind and will to form a ward when you need it. Then just sit that down in your space, focus on it, and feel the ward expand to fill and enclose your space. In this way, actually, you can create a more permanent ward: you can take a vessel and fill it with energy, really see or feel the energy sinking into the fabric of the box or jar. Pattern it to ward and contain and anchor that programming with special sigils—runes of protection work nicely. Then cut off the tie between yourself and the object. Do this by actually visualizing cutting a cord linking you both. In this way, you can ward a thing, create a warded vessel, or ward a room. It’s the same technique applied in slightly different scenarios. A ward is less stable than a shield and tends to be less powerful, which is something to keep in mind. Shields are much stronger and more self-sustaining. They’re intended to last, whereas a ward is usually only temporary. Essentially, the only way to learn to ward is to do it, to practice, practice, practice, and occasionally to make mistakes.

Body

Raven: I have two bodies, and I am equally aware of both of them. One is solid and made of flesh. It can change, but only very slowly. The other is much more malleable, and it’s not strongly connected to the first one. It is made of energy, life force, mana, prana, chi, ki, orgone, whatever you want to call it. It is anchored to my body, but it almost never resembles it, because that’s part of who and what I am. I’m aware that most people don’t work that way, so I keep it hidden, very well shielded. The rare sensitives who can see energy bodies have been known to freak out when they see mine, because it doesn’t always look very human.

Galina: I spent a good third of my life working in an intimately grueling career (ballet), and the discipline gained there has served me well in my shamanic work. One thing that I learned in the transition from one to the other is this: the body is sacred. It never lies. It betrays all secrets, and in the end, the body will win. As shamanic workers, our physical bodies are tools. They are the conduits through which we work, through which our Gods and spirits are able to work, because ultimately we are also their tools. Within the Northern Tradition, the physical body of each incarnation is part of the soul matrix. Therefore, it behooves us to see that it is well tended. The work that we do is grueling, no less than ballet, for that matter. It has tremendous impact on the physical body. If we don’t take care of our bodies, exercise a little preventive attention, and nurture ourselves, the work has the potential to break, cripple, or destroy us. Dealing with the massive amounts of energy that we channel can cause headaches, seizures, and immune problems—and that’s on a good day.

I dearly wish that someone had taken me aside long before I began this work and told me that I needed to pay more attention to my physical health. I might have listened and had fewer pieces to pick up later. Of course, as shamans, spirit workers, and shamanic practitioners, we not only have to be mindful of our physical bodies, but of our energetic bodies to an even greater degree. Injury can occur in both. In our line of work, sustainability, health, and competence rest in part on maintaining the health of the energetic body, on keeping it clean and free of parasites, and on doing as much as we can to keep the physical vessel in good working order. Start soon and start early. You’ll be grateful you did.

The physical body and the energy body within it are equally important. That’s significant enough that we’re going to say it again: they are equally important. Most people don’t even know that the energy body exists, so they don’t feed it or take care of it. They certainly don’t clean it. People who do energy work or spirit work or magic can sometimes go in the other direction, neglecting the physical in favor of activities that stimulate the energy body. That’s no more “enlightened” than the first approach. This tradition is seated in an Earth-centered religious context, and we see the body, like the Earth, as sacred.

Indeed, the body symbolically represents the Earth, and to abuse or neglect your body is to do the same to the Earth through the tiny piece of it that you are privileged to inhabit. Remember the principle of “as above, so below” (and its corollary, “as within, so without”)? That, not any psychological mindplay of “sympathetic magic,” is what hurts someone when you stab a stuffed poppet representing that person with a pin. Just as someone can, under certain circumstances, be hurt by a pin in a doll, the Earth can be hurt by the long-term abuse and neglect of the bodies of humanity. There are reasons beyond yourself to respect your flesh.

There are also more immediate reasons to do so. First, unless you’re ready to commit suicide, you’re stuck in it for this lifetime. You have to live in your body. It’s where you are, and through your body you enact your will on the world around you. There’s no fighting that. When you fight it, it wins, every time, sooner or later. It is the home port of your soul until it withers away, the battery for your spirit. It is the container through which you are privileged to experience, close up and in full-sensory array, the beauty of this world. The fact that you are here in this place now means that it is one of your immediate lessons to do so—if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be here. This world is not “less than” any other—it’s heavier and more solid, but it is a privilege to be here. Just ask some dead humans.

Second, many spirit workers—people who do the kinds of things we talk about in this book, and more, on a regular basis—find that their energy bodies become somewhat detached from their physical bodies after a while. This can cause problems with the immune system and general organ health and healing, which in turn can isolate the energy body further until both halves of the system run out of life force and the whole person becomes quite ill. Paying attention to the needs of the flesh body and keeping it as healthy as you can will help to prevent this kind of collapse. Your physical grounding to the human world must be the strongest of your energetic connections. We’re corporeal beings for a reason. Our physicality is an important part of who and what we are. Eat nutritious food, get plenty of sleep, exercise regularly. These are just as important and just as much a necessary duty as paying debts to one’s allies. Right relationship and right balance go both ways; finding the right balance with oneself is a part of this.

One thing that you can do to retard the process of being pulled away from your body is to stimulate your senses during your spirit work (and spiritual work). While we could theoretically do all shamanic work silently and with our eyes closed, ignoring all outside stimuli, that’s not the way it’s ever been done. This is for good reasons. Our ancestors were not stupid; the singing, the drumming, the rattling, the bright ribbons and swaying fringe, the jangle and clash of bells and bits of metal, the stomp of the feet on the ground, the softness of animal fur under the fingers, the burning incense with its strong scent, the fetishes with their eye-catching shapes and differing textures—they knew that these all help to take us out of our bodies, but they also bring us back. The sensory “entertainment” of shamanic work attracts the senses and forges a link with the physical body, keeping the two well linked. Respecting the body means giving it what it needs to be healthy and respecting its joy in sensory stimuli. We are bridges between the corporeal and incorporeal, the spirit world and the physical world, by our very nature. It’s incumbent upon us to be strong and resilient bridges. If our bodies crumble, the work will suffer.

Exercise: Energy Body Awareness

Before engaging in any energy work, begin exercising. (We’ll talk about that more in the next chapter.) Then after you’ve started honoring your physical body with regular exercise, it’s time to do the same with your energetic body. The following exercise will help you become comfortable with sensing and working with energy, and that will, in turn, help with maintenance of your energetic form.

Start with physical stimulation. Just as you would give a gift to the land spirit before you did a major working on a new piece of land, give a gift to the Earth that is your body. Spend fifteen or twenty minutes listening to music, stroking something with a lovely texture, looking at beauty, tasting and smelling interesting things. Concentrate only on that. Be absolutely in the moment, take your time, and don’t get distracted. Let your flesh have the gift it wants—full-sensory joy with no thought for the future, if only for a few minutes.

Then pull yourself away, ground and center, and look at your fingers. Take one hand and stroke firmly down the fingers of the other hand, imagining that you are “pulling” your energy fingers out beyond the ends of your flesh fingers, so that they protrude about an inch. Repeat the firm pulling stroke several times on each finger, until you can “feel” your fingers sticking out beyond your fingertips. Stop periodically and brush them against something that is alive and not yourself—your own thigh won’t set off the “phantom” sensation that comes from the energy body feeling stimuli that the physical body isn’t sharing, and neither will the floor, but the foreign energy field of the dog might, or that of a friend. If it’s a friend you’re brushing against, not touching her with your flesh fingers, she can tell you if she feels something. We’ve discovered that being touched by someone’s energy body often creates a skin-prickling sensation. Take note of what things feel like when touched with your energetic fingers alone. Write down your observations, along with those of your friend.

Keep in mind that if the shape of your fingers (or any other shape-shifted part) gets stuck, a good night’s sleep will usually set it right again, at least if your energy body is used to being undifferentiated. However, the easiest way to put your fingers back is to shake your hand while sharply drawing in breath; that will usually do it. Raven visualizes a tape measure snapping back up into a roll.

Over the next few weeks, work on isolating particular body parts, becoming aware of their energetic second selves, and slowly pulling the energetic limb or piece away from the physical body . . . and then putting it back and reattaching it. If something begins to cause you serious discomfort, stop. The idea is to eventually become aware of your entire energy body and to be able to detach and attach pieces from the physical at will, with no ill effects. After each experiment, do a few minutes of high-sensory play to lock you back in your body. If you mentally link paying strong attention to a pleasant sensory stimulus with coming strongly and solidly back into your body, you’ll be able to do it in an emergency by fiddling with one of your “pretty” shamanic objects.

If you want to try shaping or changing your energy body, be careful and be warned: deliberately making your energy body significantly different from your flesh for any significant length of time (more than a day, for example) can have lingering destructive effects. First, there will be cognitive dissonance as your brain gets two different and conflicting messages; this can manifest as constant vague discomfort and a feeling of “not-right-ness,” eventually leading to depression or psychological angst. (If you really want to know what it feels like to live that way every day without recourse of the most strenuous kind, ask a transsexual.) Second, your energy body can attempt to pull your physical body closer to its new shape over time, and if your new shape is not possible to get to from your old shape, it will create joint malformations, muscle spasms, and tendon distortions. In other words, it can just screw you up. Third, it will facilitate the body separation we spoke of earlier, causing physical and energetic illness. Permanent or long-term shapechanging is an advanced art that should be tried only when you have been doing this for a decade or more, and ideally under the guidance of a more advanced shaman.

Stones

Galina: I love stones. I love the way they feel, and inevitably when I travel, I return with pockets and bags packed full of stones of all sorts. They call to me. The spirits of the stones speak to me in voices that I find very difficult to ignore. I have an ancestral connection to the wisdom of the stones, and because of that, one of the first tools that I learned to use were stones of all types. Each stone or crystal has its own energy. Each one is unique. They’re living things, believe it or not. They grow and change, but they do so far too slowly for human beings to perceive, something that scientists have noted. Many people find that they resonate best with one or two particular stones, and these can become allies in esoteric work. It’s not necessary to go out and buy fancy stones either; the pebble you find in your yard may be just as powerful as the crystal you buy at the local occult shop, sometimes more so.

Stones are useful for so many things—divination, drawing out energetic toxins, healing work, as “batteries” for energy work, cleansing, and much more—that it’s useful to have a widely varying collection with which to work. Begin to experiment to find the ones that resonate the best for you personally, and keep an eye out for unusual stones that may turn up in your daily meanderings. Stone spirits are no-nonsense and usually willing to share some of their knowledge if respect is given in return. There is much power and wisdom in stone. If you approach a stone correctly, you may be permitted to partake of some of that wisdom. They’ve been around for eons, after all. They’ve seen where we came from and how our world has evolved. They are, in their own way, memory keepers, our elders, an ancestral power.

I use stones to this day in my work. I keep hematite to help clients ground. I use certain stones to stabilize my house shields. I have a huge piece of granite that my land spirits like, and I keep it in my garden and pour regular offerings over it. Stone is enduring; that is its nature. In this way, it can symbolize the commitment and contract that we make with the Gods and spirits. Because of this, stones make fine offerings too. (The only stones that I can’t stand to touch are the manufactured ones. They feel wrong, robotic, unnatural, and sterile. With this we should leave well enough alone. There is a lesson in this for us: just because we have the ability to do something doesn’t mean we necessarily should.)

Raven: I began using stones as divination tools when I was a child, exiled to the school playground twice a day during weekdays. I was a loner, a strange child whom no one would play with, so I dawdled at the edges of the playground and talked to weeds and rocks. At that time, the plant spirits first began to talk to me, and I learned about the energy of stones. I’d pick up small rocks, nothing unusual—quartz, sandstone, granite—and feel their energy. Some “vibrated” on a higher frequency (like the quartz); others had a longer, slower feel. I later found out that geologists called my high-frequency stones macrocrystalline, meaning that their crystal formations were large and in some cases visible, and my low-frequency stones microcrystalline, meaning that their crystal formations were tiny and packed together. Since no one else was able to feel this but me, I created a divinatory game from any three pebbles selected from the ground, and played it during my lonely recess periods. I carried them around in my pockets, but I usually gave them back to the Earth eventually. Later I found stones to keep, stones that my wife carved with runes to use in more elaborate divination.

Stones are easy to work with, easy to find (they’re on the ground almost wherever you look), and can be used for a number of useful purposes. You don’t need fancy semiprecious stones from a store for these tricks; you can do them easily with nondescript rocks off the ground. Be aware that some store-bought stones came from land that was raped and clear-cut and strip-mined, not taken sustainably, and by finding local surface stones you avoid that negative taint. Stones can be “charged,” filled with energy and Intent by holding them and pushing the energy into them. They can then be placed in corners, behind doors, or on lintels above windows and doors, or they can be arranged in a large shape. These stones will then be your “anchors,” holding down the energy of protection or sacred space or anything else you like. Moreover, they are teachers, and if you work with them, they can instruct you in how to sense, move, and eventually use energy.

Larger stones can be a way to call the land spirit and give it a place to fill and “perch” on. Any spirit might choose a special stone as a home to inhabit or a door to come through. (See the section on spirit homes in the Gray World chapter.) Special stones can be chosen to carve into amulets or runes. Rocks can also be stacked on top of each other or laid in symbolic formations to create boundaries, such as a labyrinth.

Go around picking up stones and checking out their vibrations. What do we mean by vibrations? It’s hard to explain, as it’s the way the brain interprets data that is difficult to quantify. (Sensing energy translates in different ways for different people. Some feel it as changes in internal temperature; some feel a “hum” or “buzz”; others see colors, or even see the energy directly.) If you hold two stones of different geological material in separate hands and compare them, one may feel somehow lighter in a way that has nothing to do with its actual weight, or faster in a way that has nothing to do with its unmoving sessile nature. Practice holding and comparing stones until you can discern this energy frequency. We find that large single crystals have the highest frequency—to the point where Raven finds them uncomfortable and prefers microcrystalline stones—and the sedimentary rocks such as sandstone and limestone have the slowest frequency. Being heated and cooled by volcanic fire or frictive pressure speeds up the frequency of a stone.

Exercise: Stone Divination

Once you have learned about stone energy frequency, try this simple divination. It’s good for when you’re caught out somewhere with no other form of divination and you need to ask a yes or no question of the spirits. Pick up three stones that are high, medium, and low vibration in relation to each other. They don’t have to be pretty; they can be ordinary pebbles from the road. The medium-frequency stone is the indicator. Hold them in your fist, ask your question, and drop them. Look to see which one is closer to the indicator stone—if it’s the high-frequency stone, it’s a yes; the low-frequency stone means no. Afterward, thank the Earth for her gift to you and cast them back into the road or field or empty lot. There’s no real need to save them—there will be more rocks at the next place they are needed, and there’s a certain magic in working with the energy of the place you are in at the moment.

Pottery

Raven: The clay piece that I use the most is a hand-thrown pottery dish that is actually the altar for a specific spirit. We often think of altars as tables of items or vertical dioramas, but it is an old tradition to make a spirit home out of a pot full of items. It’s not designed to be a feast for the human eye, but to be an energetic container that holds the aura of a periodically visiting entity. The objects placed in it are chosen by the spirit, and those preferences communicated to the spirit worker. The clay that surrounds them is as grounding as Earth, creating a small, safe world.

Galina: Craft is important to the spirituality of the Northern Tradition. There is a whole race of beings in our tradition, the Duergar, who specialize in various elements of craftsmanship. The ability to create art and beauty, to give life to inanimate objects through the skill of one’s hands, is very highly valued in this tradition. To truly understand the value of crafted objects in this tradition and the skills required to make them, objects and skills that are inspired by the Holy Powers, it is important to get hands-on experience. There is a beauty, a grace, a discipline, a wisdom that comes from engaging in a traditional craft that can be taught no other way. It is a means of connecting to our ancestors, a means of connecting to the spirit of craft and inspiration, a means of learning to understand skill, artistry, and value. These things are immensely precious to many of the beings with whom you will interact as a spirit worker. There is a unique type of magic and a unique type of grace that comes from the diligent study of craft. If you have the opportunity to do so, study something like pottery making, blade making, brewing, needleworking, carving, glassblowing, metalsmithing, leatherworking, or weaving. It is a powerful thing to bring to life an expression of that living genius, and that is what craft does: it harnesses the energies of creation and inspiration and gives them practical form. It’s a very holy thing. (While I have flirted with pottery, my personal passion insofar as craftwork goes is glassblowing, which I’ll describe in the Red World chapter.) Seek out the craft that appeals to you, and stick with it. It teaches you a certain elemental wisdom like nothing else.

Clay pots are the earliest items we know of that cross the border from simple tool to work of art. In fact, most of the oldest European cultures are named for the claywork they have left us. Most of those clay containers were simple everyday tools, but some of them were undoubtedly special and sacred, the forerunners of the archetypal Holy Grail or church chalice. Some might have held liquid that was passed ritually and poured out on the Earth as a libation; some might have held sacred objects or, in the era of shamans, spirit objects.

When the wheel turns, the inchoate mud becomes defined and beautiful. This is the theme of a hundred creation tales: the Creator takes the mud, the clay, the stuff of Earth and chaos, and makes with it a living beauty. This creation story would have been told only after the craft of pottery had been perfected, for the metaphor would not have been lost on the ancestors who worked that clay. The figure that is made the most often is the concave container—bowls, cups, flagons. It is Earth containing Water, as our flesh contains our blood. The cup is the symbol of Water in many cultures, but the cup itself is made of Earth.

To sculpt from clay is to reenact that myth of the creator God/dess and the human heart. Every container made from clay carries a little of that energy—Earth (stability) holding Water (feeling). This can also be seen as the heavy world of matter holding a small area of the fluid world of spirit, and that’s what this particular exercise will explore.

Exercise: Magic Pot

For this exercise, you’ll make a clay pot that will hold high-energy spirit items. This is good to have because while shamanic workers become accustomed over time to high levels of spirit energy, the average person doesn’t, and may find that being around objects imbued with this energy can unground them and make them jittery, headachey, or even sick. There is a certain “contamination” factor that happens as you progress in this work. Shamans especially become fairly “radioactive” on a psychic level, not in a bad way, but not in a comfortable way, either. Therefore it’s good to be mindful of one’s tools and have a safe place to store them.

A clay pot (or cup or flagon or whatever container shape you like) can be either pinch-molded with the hands or thrown on a wheel (a skill that will require some training, perhaps a class). Both have value in that the pinch-molded pot is closer to those made by the first ancestors and can be used to house spirit items close to them, while the potter’s wheel can symbolize the Wheel of the Year, or the ever-turning cycle of life that sculpts us all. Decide first which would work better for the nature of the spirit items involved.

Place the clay on the molding surface or wheel and say a prayer of thanks to the Earth from whence it came, the solid ground beneath our feet that nourishes us in so many ways. As you work the clay into a container, use your Intent to focus on making it a psychic container as well, one that can hold a tiny space of Otherworldly energy and not let it leak away. It should not feel like a prison or a trap or a cannon to shoot energy out of. It should feel like a home, a favorite chair, a place in which a spirit would want to make a part-time bed. It should be strong enough to contain his energy and not let it leak away. If you know what sort of spirit you want to invite into the pot, add that to your Intent. Continue holding the Intent through the shaping, the decorating, the painting—all of those things. When the pot goes into the fire, ask for Fire’s blessing on it. (Look for the Fire Blessing in the Red World chapter.) When the container comes out, refer to the Spirit Homes section in the Gray World chapter, which discusses how to sanctify them and invite spirits in.

2

The Golden World

Sun

Hail to the Sun in her chariot above us,

Hail to the golden horses and the wheels of fire,

Hail to the morning’s glory and the sunset farewell,

Hail to the one who always returns

And may we learn such constancy in the end.

Unlike the other chapters in this book, which deal separately with a number of spirits of a single kind, this chapter and the next address two very large and important divine beings. The Golden World is the realm of the Sun, and the Silver World is the realm of the Moon. These two heavenly beings are an important aspect of our reverence for Nature, and significant in any practice of Nature-based shamanism. The Sun and Moon are the timekeepers of the world, and in the case of the Sun, the very giver of life.

In the introduction, we said that we were going to keep the Gods of the Northern Tradition out of this book, as working with them on a shamanic level is advanced business, but the Sun and Moon were deified in the North as the divine brother and sister Sunna and Mani. Among the Saami, the Sun goddess was Beiwe or Biejve, and the Moon goddess was Manno—both female. To the Finns, Paiva was the Sun god and Kuu the Moon goddess. Wherever people have looked at the sky, they have deified the Sun and Moon, and as one of the most important parts of Nature, there’s no getting away from them . . . so there’s no getting away from their divine nature here, either.

You’ll notice that the genders of the Sun and Moon change randomly by culture; to us, this shows that the Sun and Moon themselves are not gendered, but can manifest as either depending on the culture that looks at the sky. Our modern Western world tends to think of the Moon as female and the Sun as male, but this is a cultural holdover from classical Greco-Roman thought. The Greeks and Romans saw the female principle as wild, irrational, and emotional, and the male as civilized, rational, and objective. In ancient northern Europe, the opposite was true—the most popular female divine archetypes were often rational, peaceful, and civilizing forces, while the most powerful male divine archetypes were irrational, inspiring, wrathful entities. The Moon’s changeable emotions fit better with maleness in this system, and hence we have the myth of Mani, the wandering, inconstant god who was the inspiration for the later folk figure of the Man in the Moon. Sunna or Sol, his sister, was a bringer of light, clarity, and the awareness of time that was necessary to work on a schedule and plan out one’s day for maximum productivity.

In general, we will refer to them as Sun and Moon, because we don’t know what they would have been called before the Indo-Europeans swept in, but in honor of Sunna and Mani we will refer to the Sun as she and the Moon as he during these two chapters. Because these chapters are about two great spirits instead of many smaller ones, we have presented the entries a little differently. Rather than giving our personal experiences with each entry, we provide them once at the beginning and then move on to specific solar and lunar exercises.

Images of the Sun go back to Mesolithic times, depicted in rock carvings as a traditional circle with rays, or a circle with a central dot, or a four-spoked or eight-spoked wheel (presumably referring to the solstices and equinoxes and cross-quarter days, still celebrated as holidays) millennia before actual wheels were invented. There are also carved figures of people lifting their arms in worship. With the Bronze Age, Sun symbols exploded onto the scene, including numerous golden wheels (the wheel was invented by this time), carts, chariots, and horses. The earliest and most famous Sun-worship statue in northern Europe is the Bronze Age chariot found in Trundholm. It is a mare on wheels like a chariot, pulling the disk of the Sun, which is also on wheels. The Sun disk is gilded on one side—the side seen when the chariot moves east to west, like the Sun’s path. The other side of the disk is dark, as the Sun was thought to move under the Earth from west to east every night. In the same find was a drum with Sun-ray decorations on the skin and a pattern of solar wheels cast on the metal frame.

Like many solar deities, the Norse Sunna drives her chariot across the sky pulled by golden horses. Her herald, Daeg (Day), also rides a shining horse. The concept of the Sun as the great turning wheel of a horse-chariot is said to be a wholly Indo-European idea, found also in Greece and India. However, the Saami people, one of the indigenous races of northern Eurasia who slowly made their way into arctic Europe, have their Sun goddess Beiwe riding in a sleigh made of reindeer bones and pulled by white reindeer. No great golden turning wheels, perhaps—those we can lay on the Indo-Europeans—but a solar deity crossing the sky in a vehicle may well be a common human conception. Certainly on the far side of the Indo-European invasion, the Egyptian Sun god, Ra, traveled in a boat across the heavens.

Regardless of the source of the divine concept for our planet’s star, the Sun is important to circumpolar and arctic and subarctic people for simple, practical reasons. In the winter, there are whole days with little or no Sun, and the cold is bitter and often fatal. In the summer, there is a period of long days and no nights. In the North, the Sun’s pattern is more extreme, and her life-giving touch more crucial, than in the gentler-climate southern areas.

Raven: In a story I read in my youth about a young Saami man, the main character and his family, as well as all the other families in their various lavvu and goahti (Saami tents), would come out and cheer, and sometimes cry, on the day that the Sun rose above the horizon for the first time that winter. As they lived above the Arctic Circle, the Sun vanished for weeks at a time. During this time they lived in darkness, except for the firelight in their tents, and they slept only in periods of three to five hours in rotation, as every post-pubescent member of the siida (clan) had to take shifts sitting outside in frostbite-cold weather with the dogs, guarding the reindeer herd and watching for the wolves that would move in at any time of the lightless day. During the monthlong day at the height of their summer, they migrated north to the coast with the melting snow and slept twelve to fifteen hours of each endless day in the wolf-free calving grounds. This story made our own temperate-zone experience of the Sun seem very ordinary by comparison, and I understood how we could ignore her glory here, where her visits are so much more regular.

Galina: I’ve always connected much more strongly with Mani than Sunna, perhaps because I am more of a night person, or perhaps because I’ve had more interactions with Mani. For all that, I find Sunna magnificent. I’m actually surprised to find her so little honored among Northern Traditionalists today. Her goodwill would have been essential to our ancestors and, whether we realize it or not, it’s essential to us as well. We can even get sick from lack of sunlight: vitamin D deficiency leads to a plethora of health problems including Seasonal Affective Disorder. It’s not just the land that needs Sunna’s blessings to grow and stay healthy; we do as well.

Dawn

Sunna is sometimes called Sol, and the Sun is the living embodiment of her power. She must have been immensely important to our ancestors; anyone living an agricultural lifestyle would be, especially before industrialization, utterly dependent on her for a good harvest. As my colleague Sophie Oberlander noted in Jotunbok, Sunna’s presence in the heavens also has tremendous eschatological import: her capture by the wolf Skoll is one of the signs of impending Ragnarok. More than that though, Sunna’s power is one of the building blocks of an ordered, healthy, whole society. (Think about it: when the Sun goes cold, we as a planet perish.)

Sunna might also be said to have healing power. As the Sun, she brings health and vitality; as the Sun is made of heat and fire, so Sunna’s power has the potential to hallow, just as all fire has the potential to cleanse and consecrate. She drives out metaphysical darkness and decay as her sister Sinthgunt (goddess of twilight) drives out disease. She makes the world holy and by doing so defines the inangard, the sacred enclosure of a healthy community. Scandinavian winters are long, tedious, and rough. The lengthening presence of the Sun in her daily voyage across the sky must have been a welcome sight to our ancestors as winter turned slowly into spring.

Most of all, Sunna is our pacesetter. Most of us, though not inextricably bound to the Sun in the way our agrarian ancestors were, still rise to begin our workday by her unchanging cycles. If Pagan or Heathen, we still celebrate holy tides determined by her movement across the sky. We still crave the return of the Sun during the harshness of winter, when the days are dark by four p.m. Sunna, by her very presence, serves as a potent visible reminder of the Gods’ power and the presence of the holy in our lives. She, as our pacesetter, orders our days and lives just like she did for our ancestors. She keeps the world in order, counting out the seasons and the days. She brings health, wholeness, healing, and growth to our world. We as shamans and spirit workers would do well to pay attention to the daily rhythms of Sunna and her brother. They order our world so carefully that we, who are by our very work committed to restoring and maintaining balanced relationships with the Gods, ancestors, and spirits, can learn much by charting our lives by their course.

Exercise: Sun Meditation

For those of you who—like us—are not morning people, this exercise might be a bit difficult. (OK, more than a bit, let’s be honest.) It is, however, a worthwhile endeavor if you can do it even once a week or once a month. Rise a little bit, maybe ten minutes, before the actual dawn. Go outside, face east, light a stick of incense, pour out an offering, and light a candle, all in honor of Sunna’s approach from the east. If you are in an apartment, this can be done either in a window that faces east or in a local park. Sit comfortably and reach out with your senses, watching for her approach. As the darkness begins to recede (and this alone is magnificent to observe), reach up and welcome her. As she moves across the sky, feel/see/imagine that she is pouring down her energy into you. Feel it flowing into the crown of your head and running all the way down to your toes. With each inhalation, you are actually breathing in sunlight. Continue doing this until you feel that you are full of her energy and light, until you feel as though the crown of your head is overflowing. Then thank her and go about your day, refreshed and renewed, having been brought to energetic wakefulness in tandem with the Earth itself, under her powerful aegis.

Morning

If you’ve worked through the first chapter already, we assume that you are exercising. It doesn’t matter what it is as long as three or four times a week for at least a half an hour, you’re getting some sort of physical exercise. Do not shortchange yourself here. Do not yield to any excuses about why this can be avoided or put off. Suck it up and get out there and exercise, even if only walking for a half hour every few days. It’s just as important, maybe even more so, as energy work. Don’t neglect it. Studies show that it takes at least thirty days of daily repetition to create, break, or change a personal habit. So start now. Put this book down right now and go do something physical. By doing so, you’re taking care of your body. You’re preparing yourself for the rigors of spirit work, and you’re honoring both the Earth and the Sun. Spirit work isn’t about removing oneself from the physical; it’s about engaging with it holistically, in a balanced, honorable fashion. We’re corporeal beings for a reason, and our bodies are our most important tools, the conduits through which we touch the realms of spirits and Gods. The body is also part of our soul matrix. It deserves to be honored right along with everything else. If you don’t keep your body in good working order, the higher levels of spirit work are going to be exhausting, draining, and painful, and quite possibly physically destructive.

Exercise: Well, Exercise!

This isn’t rocket science. Go join a gym and dedicate your exercise to Sunna as an offering. It really doesn’t matter what kind of exercise you do as long as you’re doing something. If you can’t afford to join a gym, that’s okay; get out and walk. The ideal would be to do something physical every day, if possible, and do it as an offering to her. Honor her by honoring your body and at the same time hone yourself for this work. Move.

Noon

The Sun is made of fire. We all know that, but there is by definition a good deal of affinity between them. In the cosmology of the North, the Sun goddess is a fire giantess, as is most of her family of sky giants. There are strong links between Fire and Sun, but at the same time there are marked differences. The Sun’s energy feels “higher” than Fire’s, in the sense of being lighter and more joyful. It’s also, obviously, more removed from the Earth. (Unlike her brother, Sunna is rarely if ever distracted from her course by the foibles of humanity. She’s very task oriented.) Fire is more serious; it can dance happily, but its joy is always a little more intense, just this side of becoming destructive wrath. The Sun’s joy is less wrathful and more exuberant. Sun is distant, the queen on her throne who gives out largesse to the populace and honestly wants them to thrive. We don’t see her danger until we are up close and personal, and then she is more dangerous than earthly fire. Fire is more personal, living in everyone’s hearths and homes. We can have tiny fires if we like, and contain and control them in small spaces. We have to be careful, because fire can sometimes either escape or go out, but we obviously have much more control over fire than over the Sun. It remains to be seen whether the Sun can be said to be merely a large instantiation of the element of Fire or if every fire on Earth is actually the messenger of the Sun, whose birth threw out the molten pieces of rock that later congealed into our planet. Perhaps both are true. Real truths are often paradoxical.

Exercise: Prism Fire

There are many ways of making sacred fire, all of which will be discussed in the Red World chapter except for this one, because this is making solar fire. You will need flammable materials, such as bits of paper, a candle stub, and kindling laid for a fire. You will also need a piece of glass that will reflect and concentrate the Sun. Raven uses a fist-size solid glass ball, originally a paperweight, that he got at a yard sale. It didn’t occur to him to use it as a firestarter until one hot solstice when he placed it on an outdoor altar . . . and when the Sun sank to the right level, it caught the ball and set the table and the surrounding grass on fire. (He, of course, had to spend the next hour playing with it and setting things on fire until the Sun got too low to cast rays.) You will have to experiment with prisms and glass balls and chunks until you find the best one to do the job—some people have even lit a spark with eyeglasses in an emergency.

Sacred fire from the Sun can be used as part of a ritual to burn away depression. Start the fire on a bright day with the glass firestarter, and build up to a blaze. Give the depressed person a bowl of water to hold to his or her heart, and tell the client to concentrate on the sadness and visualize it trickling out into the bowl of water. While this takes place, stand or sit or kneel behind the person, with your head level with his or her heart chakra. You will be working to move that depression out of the individual and into the bowl, and then filling the empty space with solar energy.

First, as you stand there, focus on the Sun above you. (No, you are not going to set your client on fire!) Reach out with your awareness from your head and visualize a tendril (or limb or thread or whatever works for you) going up and connecting with the Sun’s energy. If you’ve connected, you should feel a trickle of warm, “golden” energy coming down that line. Once that line is secure, extend a second one, this time from your heart chakra, to the fire burning in front of you, the “child” of the Sun that she has sent down in her goodness. Create a line to that fire, which should be easier than the Sun because it’s closer. Breathe in and let the two lines of energy meet in your throat chakra, one coming from your heart and the other from your head, where the Sun beats down.

Now let that solar fire energy, the combination of the two, come out your mouth in a sung note. It can be any note or words or a tune; let the energy choose the form. With your voice and the exhalation of your breath, “push” the energy at the heart chakra of the person in front of you. (For more information on how to use the voice to push energy, read the White World chapter.) Visualize the warm red-gold energy going in straight between the client’s shoulder blades, hitting the heart full of gray dampness that the person is trying to push out, and let the energy do the pushing. As you intone your note and push the energy, visualize it filling your client’s heart and pushing out all the sorrow like a wave into the bowl. Part of depression is inertia—emotional, physical, and energetic. By calling on Sunna and her energy in this way, you’re breaking the hold of that energetic inertia, which in turn can help upset the hold that depression has on the client.

When the process feels done—and you will learn intuitively over time when a process is done—tell the client to move to the fire and very slowly drip the water into it. The trickle should never be enough to put the fire out. The idea is to turn every bit of that water to steam, little by little. If the fire gets low, have the client stoke it with more wood, saying, “I feed the fire of the Sun within, and I do not let it overcome the sorrow.” When it is done, recan the client with herbs, and you’re finished.

If the client is suffering from some sort of chemical depression, this will provide only temporary relief. The actual problem is larger and cannot be solved by a temporary infusion of positive solar energy. If the sorrow is from an ongoing situation that cannot be resolved, it may or may not be ephemeral. However, even temporary relief can be better than nothing, and there should be no negative side effects from this treatment.

Evening

In the last chapter, you learned most of the important basics needed to form a strong foundation for your shamanic work. One item we left out, however: personal purification. Ordinary living can fill a person with psychic gunk, but people who work on other people’s energies and wyrd (life paths) are even more at risk. Shields help, of course, but sometimes things get through. (If you don’t have proper shields, or don’t clean or maintain them, gunk will get through.) In addition, sometimes personal problems and struggles can create a buildup of psychic garbage that creates static and interferes with spirit work. Spirit workers of all kinds should do regular purifications to keep them clean and open, just like surgeons wouldn’t walk into an operating room without cleaning themselves before and after, just in case. We actually recommend cleansing at least weekly in addition to before and after each client as a bare minimum. Psychic hygiene is just as important to a shaman or shamanic practitioner as physical hygiene is important to a medical professional. And sometimes, a client may need purification. If you touch a person energetically and get a feeling of “ick!” then the first course of action may well be a cleansing, or a series of cleansings.

However, people are all different, and what works as a cleansing for one person on one occasion will not work for every person or for the same person every time. Therefore, rather than give one exercise for cleansing, we’ve scattered a number of them throughout this book. You’ll find one below that uses the Sun for purification and one in the next chapter that uses the Moon’s energy. You’ll find one in the Blue World chapter—called Lake—that is nominally about healing (and can be adapted to a bath if you don’t live near a lake), but can be used for purification as well. A cleansing exercise in the Green World chapter—named Recels I—uses the smoke of mugwort, one in the Red World chapter involves recaning with flame, and one in the White World chapter uses ice. We recommend that you as a practitioner try all of them, so that you can better gauge which one is more suited to any given person or situation.

Exercise: Solar Purification

This exercise draws upon the Sun Meditation, except that you begin fifteen or twenty minutes before sundown. Go outside or to a window where you can track the procession of the Sun across the sky at sundown and make offerings. Then center yourself and begin to breathe, asking that Sunna cleanse you of whatever psychic gunk may have accrued on you and in you. Reach up to her with both hands. Extend your senses until you sense that a connection has been made. First, just like with the Sun Meditation, feel as though you are drinking in her light. Visualize her pouring her light into you until you are filled with it from toe to crown. Your muscles absorb it, drinking it in like a sponge gobbles up water. It flows into the spaces between your bones. It wraps itself around the cartilage. It seeps into your bones and into your marrow. This gold current flows with the blood in your veins. It overflows your crown and flows down around you, coating your skin, coating your aura, until you are thoroughly filled and cloaked with sunlight.

Once you feel yourself well and truly filled with her energy and light, and as she progresses into the west, ask her to take all that psychic buildup with her. Feel as though the golden energy that has been given to you for this purpose is slowly (in time with her passage across the sky) seeping out the soles of your feet and into the Earth, which can absorb and transmute this energy into something usable. As the light sinks from you into the soil, it gathers up the gunk, and with its momentum carries it into the Earth too, ridding you of the psychic contagion. When you are finished, thank Sunna, ground yourself, and take a cleansing bath for good measure. Then be sure to eat something.

Winter Solstice

The Sun goes through phases just like the Moon, and they reflect the Moon’s eight phases in their own way. We can measure them as well—the winter solstice is the Sun’s equivalent of the New Moon, when the Sun is at her nadir and the world threatens to be swallowed up in darkness; the summer solstice is the equivalent of the Full Moon; the equinoxes are the equivalents of the Quarter Moons; and the cross-quarter days (often referred to in modern Paganism as Oimelc, Samhain/ Winternights, Beltane/May Day, and Lammas) are equivalent to the Waxing and Waning Crescent Moons, the Gibbous Moon, and the Disseminating Moon, respectively. Thus we begin on Yule, the winter solstice, just as in the next chapter we begin on the New Moon.

Exercise: Burying Amber

This is the first half of an exercise in making one of the many substances that shamans in our tradition find it useful to acquire, charge, and bless. If you live in a climate where the ground is frozen by Yule, you will need to dig a hole in the ground about a foot deep and reserve the earth in a bag somewhere it will not freeze. Cover the hole and come back to it at midnight on the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. In the meantime, acquire a cup of mead and a small chunk of rough, raw amber. Amber is the stone of Day, just as jet is the stone of Night. Wrap it in black cloth and lay it in the hole, then pour the earth in over it, saying this prayer:

Spark of the Sun, I bury you

As Sun lies now beneath the Earth

And like a seed you will gather light

And be released when the year is right,

And rise again into rebirth.

As you scoop the cold earth into the hole, visualize the amber as a seed of the Sun, waiting under the soil for its destiny. While you kneel on the cold ground, ask the land spirit for its blessing on the Sun-seed you have just planted. Ask it to keep the seed safe until the high summer. Pour the mead—a solar substance—out onto the earth as an offering.

One note: This ritual can be performed in reverse for Night-affinity techniques by burying a piece of jet at the summer solstice and then unearthing it at Yule (assuming the ground is not completely frozen). However, if you carve or grind jet, wear a mask; its particles are much more harmful to the lungs than those of amber. (If you are more of a lapidary, you could do this with a moonstone.)

Spring Equinox

Here we are going to talk about blessing things, people, and situations. Among shamans in some Siberian tribes, blessing the spring planting and the autumn harvest were among their yearly tasks. In more civilized areas, these tasks were likely taken over by priests as populations grew, temples were built, and priestly hierarchies emerged, but in small nomadic tribes (and probably in places too remote to support priests), the shaman was the holy person to turn to for blessings, sanctifications, and other religious necessities. Since the folks who might call on a shaman or shamanic practitioner don’t always have large religious communities that they can turn to, sometimes we get to do that priestly work for them as well, and we should know how to do it. As we’ve said before in this book, many neoshamanic traditions downplay a religious aspect, but this tradition is solidly planted in our faith, and all shamans are also priests of some sort (although obviously most priests are not shamans), and should know how to do simple things like dispense blessings. If you can pray, you can bless. It’s the same operation in reverse, with the aid of that sacred being.

However, there are different levels of blessings. If you’ve ever seen the average modern minister or priest bless something, they are basically inviting God or whomever to bless the person or thing they are touching. For a spirit worker who has actually made contact with real entities, the responsibility of blessing is much larger. Our duty is, whenever possible, not to merely invite a sacred entity to bless something and hope that the entity notices our plea, but to actually get the being’s full attention if only for a moment, and to open ourselves as the living conduit for their energy. For us, it should not be a shot in the dark, but a reasonably certain process that gets results. When we pray in a public ceremony to an entity we have touched and could touch again, we are expected to get that entity on the line and be clear enough to be used as its tool in this way.

Exercise: Blessing the Seed

Ideally this should be done on the spring equinox, but if the climate is not right, it can be delayed until later in the spring. For this exercise, you will need a patch of garden for planting seeds, and some seeds of the early Stone Age wheat variety Einkorn hornemanii. (Numerous specialty seed companies carry packets of Einkorn; one Internet search will find several of them.) The best way to plant a packet of Einkorn seeds in a small garden patch is to reserve some good dirt in a bucket, distribute the seeds over the area fairly thickly—at least one per square inch, and more is fine—and sprinkle a half-inch of dirt over them. But first, hold a single seed in your palms and extend your hands to the Sun, saying:

Hail, waxing golden one

On this your day of equal night,

In this your time of opening.

Bless these seeds that will go down into darkness,

And coax it forth again into the light,

Pulling the leaves up toward heaven.

Sow all the seeds and cover them. Then say this prayer to the land spirit:

Hail, sacred spirit beneath us,

You who hold up our feet as we walk,

Bless the seeds we send to your realm

And feed them well, that they grow tall

And someday give back their essence to you.

Sprinkle the garden bed with a watering can of rainwater, and say this prayer:

Children of all the clouds, I hail you.

As I lay you here, so shall you be drawn here.

Bless these seeds with every drop.

Once you’ve made your three blessings, you are done until the fall. You do not need to use these exact prayers; they are offered here for those who don’t know what to say on their own. You can sing or chant instead of speaking; the method doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you not merely mouth the words. You must reach out your consciousness and connect with the spirits as you pray, and then you wait a moment for their response. Visualize yourself as an open channel for their blessing energy. It may be easiest to visualize the channel going out through your hands to pour the blessing forth. If you have to stop and do each step over and over again in order to get it right, that’s not a tragedy. You’re practicing, after all, and if it takes hours to get a single packet of seeds planted, so be it. If you don’t have a feeling of connection to something greater while you pray, it may be that it is not the right day to do this. (For all you know, there will be a flood tomorrow and the spirits are aware of that.) Try again the next day.

How will you know if the blessing comes? You’ll feel it. A blessing is one of the loveliest things to ever rush through one’s energetic pipes. The energy rubs off, of course, and as a channel for blessings, you will be blessed yourself. It may bring tears to your eyes; don’t be ashamed. There is nothing shameful about being moved by the touch of sacredness.

When you are finished, as a thank-you, it is good to leave an offering of bread and milk to Mother Earth, and milk and honey to the land spirits. There is even a very old Anglo-Saxon charm that teaches people to do just that. (See the Resources.)

Summer Solstice

This is the second half of the exercise we began at the winter solstice, and now we’ll explain the point of it. Sacred and blessed substances are important to shamanic work. Every longtime practitioner has a supply of objects and substances that have been energetically changed in some way. The simplest method, which we will refer to again and again in the various craft sections, is making or manipulating something with Intent—meaning that you actively put energy of a certain flavor into the item, using your motions and activity as the way to embed that energy. You can also embed energy that isn’t your own—for example, sitting next to a lake while knotting together a net and actively drawing “lake-ish” energy off the body of water in front of you to suffuse each knot. These create what we call charged items, and you can do the same with substances while chopping, sifting, or grinding them.

However, making them sacred means getting a blessing on them. This usually requires that they be touched in some way by a God or spirit. In the last exercise, you practiced being the conduit of a blessing, which you’ll do again in the fall. The solstice exercises are a different way to go about it. On the winter solstice, you asked the Sun to bless a piece of amber (which has an affinity with the Sun), and you buried it, as the Sun is at its darkest point on that night. You created affinity, and asked for the Sun to put her touch on the item that was dancing her dance. This is a way to get a blessing on something that does not require the ability to be a conduit. It’s very useful for people who can’t master the equinox exercises, or who are having a bad day and can’t manage it at the moment, or have a client who has to do the process for themselves without a close relationship with the spirits in question.

Both energized and blessed substances are useful, for instance, to burn and “smoke down” a person or place, to place in extremely tiny amounts (what Raven’s partner refers to as a “shamanic dose”) in food or water, to put in a power bag or spirit house. Amber is a wonderful substance that can be worn as jewelry or ground into a powder to burn as incense, mark on someone’s body, or grind into sacred bath salts. You can also place a few grains into some mead for drinking. Sun-blessed amber can be used in any shamanic working in which you need to focus the Sun’s energy.

Exercise: Unearthing Amber

At noon on the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, go to the place where you planted the amber six months ago. Before you do any digging, face the sky and thank the Sun for touching its tiny spark underground. Then get down on the ground and thank the land spirit for keeping it safe. If you’ve brought offerings to pour out for the Sun and the land spirit—and by this time it should be routine for you—give the gifts and dig up the stone. Unwrap it and let it sit out in the Sun for a while. If it is a rainy day, let it sit out for a few hours during the next sunny day.

Then get a piece of fine-grit sandpaper, and sand the rough stone until it is smooth. Don’t use coarse grit and work your way down to fine like you would normally; do the whole thing with fine sandpaper. It is all right if it takes many days of periodic work to get it smooth and in the shape you want; erode it slowly like Nature erodes stone. The point is to get as much fine powder off of it as possible, all the same grain. Sand the amber over a large piece of paper so as not to lose any of the powder. After each session of sanding, carefully shake the powdered amber into a small vial with a tight lid. This will be your Sun-blessed incense, and many other things as well. When you have the stone sanded into the shape and smoothness that you want, you can place it on a Sun altar or wear it as sacred jewelry to connect with solar energy.

Autumn Equinox

What one begins, one has to finish. Blessing the seeds yields, eventually, to the task of blessing the harvested crops. Since it is assumed that this is six months later and you have been doing shamanic practice for that long, we are not going to provide you with prayers this time. We will just let you know what prayers you need to say, and you can work them out in any way you like. It’s not the eloquence that counts, it’s the sincerity . . . and the efficacy of those words, songs, chants, or motions in helping you make a good, clear connection with the spirit in question.

Exercise: Blessing the Harvest

For this exercise, you will need to have a large garden, have friends who garden, or have friends who are members of a vegetable CSA (community-supported agriculture, small organic farms that sell shares of their crops direct to local customers) or shop at local farm stands. In any case, you want people to bring you freshly harvested crops to bless. It doesn’t matter what sort they are so long as they will be eaten. If you can arrange it, get people together in a group for you to bless the entire mass at once. Unlike the seed blessing, this is done in public. You can, of course, practice beforehand. Plants are harvested throughout the summer, and you can practice blessing all the way up to the equinox. The ritual itself doesn’t have to be on the exact equinox; it should ideally be at the time when your Einkorn wheat is ready for harvest, and that might be earlier or later, depending on your climate.

Put the baskets (or other containers) in front of you, ideally on the Earth, close to the patch of ancient wheat. Then say the following prayers:

First, thank the Sun and give her an offering. Ask for her blessing on the vegetables she has helped to grow, that they might provide their consumers with energy.

Second, thank the spirits of the land who helped grow the crops, and give them an offering. Ask for their blessing on the vegetables they have helped to grow, that they might strengthen the bodies of their consumers. For both, speak from the heart, and keep your mind clearly focused on the reason you are making your request. There was a time when, if the harvest failed, people starved to death. It was the shaman’s job to make sure that didn’t happen. This type of work, simple as it may seem to those of us raised in urban societies, was utterly crucial.

Third, thank the spirits of the rain that nourished the plants and helped them grow. Ask for their blessing on the vegetables that they might be tender and delicious and keep well.

Fourth, ask the blessings of the plant spirits themselves, that they might bring the nutrients in these vegetables into whatever parts of the consumers’ bodies they are most needed.

Fifth, ask the blessing of the Force of Sacrifice, all that dies that we might live. You can call him by the name of John Barleycorn or, if you work with the Northern Gods, Ingvi Frey.

Sixth, go to the patch of ancient wheat with a sickle. Ask for the blessing of Father Wheat, who is one of the Ancestral Fathers and Mothers. (For more information on this, check the Green World chapter.) Cut down the wheat stalks just above ground level. Tie the bundle of wheat and hold it up in the air. Ask the blessing of the ancestors on the ancient grain that they bred themselves, so long ago.

Send everyone home with their blessed food. Remind them that as this food is now sacred, none of it must be wasted. Feed any scraps to animals or compost them to go back into a garden. Then let the bundle of wheat dry out, and carefully thresh out the grain. Keep it, like the amber powder in the last exercise, as a sacred substance. It can be used to bring in the energies of Sun, John Barleycorn, Father Wheat, or the ancestors, depending on what you need. Twist the stalks into a braid to hang on the wall for health and good fortune. At the next harvest, that dried braid may be cast into a sacred fire and replaced with one from the new harvest, always with gratitude and thanks to the vaettir, ancestors, Elemental Powers, and Holy Powers.

Sundial

Sundials have been in use since people decided that it was important to know what time of day it was. The earliest known piece of a Babylonian sundial dates to 1500 BCE, and by 600 BCE they were all over Greece and later spread to Rome. From examining the earliest sundials, it seems that they were built as much to admire the solar cycle as to nail down part of the day. In the Iron Age, people were taught to tell time by measuring where their shadows fell; in the medieval era the Venerable Bede actually published a chart delineating the ratio of shadow-footsteps to hours. (One assumes that he had average-size feet.) Churches carved crude sundials into their walls in order to mark the monastic hours. The Saxons divided the day not into hours, but into “tides,” large multihour swathes of time from which we get noontide and eventide.

Sundials are not ancient, but they are useful tools for connecting with the Sun’s energies. Building any sort of sundial forces you to confront the solar cycle and learn a lot more about the doings of the Sun. While the details of building an elaborate sundial are too complicated to go in to here (and for these details, check the very good books on the subject listed in the Resources), we can describe a few simple kinds and explore how they would work as a way of connecting with the solar spirit.

Craft: Creating Sundials

The simplest form of sundial is the noon mark. In older days, noon marks were made on the sides of houses so that housewives would know when to call in the hungry workers for lunch. Many modern residents of these older homes never realize that those strange marks actually mean something. There are two ways to make a noon mark; one involves mathematics and one involves being at the same building at noon more or less every day for a year and continually making a mark as the shadow from a stationary object falls across a wall or windowsill or porch railing. We recommend, for all these sundial methods, that you work from the observational and empirical mindset rather than the mathematical one, not because the math is so terrible, but the point here is to learn about the solar cycle in a deep and organic way. Noon marks don’t have to be merely a series of lines; they can also be special symbols for different times of the solar year. Remember that many electronic devices are not set for actual noon wherever you are; they are set for the center area of your time zone, which can encompass up to a half hour’s worth of difference from your actual position.

The solar cycle can also be observed by sunbeams. If you make a hole in a piece of paper and put it on a south-facing window, the beam of light will make its way up and down the wall or floor throughout the year. Your noon mark should tell you when it’s noon on each day. If you take the right notes on your moving beam—again, details of how to do this are found in the sundial books we’ve listed—you will create a long double-teardrop shape, with one long loop and one tiny one. This is called an analemma, and the place where the two loops cross is at the equinoxes. You can create an analemma with tacks on the floor of a building, and this makes for a good inside Sun-worshiping spot.

You can set up a classic sundial with its triangular gnomon (upright marker) outside in any unshadowed place. Don’t buy decorative sundials in garden stores or supermarkets. They are often an artist’s fanciful rendition of a sundial, rather than an accurate tool. At best, they are accurately laid out for an arbitrary and often unspecified latitude. Accurate custom-made sundials are available from specialty craftspeople, but learning how to set up your own, from observation rather than mathematics, is an excellent exercise for connecting with the energy of the Sun. Classic sundials are basically altars to the Sun and can be used as such.

One of the most wonderful sundials for our purposes, however, is the analemmatic dial. This requires a fairly large unshadowed and flat outside space, and can be marked out with paving stones in a garden. The stones are set in two abutting parallel rows on a north-south axis, which can be determined very roughly with a compass and then adjusted by checking against Polaris, the North Star, at night. Each section of the two walkways corresponds to a specific time of the year; the solstices are at the ends and have tiny sections, while the middle sections are wide and correspond to the equinoxes. Most sources on laying out analemmatic dials divides them into twelve unequal sections for the months, but for shamanic purposes they should be divided into eight unequal sections for the eight periods of the solar year. This is actually easier than the rather arbitrary calendar months, which have no relationship to the solstices and equinoxes.

The ratio between the sections must be calculated mathematically, but once that is done, you can stand at noon on any of the sections and your own body becomes the sundial gnomon. A friend can mark where the head of your shadow falls, which will yield a semicircle of points over the course of the year. Then place a number of objects (which can be plants, statues, spirit houses, or whatever you like) on the points. When you stand on your analemmatic dial on any given day, you have the array of the whole solar year spread out in front of you, and you are literally the Sun’s point of measurement on Earth. It’s an amazing feeling and an excellent place to absorb solar energy on a psychic level, which works even through clothing if you are worried about ultraviolet rays.

3

The Silver World

Moon

Hail to the Moon that rides the night,

Hail to the Watcher in the dark window,

Hail to the silver beams on the rippling water,

Hail to the white dogs and the shining track,

Hail to the one who sends us inspiration.

The Moon, like the Sun, has been called upon since wolves began to howl at it. Paleolithic humans probably used the Moon for gauging time, as its convenient cycle of 29.5 days is always easily marked in even a partially clouded sky. The oldest lunar calendar ever discovered dates to the Aurignacian period of the Paleolithic era, approximately 32,000 years ago. It is a series of Moons, from Crescent to Full, carved in a snakelike line on a piece of bone. It is conjectured that these small, lightweight, portable calendars were carried on hunting trips or other journeys as a way of clocking how much time had passed. Nomadic early humans relied more on the phases of the Moon than of the Sun; the first solar calendars did not appear until the Neolithic era, when agriculture required a yearly planting-and-harvesting cycle.

There have always been Moon Gods, in every religion and pantheon. In the Northern Tradition—both the Iron Age beliefs that inform modern Heathenry and Northern Tradition Paganism and the Paleolithic to Bronze Age beliefs that inform this shamanic tradition—the Moon is male. In modern Paganism, the Moon is seen as female to the point where the idea of a masculine Moon makes eyebrows raise. There are as many male Moons as female ones—in Egyptian, Sumerian, Japanese, and some African mythologies, to name just a few—but because of the link between female menstrual cycles and the lunar cycles, modern Pagans associate lunar energy solely with femaleness. Part of this is also cultural, drawing from classical Greco-Roman assumptions about maleness being rational and femaleness being irrational; we have seen both men and women attempt to link this to the disorder of PMS.

However, in the Northern Tradition, things are subtly reversed. The irrational is associated with maleness—Odin is a berserker god and a deity of the wod, or divinely inspired altered states; Fenris is the force that devours everything; Loki is the trickster who seems not to always know why he does things; Frey is the lover who becomes obsessed and will give up anything for the beloved; Thor’s mighty rages and wild dancing joy create the storm (as opposed to the Greco-Roman Zeus/Jupiter, whose thunderbolts are much more calculated). In contrast, Odin’s and Thor’s goddess-wives, Frigga and Sif, are civilizing forces; Fenris’s sister, Hela, the death goddess, is cold and controlled; Frey’s bride, Gerda, is quiet and self-contained; and Loki’s second wife, Sigyn, is nurturing and soothing (although his first wife, Angrboda, defies the pattern). Sunna, too, is a direct female force that casts bright, revealing light instead of the soft, obscuring light of her wayward, wandering brother, Mani. For anyone who has met the Moon god Mani, though, it’s almost impossible to think of the Moon as solely female again.

The Moon has eight phases, and lunar energy acts differently on each phase. During the New Moon (or Dark Moon, as some call it), the lunar spirit is renewed, childlike, shy, full of wonder. As the Moon waxes into a crescent, the lunar spirit picks up speed and becomes enthusiastic and playful. The Crescent Moon may also manifest as a Warrior’s Moon, with Mani keeping his weapons at the ready. On the Waxing Half-Moon, self-doubt and conflict appear. On the Gibbous Moon (the Waxing Three-Quarter Moon), the feel is one of ingenuity and learning to climb out of trouble. On the Full Moon, the lunar spirit blossoms and the energy is at its peak, washing over everything. While the lunar energy is strongest at this point, it is not necessarily attuned to a human wavelength, and it may be difficult to get the Moon’s attention.

On the Disseminating Moon—the Waning Three-Quarter Moon—the lunar spirit turns outward and looks down upon the world and its people. This is actually the best time to make a connection, because the focus has changed from internal to external. On the Waning Half-Moon, more conflict and doubt appears, this time over the suffering in the world. This is a good time to ask for lunar help and aid with your problems, because the Moon is most compassionate during this period, and during the Waning Crescent or Balsamic Moon, which is next. This is the “old wise Moon,” ready to go once again into the darkness and be reborn.

Raven: I first came to the Moon as an astrologer, and that still shows—for me, the Moon’s cycle is a sacred thing that dances through twelve signs and eight phases, rotating in thirteen lunations until it catches up with the Sun in nineteen years and change. I did a lot of Moon-gazing to learn about the Moon. Since I am primarily a nocturnal creature due to my lupus condition, which won’t let me spend time out in the Sun for very long, I do a lot of things by moonlight. Living away from the city, the Moon’s light is not compromised by light pollution, and I can move in that silver light with impunity. Sometimes it is so bright as to be almost daytime, but his soft light never burns me. I’ve lived with the Moon in the sky for so long that I can now do a fast calculation in my head—“It’s the Waning Quarter, and the Sun is in Aries, so that puts the Moon in Capricorn, so that’s the Miser’s Moon, and I’d better remember to be generous to my friends . . .” The Moon’s information isn’t obscure and difficult to read like the stars. It’s right there where anyone can see it, even through partial cloud cover. The Moon loves people close up.

Galina: I came to the Moon because I fell in love with Mani. I’ve had the opportunity, in a yearly ritual for the past few years, to allow him to possess me. (Deity possession, or “being ridden,” carrying a god or spirit like a horse carries a rider, is a specific skill that takes inborn wiring to do safely and well. It involves allowing a deity to push one’s consciousness aside, wear the body like a garment, and interact directly with his or her devotees.) During the brief period where he was settling himself in my body, before I went down into unconsciousness, I experienced full-on the gentle yet compelling power of this god. I emerged utterly besotted. I became a fervent devotee. I maintain a shrine to him in my home, delight in his nightly presence in the sky, pour out regular offerings and celebrate his beauty and power regularly. He has watched over me and guided me home and kept me safe, and he blessed my mother before she died. My connection to the Moon comes not through astrology or astronomy or menstruation or tides. It comes specifically through love for Mani. The other things are useful because they are avenues through which I might be able to better connect to him. That is all. May he be hailed.

New Moon

The New Moon is the dark time when the Moon is underground, waiting to be reborn. This is the most difficult time to touch the lunar spirit, so our exercise will reflect that distance. The New Moon is also the time of beginnings and potential, when the Moon is at his most childlike—both wide-eyed and wondering at the amazements of the world, and easily hurt by disappointment. If you work with lunar energy at this time, expect to feel the stirrings of enthusiasm that may or may not be grounded in practical reality, and wild dreams of strange beginnings.

Exercise: Moon Burial

Find a round mirror in a frame or a round picture frame with glass over the front. Paint the mirror or the picture back with high-gloss black paint. Wrap the mirror in a dark cloth and go out on the New Moon to dig a hole at least a foot deep. Before you bury the mirror, place a seed into the hole—preferably the seed of a tree that you would like to grow in that spot—and then fill the hole most of the way, place in the mirror, and fill it in the rest of the way. The seed can be from any tree, but certain trees are specifically lunar in nature, such as the willow and eucalyptus, and especially the aspen, which is the tree dedicated to the Nordic Moon god. After covering the mirror with earth, say the following prayer:

Silver spirit, beneath the soil

You rest and gather hidden light,

And sprout like seed, and leaf and grow

A silver tree in darkest night.

Then you wait two weeks until the Full Moon and dig up the mirror. Do not go too deep and disturb the seed. If it grows into a tree, that is a good omen; dedicate it to the Moon and tie white ribbons and lunar ornaments to it when it is big enough. If it does not sprout, the mirror will still work. Clean the dark mirror carefully, recan it with mug-wort smoke (see the Green World chapter to learn about mugwort and recaning), and in two weeks, when the Moon is new again, sit in a dark room and lay the mirror flat on a table. Light candles and place them around its edge, then sit and stare into it and ask the Moon to give you wisdom or the answer to a question. Let your eyes unfocus, but keep them on the mirror. When you suddenly get the urge to focus them, do it and take note of whatever image flashes on the mirror’s surface. This is your message from the Moon.

The Moon has seen everything, every moment of human folly tumbling by in the passage of days, weeks, years, and eons. He is ancient, though you might not know it from his presence. He has a fascination with numbers, counting, time, and patterns, and he sees more than many might realize. He is a truly gifted diviner, and maybe, just maybe, he will whisper some of his wisdom to you.

Crescent Moon

The Crescent Moon is the time when the Moon emerges from the dark, full of hopes and dreams and ready to run across the sky. It is a time for taking the next step in a project, and if you connect with the lunar energy during this time, it can give you the motivation to do that. It is a somewhat self-involved energy, so be careful of the feelings of others. The Crescent Moon imitates horns, and this Moon does have the feel of the charging, enthusiastic bull. Sometimes this Moon comes with the discerning power of a warrior, and we call it then the Scimitar Moon. It is a time to take stock of one’s possibilities, one’s surroundings, one’s resources, and one’s debt. It is a far-seeing Moon, the strategist always at the ready.

Exercise: Purification Divination

As we mentioned in the Golden World chapter, psychic hygiene is very important to shamanic work, especially if one is actually doing work for others. Dirty energy can rub off when you work on someone, no matter how hard you try to shield—getting that close to them can still sometimes pass dirt. In addition, we all build up our own psychic filth, which interferes with one’s spiritual “signal clarity.” It’s worth it to do regular purifications as an ongoing discipline in order to keep oneself as clear as possible. Good signal clarity is crucial to this work.

It’s also useful to have clients do purifications or to do cleansings on them. This can be as simple as recaning them with smoke or as complex as having them take a series of special baths in various substances. However, sometimes it’s hard to choose which purification is best, for you or for a client. That’s when a simple divination system is in order. We suggest choosing a polished stone for each of the types of cleansings listed in this book, as follows:

Simple grounding and centering, no special cleansing needed (in Beginning Place chapter): brown stone

Sun Purification (in Golden World chapter): yellow or gold stone

Moon Cleansing (next exercise in this chapter): white stone

Recaning with Mugwort or Juniper (Recels I and II in Green World chapter): two different green stones

Water Cleansing (Lake exercise or Cleansing Bath in Blue World chapter): blue stone

Fire Cleansing (in Red World chapter): red stone

Raven’s Ice Cleansing (in White World chapter): clear stone

Not necessary; you’re fine: gray stone

You can add other stones as you learn other methods. For example, some animal spirits (like Reindeer) teach cleansing techniques and assist with them. There are also runic methods for those who use runes; methods using song, music, or galdr (shaman singing); and advanced methods using pain and ordeal. Some people like to draw purification methods from other spiritual traditions; Galina has used techniques from Yoruba and hoodoo practices as well, such as the traditional “head cleansings” of Yoruba religions. Raven has been known to use a modern method that involves standing between two speakers with earplugs in and turning up very loud music with a deep beat to use the vibrations to clean him. You may want to try chi-moving exercises such as yoga and t’ai chi. You can add as many as you like to the list, as long as you include all the above purifications, even if one wasn’t your favorite or didn’t work out well the first time. It might turn out to be the best thing for a future event or for another person. (Always try out a purification method yourself before recommending it to anyone else.)

Put the stones into a bag and pull one when you feel logy and cluttered, or tense and overworked, or overwhelmed by any emotional situation. If you are inclined to make lots of internal psychic garbage, you might want to undertake purification before any serious working just to make sure that you are at least temporarily clear.

Waxing Quarter Moon

The Waxing Quarter Moon is the time when the Moon has charged at his goal but then has tripped and fallen. In Norse mythology, Mani (unlike his determined sister, Sunna) was a wanderer and often left his course to interfere in something on Earth that distracted him, only to look up and realize that he was late and had to hurry back across the sky. It was said, when the clouds blanketed the night sky, obscuring the Moon, that Mani had drawn the clouds so that no one would know that he had snuck away from his job. This would confuse the great wolf Hati, who had been set to chase him across the sky because of his waywardness. The Waxing Quarter Moon is a time of second-guessing oneself, and possibly a moment of emotional crisis as well. If you are holding back emotions that need to come out, this is a good time to do it. Go out and cry or rage with the Moon if there is no one you can do it in front of. He will understand and sympathize.

Exercise: Moon Cleansing

The Moon’s touch drives out foulness. Approached rightly, he can help clean out tremendous psychic build up and gunk. Begin by taking a quiet cleansing bath. Numerous recipes are available (see Reicher’s Spiritual Protection or Mickaharic’s Spiritual Cleansing). A cup of apple cider vinegar and a handful of sea salt is a good basic one, as is simply adding a can of dark beer to your bathwater. For Mani, I often use the following: a cup of white rum, white carnations (or roses), a capful of jasmine oil, and a handful of sea salt (preferably pink Himalayan). Regardless of the cleansing recipe you choose, take your bath and dress in clean white clothing. Do not dry off, by the way. Allow your skin to air dry. Then go outside or to an open window where you can clearly see the Moon. Make a small offering to the Moon (he loves Sambuca, and cookies are always good offerings for him), and ask that he cleanse you inside and out. Then sit under his light. As you breathe, feel as though you are breathing him in. Feel as though you are drinking in the gentle, cleansing light of the Moon. Do this for as long as you feel you need to, until you feel as though his light has moved through you fully and cleansed every bit of psychic gunk away. Then thank him and consider the cleansing complete. (Alternately, if you are near the ocean, don a white robe and wade into the water when the Moon is out and let the waves wash over you, asking Mani for cleansing. Then leave an offering before you head home.)

We actually believe that it’s good to do preemptive cleansings regularly. We pick up an awful lot of gunk in this work. It takes ongoing vigilance to truly stay properly clean.

Gibbous Moon

The Gibbous Moon is the Waxing Three-Quarter Moon, and it is the time of correcting missteps. This is a good time to apologize for things you’ve done out of selfishness, and to keep the promises you’ve been putting off. Good hard work on your emotional self is a balm during this time. Connecting with the lunar spirit can give you the motivation to do those hard things. In fact, this coming Gibbous Moon, stand out under the Moon and ask yourself: What is the thing I’ve done in the past year that I am most ashamed of? Then ask: How would I have to change as a person in order to never have that happen again? Ask the Moon to help you to become that person.

Exercise: Dream Journal

Dreaming is the Moon’s business, and for some practitioners, it is part of their business as well. Dream work is a particular talent that some people seem to be born with. For them, the time when they are most open to other influences is when they are sleeping, and specifically during their REM cycle. They get their clearest messages and most important images while asleep. To see if dreaming will be part of your shamanic toolkit, you need to start by learning how to remember your dreams.

Select a journal that appeals to you aesthetically—or, if you have the interest, try your hand at making your own. Book making and book binding are fascinating crafts to explore. It’s important that you actually hand write this journal. There’s something about writing it out rather than typing on a computer that allows for better dream recall and for greater facility at accessing your dreams. Keep the journal and a writing implement by your bedside.

Before you go to bed, ask the Moon to grant you good and useful dreams and recall upon awakening. As soon as you wake, before you do anything else (even if you wake in the middle of the night), reach for your journal and write down your dreams, anything you remember. That’s all there is to it. It may take a few weeks or even months to really develop any facility with this, but eventually the dream journal has the potential to become a useful tool in this work. We’re less guarded when we sleep, and Gods and spirits are more able to communicate with us clearly, all the more so if this is one of our talents.

We add one caveat: you really need to get a full and regular night’s sleep. In this work, that’s not always as easy as it sounds, but doing so can be offered up as a gift to the Moon.

Full Moon

On the Full Moon, the lunar energy is at its height. Everything we associate with the Moon, for better or worse, is very strong. There isn’t any one emotion associated with the Full Moon; the emotional climate depends partially on the astrological sign and partially on the general atmosphere—remember that the Moon is by nature changeable and fluctuating. But still, connecting with the Full Moon is tapping in to the largest source of lunar energy of all—unchecked and torrential. That’s why were-creatures are associated with the Full Moon; if you are doing some working that depends on the Moon’s energy, and it’s huge, and you’re not sure if you have the power to do it, you’ll want the Full Moon for maximum voltage.

Exercise: Tides

The Moon controls the tides all over the world, and to work with the energy of the tides is to align oneself with the rhythms of the world. This exercise is designed to link you to that world rhythm in an organic way. It lives at the confluence of Moon and ocean, but because the Moon is in control, it is more about Moon than ocean, so we list it here rather than in our chapter on Water. This exercise does not require you to be at the actual seaside, though of course that’s the preferred method. If you can make it to the beach on a clear Full Moon night, bring an offering for the Moon of milk, white wine, or clear liqueur, and pour it onto the waters where the Moon’s reflection lies across them. Say the following prayer:

My blood the tides in rhythm,

My heart the ocean’s dance,

My blood the Milky Way’s course,

My heart the Moon crossing the sky,

I am one with all that pulses

In the rhythm of life.

Then sit or lie on the land near the water—ideally where the tide can just touch your fingertips when it comes rushing in—and put yourself into a light trance with breathing. (You can use the Utiseta exercise in the Beginning Place chapter.) Align your breaths to the rhythm of the tide, so that you are breathing in or out on each wave. Ideally, you should breathe in with the receding tide and out with the uprush of water. Do this for at least half an hour. While you’re doing it, be aware of the Moon’s location in the sky. Ask the Moon, aloud or silently, to help you find the way to link that natural rhythm into yourself permanently. Visualize the Moon’s silver thread coming down through the top of your head like a trickling of light, running silver through all your veins. Pull that into you with every in breath aligned with the tides. Immerse yourself in the sensation—breathing the tides, feeling the moonlight trickle all through you. Keep going until you feel that it’s definitely over. Then thank the Ocean, thank the Moon, and take your leave.

If you are not able to visit the ocean, you should definitely find a place to be out under the Full Moon on a clear night and make your offering. Bring a recording of the sound of the ocean with you, perhaps with headphones. Do utiseta, put yourself into a trance, and visualize yourself on the seashore. If it doesn’t come, visualize flying or running or walking all the way there. If it still doesn’t come, quit and find a way to get to the real ocean. If you can bring yourself to the ocean in your mind, settle back, listen to the tide sounds, and look at the Moon. Proceed using the directions from the last paragraph.

Once this exercise is completed, you may find that it has odd effects on you. It may change and regularize your sleep cycle, for example. It may echo in your head and in your walk. It may change your moods and influence you toward different food and health choices. It may unlock old negative feelings that must be dealt with. However, if you’ve done it right, if you have let yourself be changed by the power of Moon and sea, you will be able to call that energy up again at any time just by remembering the pace of that breath and visualizing the tide coming in and going out. This will be useful when you are having trouble grounding to the Earth, and especially when you are grieving or upset and can’t focus. The rhythm of the tides—which is the embrace between Earth and Moon, lover and beloved, center and boundary—can bring you back to a place of equilibrium.

Disseminating Moon

During the Disseminating Moon—the Waning Three-Quarter Moon—the Moon’s attention turns outward. He sees the injustices in the world as he passes over it—especially the “dirty deeds done in the dark.” Many of his myths deal with him stealing children whom he perceives as being abused; in some cases he rightfully rescues them and places them in divine houses, but in at least one German myth he attempts to take the children of the emperor of the dwarves, who chases him through nine worlds with an axe and takes his children back. The Moon is a creature of emotion, and sometimes his emotions and sentiment get the better of his common sense. At any rate, during the waxing half of the lunar cycle his energy is contained and turned within. During the waning half his energy is externalized, and if you work with lunar energy during this time, it will reflect that situation. You will notice the problems of others and be moved to help them—or, sometimes, interfere where you are not needed. Follow the urge if it is a noble one, but check and check again to make sure that a given struggle is actually your fight and not that of someone else.

Exercise: Moon Eyes

Many parasites inhabit the world. Some live in rivers, or swamps, or groundwater, or earth, or the dung of creatures who pass them on. Some are good-size worms that can be seen with the naked eye; some are microscopic. And because the spirit world in many ways is not so different from the physical world, there are psychic parasites that feed on the energy body just as embodied parasites feed on the flesh. If you have the Sight, you’re skilled at looking into people’s energy bodies, and you can put your astral fingers into someone to feel around, you can learn to discern psychic parasites from all the other stuff. But if you’re not quite skilled or talented enough for that yet, you can use the Moon to see them. This is best done with maximum moonlight, and for some reason it seems to work better on the waning side, so a nice bright Disseminating Moon on a clear night is a good time.

There are a lot of reasons why someone might suffer from low psychic energy—physical health problems, emotional stress, psychic vampirism (from someone else or because they are one and can’t find a place to feed), to name a few. These should all be disqualified first, before you jump to the somewhat rare conclusion of psychic parasites. If everything else has been checked—by divination as well as other methods—then take the client to lay out under the clear moonlight on a blanket. Let the moonlight shine directly on the client, and say a prayer to the passing Moon. Ask him to help you see what there is to see, and then look at your client’s body, one area at a time. Some psychic parasites live next to the spine, some in specific organs. Some are tiny, and some can be up to a foot long. Some are snakelike, some like curled shrimp, some like insects, some just vague shapes. They generally show up as dark shapes in the energy body when illuminated by the Moon. If, after some scrutiny, nothing shows up, that’s probably not the answer, and you should look elsewhere for the solution to your client’s trouble. If, however, you see something suspicious, extend an astral finger and “poke” it. If it moves involuntarily in a way that sets it apart from the rest of the individual’s energy body, you’ve got a parasite. Just to be sure, use a divination method to check that you saw what you thought you saw.

The actual removal of such parasites is advanced shamanic art, and this beginner’s book is not the place to discuss it. If your client actually has one (or more), first try a round of the cleansings we suggest in this book. If that doesn’t work by the following month, it’s best that you find someone more advanced to pull any out parasites without damaging the client. However, even diagnosis is a helpful thing to a bewildered client who has no idea what might be going on. At least you can send your client away with a clear problem to be solved.

Waning Quarter Moon

As the Moon wanes to the final three-quarters of his cycle, emotional crisis reemerges for him, this time from external forces. On the Disseminating Moon, the lunar energy turned outward in order to help others, and on this Moon it faces the fact that sometimes others don’t want to be helped, or perhaps it would be better in the long run to leave them to work it out themselves . . . or maybe it’s just that nothing can be done. This is a time of mourning for what could have been, and learning to adjust to what may seem like the injustices of the world. Connecting with the lunar energy at this time can be uncomfortable, but it is useful when dealing with interpersonal problems with others. The Moon understands when things just don’t work out, when free wills clash, when one person’s damage trips over another person’s damage. Take it to him and he will help you work it through.

Exercise: Finding Ley Lines

Just as the human body has lines of energy running through it (they are usually called meridians in this day and age, although other cultures have had other names for them), so too does the Earth have such lines running through it. Like meridians, they also have “power points” at various intervals along them. The current term for them is ley lines, and it is generally accepted by those who work with them that they fall into two categories: up and down. Some use the words positive and negative, in a neutral way similar to A/C and D/C, but those terms are often too bound with value judgments for them to remain neutral. Basically, an up line pushes energy up from the Earth’s center, and a down line pulls energy down. Ley lines can vary in size, from tiny as a thread to a road the width of a truck, and they can lie deep in the Earth or very close to the surface (and as such be disturbed by earth-moving operations, thus releasing random energy into the atmosphere until they “heal”).

Living on top of a major ley line is problematic. In general, only holy places or wilderness areas should be sited on large lines, no matter their polarity. Living on a large down line can cause depression, fatigue, rotting teeth (and house parts), and occasionally chronic illness, while living on a large up line can cause insomnia, migraines, and possibly mania, or illnesses of overactive glands or “overgrowth,” such as cancer (or mold). Living on smaller lines isn’t so bad, so long as an up line isn’t running under your bed or a down line through your living room. Down lines are a wonderful place to put compost heaps, while up lines are great for gardens. Lying flat on a down line is good for grounding or—especially—letting negative energy run out of you. Lying on an up line can be energizing.

The traditional way to locate ley lines is dowsing. We typically think of dowsing in terms of finding water—its most practical purpose—but one can dowse for anything with an energy field. (Some people are so talented that they can dowse for anything at all, but that’s more about clairvoyance.) While the art of dowsing is more complex than we can describe in this book, if you’re trying to find ley lines and are having trouble seeing or sensing them, the Moon can help. Go out to where you’re trying to find lines, at night with the Moon shining above you, and stand in the moonlight. Pour out an offering to the Moon—perhaps milk, white wine, or sambuca liqueur. Look at the land again, and see if the Moon can assist you in seeing the lines. Like the Moon Eyes exercise above, seeing land with the Moon’s sight can show glowing silvery lines across the surface of the Earth.

Another way the Moon can make this work is to allow you to feel the lines, if you’re just not a very visual person. Some people can do this automatically by extending their senses down into the Earth and scanning for them, and it’s always best to try it on your own first, but if it isn’t working then make your offering to the Moon. Lift your hand until it is over the Moon, and ask the Moon to help you see what there is to see. You may feel the Moon’s gentle energy touching your hand; seize that feeling and visualize that white beam energizing your palm. Now walk around the area with your hand out and your palm facing down. If the Moon has lent you what you need, you will feel a definite sensation of energy when you come close to a ley line, and that sensation will increase as you cross it. An up line will feel “buzzy,” with a fast pulse and possible a slight push of energy; a down line will have a slow pulse and feel like a pull to the Earth. Make sure that you bring paper and pencil, and take note of where the lines are for later use. Always remember to thank the Moon for his help and blessings.

Balsamic Moon

During the Balsamic Moon—the final waning crescent—the lunar energy ages to become the wise old one. At this time, the Moon is stooped and old, weary but patient. He teaches us about getting past all the turmoil that so occupied our hearts, and seeing the larger picture. Will this matter in five years? Ten? A hundred? When you are long dead? The Old Moon has the collective wisdom of all the other phases, but he does not impart it unless you ask. The lunar energy at this time is quiet, serene, introverted, and as objective as the Moon ever gets.

Exercise: Labyrinth

In olden times, labyrinths were scattered all over the world, including the coast of Scandinavia. By the time the practice was written about, they had become little more than fun toys for children or wilder adults to run or pace for pleasure, but their origin goes back much further. Labyrinths have two sorts of uses: ritual/meditative and shamanic. The traditional ritual/meditative uses of a labyrinth involved walking it with Intent as a meditative process and then either leaving something unwanted behind in the center or finding something you were looking for. (Which it will be depends on the kind of labyrinth, which is explained below.)

For shamans, labyrinths are used to travel from one state to another—between worlds, between shapes, between altered states. For this, the labyrinth must be built with Intent. First, it needs to be on top of the crossing of two ley lines. You often see old labyrinths with old water pumps near them, which is a “tell” of a downward-pulling ley line. They can be two up lines, two down lines, or one of each. Having one of each makes the most versatile labyrinth, but one has to make do with what one has. An up ley cross will tend to want to send you to upper worlds, and it will be harder to travel downward (though not impossible); a down ley cross will have an affinity with the Underworlds and be harder to use to travel upward—tough, again, but not impossible. For meditative purposes, when you get to the center of a down labyrinth, you drop what isn’t wanted and then circle back out, lighter for the journey. For an up labyrinth, expect to find something new waiting for you when you get to the center. Labyrinths built on a balanced ley cross can go either way, although one way might be stronger due to the relative size of the lines.

Labyrinths come in many different shapes and are made from many different materials—turf, plants, laid stones or brick, and sod cut away and the raw ground filled with chalk. You can easily trace a round one with a large compass made of stakes and rope. (Raven built an eight-loop round labyrinth in his back field, on top of the existing down ley cross, of stones laid into the field’s dirt.) We’ve found that astronomically placed standing stones (aligned to solstices, equinoxes, etc.) situated around the perimeter of a labyrinth can add dramatically to its power. It can also add a protective ward around the labyrinth. Ironically, so can solar-powered lights driven into the earth along its pattern. These two additions bring solar energy to the innate Old Moon energy of a labyrinth, combining the two and making them stronger.

As you build your labyrinth, put plenty of Intent into it. You’ll have time to do that, as it’s not a quick job. When it is done, go out on the night of the Old Moon and stand at the entrance. There is a musical key that unlocks an eight-ring labyrinth; if you can figure out what eight notes to sing or play, you can lock and unlock the shamanic aspect of your labyrinth. This is one of those mysteries that people need to figure out on their own, so we are not going to give you the notes. If you’re really having trouble, ask the Moon and perhaps he will tell you, or direct you to someone who can.

Craft: Dream Pillow

Earlier in this book, we discussed dreaming as shamanic work, and how some people are highly gifted in that way. However, for people who don’t have that gift and would like to utilize their dreaming capabilities more effectively, you can craft a simple dream pillow for them.

Make a pillow out of any white, gray, silver, or light blue fabric, the size of your hand with the fingers spread out. Ideally it should be round. If you are a fiber artist, you can decorate it with appliqués of the Moon or knit it with a symbol or image. Stuff it with any fiber (although handspun wool of a live animal would be best), and place within its stuffing the following items:

One small silver coin (a dime will do, especially an older one with more actual silver in it)

One teaspoon lavender

One teaspoon chamomile

One teaspoon mugwort

One teaspoon vervain

One teaspoon betony

One teaspoon thyme

One half teaspoon poppy seeds

A bit of white cord with nine knots tied in it

Nine holly leaves (carefully wrapped in wool so their prickles don’t go through the fabric)

A rolled-up piece of paper with your Intent on it. (A friend of mine likes: “Let me wake up tomorrow knowing something I didn’t know today.”)

Stitch up the pillow and put it under your regular pillow, starting on the New Moon. Ask the Moon to help you with lucid dreaming, and to open a channel into your dreams for spirit to enter, but only if it has positive intent. Ask the Moon to guard your dreaming mind and protect you from those who would harm you through it.

4

The Green World

Plants

As roots may we be solid,

As trunk may we stand tall,

As branches may we reach high,

As leaves may we whisper beauty,

As blossoms may we open to possibility,

As fruit may we give forth our legacy,

As allies may we be worthy of the Green Ones.

Plants can be powerful allies. When most people think of shamanic plants, their minds immediately jump to the entheogens—mind-altering plants that open the psyche. The ancient shamans of northern Europe certainly had access to and did use some entheogens—Amanita mushrooms, belladonna, henbane, roseroot, and others—to enhance psychic journeying and turn up the volume on their ability to see and hear the spirits. However, these are by no means the only allies in the Green World, nor necessarily the most common or even the most powerful. Since time immemorial, tree and plant spirits have aided shamans in activities such as healing the body and mind, protecting an area, reading the fertility of a piece of earth, blessing fields, and purifying a person or space before undertaking esoteric work. Accounts of these practices have come down to us in many surviving documents, such as the Old English herbal and leech charms (from the old Anglo-Saxon word laece, meaning “healer”). Just as our ancestors learned to access this ancient knowledge, we as contemporary practitioners can too. In this tradition we often refer to plant spirits as Greenwights, and that word will be periodically used in this chapter.

Ancient folk were much more aware of their environment than modern people usually are. Their constant vigilance was necessary for survival, and they were generally able to identify most of the trees and plants that they saw every day in their ecosystem. Exploring and understanding that ecosystem was necessary for their survival. Traditional practitioners of the shamanic arts often knew hundreds of plants and their uses, and they made various levels of alliance with the spirits of those plants. We don’t have the space to explore hundreds of plants here; the nine spirits of the Green World that we will meet in this chapter were chosen because they are well-known examples of plants that our ancestors considered to be highly sacred. By learning to work with these nine plants respectfully and well, you will build a foundation from which you can continue to safely make alliances within the Green World. It should be noted that none of these plants number among the entheogens, which require more advanced training to connect with safely.

Each plant in this chapter is a medicinal plant, and a few of them are ancient medicines of great power. We have chosen not to reiterate their extensive medicinal uses, as this isn’t a book of medicinal herbal-ism. Using herbs as physical medicine was certainly part of the work of ancient shamans, but what differentiated the shaman from the simple herbalist (and, later, the doctor) was that the shaman did not merely apply the herb to the patient, but also invoked the spirit of that plant for added potency and direction of cure. For those who are interested in learning about Northern medicinal herbalism, or the healing and spiritual uses of other plants from this part of the world, we recommend The Northern Shamanic Herbal, published through Asphodel Press. Learning medicinal herbalism is a long endeavor that may take many years to become proficient. There are quite a few excellent medicinal herbals on the market and even programs and courses of training that offer the requisite medical knowledge.

We think of plants as nonsentient—perhaps even not really alive—because they are sessile and cannot easily communicate with us. Scientific studies refute this—studies that show that plants feel pain, for instance, and are aware of the intent of the humans around them. For an animist and for anyone who is pursuing the path of a shamanic practitioner, believing plants to be nonsentient is a mistake. The spirits of the Green World are powerful allies with a great deal of wisdom, and they can advise the new practitioner on a number of topics. These are not merely limited to spiritual pursuits, although the new practitioner could do worse than to run her latest journeying plan past a steady plant ally. One might not think that a plant spirit would know enough about people to say, “That new flame, that one’s not going to last,” or about human bodies to say, “Why aren’t you getting enough sleep? Go in the house and rest.” But you’d be surprised. Part of their core competency is about creating and maintaining balance. That is part of their job, so to speak, within the greater ecosystem of the environment. They are immensely sensitive and aware of when things are out of balance, and that includes the smaller microcosms of our bodies and our emotional worlds.

In exchange for their help, they often ask you to alter your way of thinking about plants, and your way of interacting with them. For those city dwellers who think that you don’t interact with them at all, keep in mind that much of the food you eat is plant derived. You put their bodies, quite literally, into your own body every day. Essentially, if you’re eating, you’re interacting with the Green World. Some shamans and shamanic practitioners who work with the Green World have found that they are required to eat plant matter that has been grown with respect—not bioengineered to survive being laden with coat after coat of pesticide, not processed into oblivion or superheated so that it forms trans fatty acids. Chemicals in our food cut down on signal clarity, and organic food is grown with respect. Working with any family of spirits must be based, first and foremost, on respect. Certain plants have allied themselves to humans—grains, legumes, some fruits—and we refer to them as the Ancestral Fathers and Mothers in this tradition. Even the wildest of weeds is aware of our lack of respect for the Ancestral Fathers and Mothers; the Greenwights who have sacrificed the most for our species and the other citizens of the Green World do not think much of us for this. Awareness of what plants we eat and how they are grown is a common taboo leveled on spirit workers in exchange for alliances.

Some Greenwights will ask that a human ally be vegetarian or even vegan, perhaps in order to more fully live in the Green World. Other Greenwights will forbid their human allies to be vegetarian or vegan, because there is a temptation among us to privilege the lives of animals over plants, imagining that it is cruel to eat animals but fine to uproot and chow down on a still-living plant—because it isn’t really alive. For those humans, forced omnivorousness is a way to drive home that carrots are just as alive and worthy of living as cows and, moreover, that all life feeds on life. The Northern Tradition grew in a harsh, freezing climate that required eating whatever was available and being grateful, and this is still the way we work with food in this tradition, both animal and plant. Nothing is forbidden as long as it was raised with respect, was killed cleanly, the spirits have not given you any taboos against it, and your body does not react badly to it.

Greenwights might also ask their human allies to grow a garden, grow plants in pots to give away, clean up an area of the natural world, or make it possible for others to do so. Plants communicate with each other through an enormous, worldwide network, and they know that things are off kilter with the environment. They also know who is at fault, and shamans or shamanic practitioners may need to prove that this, too, is a concern that they value. This is not done by giving lip service, but by pitching in and making change. There are no free rides within the Northern Tradition, and no knowledge or power is gained for free. We are required to step up to the plate and put our beliefs and the respect we claim into very clear action.

Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris)

Raven: Before each of my shamanic workings with a client, I light a flame and set the end of the silvery bundle of leaves and twigs on fire. I gathered these from my own land, tied them together, and hung them to dry. I watched the Moon glint silver off their leaves, the Moon whose energy is so bound up with this plant named after the Greek lunar goddess. Her smoke wafts forth and she dances around me; I can see her drifting silver hair and silver green skirts. I breathe her in and feel that moment of dizziness, of my inner eye opening. I wave her smoke around the room to purify it as I sing a small bit of a song of my ancestors that is a thousand years old, a song where she is the first power mentioned. Her smoke quiets the room and calms the client, and we can begin.

Galina: Mugwort was one of the first plants with which I developed a relationship. Grandmother Mugwort is strong and very protective. Her use within sacred work is attested to in very old English herbal manuscripts and I liked the fact that, in calling upon her for aid, I’d be doing something that my ancestors would have recognized as holy—and she is very holy. I’ve only recently started to grow my own mugwort, and I was surprised to find that even before I planted the first cuttings, she was present on my land. The land gives us what we need, and I had wild mugwort growing all around the border of my property, watching over me, guarding my back. I call upon her for cleansings and before and after I see clients. I ask her to cleanse and purify the space, and I trust her wisdom to drive out and expel any energies that do not belong.

On every continent, Artemisia species are burned to clear away negative energies. This has been a frustrating thing for ethnobotanists, who don’t understand why people on different sides of the planet somehow independently figured out the same superstitious and mythical use for the same plant species. We, of course, know better. Mugwort is very old and has been used magically for a very long time. She has no active hallucinogenic parts, unlike her brother plant wormwood (whose alkaloid thujone isn’t useful while burning anyway; he must be ingested), but she doesn’t need hallucinogens to do the trick of creating a sacred space and enhancing psychic abilities. In our experience, she’s always been the best plant for the job. And, of course, it is the first plant listed in the thousand-year-old power song of our ancestors, Charm of the Nine Sacred Herbs. In this charm, mugwort is referred to as Una, the oldest herb.

When you work with her, sooner or later, you realize she is truly ancient. She carries with her a sense of memory; here is a spirit who watched our first human fumblings as we crawled out of the primordial ooze, here is a spirit who watched over our Neanderthal ancestors, who saw humanity gain the grace of fire, of craft, a spirit who reached out eons and eons ago to inspire the first shamans. She remembers all the wisdom that she bore to those first ancient humans, and she can share with us as well. Grandmother Mugwort watches over humanity. She has an interest in our well-being, and she has much to teach.

In the Middle Ages, mugwort was connected with Saint John the Baptist, who was said to have worn a belt of the herb during his time in the wilderness. Saint John’s herb, as the plant became known, had the power to drive out demons, and sprays of the herb were worn around the head on Saint John’s Eve as a protection against possession by evil forces. In China, bunches of mugwort were hung in the home during the Dragon Festival to keep away evil spirits. The Ainus of Japan burn bunches to exorcise spirits of disease, who are thought to hate the odor. It was planted along roadsides by the Romans, who put sprigs in their shoes to prevent aching feet on long journeys, and carried the plant to ward against wild beasts, poison, and stroke. Mugwort prevents elves and random evil things from entering houses, and is said to cure madness and aid in astral projection. A pillow stuffed with mugwort and slept upon will produce prophetic dreams. Mugwort is burned during scrying rituals, and a mugwort-and-honey infusion is drunk before divination. The infusion is also used to wash crystal balls and magic mirrors, and mugwort leaves are placed around the base of the ball or beneath it to aid in psychic workings. Crushed mugwort can be burned as incense as an aid in scrying.

This is the plant of Midgard, the World of Humanity, and it is burned at the start of a ritual. One starts and ends with mugwort, as one starts and ends with Midgard. Its shamanic purpose is purification. We tend to think of purification, in these days of advanced medical antisepsis, as creating a sterile atmosphere. To us, pure has come to mean “without life.” When we use something whose basic power is purification, we expect, on some level, for it to clean everything and leave it a blank slate.

However, that’s not what magical purification actually does. Perhaps a better term for it would be sanctification or consecration. Purifying activities create that aura of sacred space, which is so clear when you’re in it but so elusive to describe. In order to create that energy, they do push out other sorts of energy, including the busy, well-worn, “messy” energy of the everyday. After the purification energy fades, the other stuff may drift back, or it might not, so it can have a cleaning effect in some cases. Grandmother Mugwort helps to create an environment within a space that simply isn’t conducive to malignant energies of any sort. The image that comes to mind is of an old-fashioned hausfrau sweeping the house thoroughly from top to bottom, shaking out the sheets, beating the carpets until everything is spotless, and then doing that day after day to maintain that sense of “clean.”

Mugwort is the herb that is most often burned as recels, the Old English word for incense, pronounced ray-kels. The act of burning it is referred to as recaning, which can be pronounced various ways, but the most graceful seems to be reek-an-ing; the verb recan is a cognate to our word reek. Celtic tradition people use the term saining. It’s an alternative to the Native American term smudging. Mugwort can be bound in lashed bundles and burned in the same way as white sage. It has a clearing effect on the mind and heightens the extra senses, so it is a good thing to burn at the start of any working that is going to involve an altered or trance state. Eventually, the mind becomes keyed to the scent of the herb, and the smell alone becomes enough to spur some people into a light trance, or at least into the necessary head space for sacred work. Some people have a stronger reaction to mugwort than others. A few report that just having it by the bed can cause vivid journeying dreams. Its effect on you may depend on how much the plant spirit likes you or on whether you and the plant have a natural affinity or connection.

Grandmother Mugwort is witchy, spooky, and incredibly powerful. Most report the essence of this plant as feminine, if ancient and mysterious. She is very lunar, but she is not the shining maiden New Moon or the swollen Full Moon; she is the mysteries of the Dark Moon, the witchy crone with the wild mane of silver hair and the long, pointy fingers. Her voice is rough and cracking, and she cackles. When she opens her arms, silvery magic pours forth in a cloud, and she fills a space like no other plant we know, even beating out juniper and American sage. The only thing that comes close to Grandmother Mugwort’s power and presence requires a combination of several different herbs. She loves to work with psychic folk and lays very few rules; her attitude seems to be more one of “Knock yourself out! If you get screwed up, it’s your own fault and you’ll learn. Now, won’t you?” After which she cackles at you further. To her, your safety is not her problem . . . which can be good and bad.

Botanically speaking, mugwort and wormwood are very similar, considered sibling plants and both of the Artemisia genus; they are sometimes confused for each other. Chemically, mugwort lacks the thujone content of wormwood, so the psychoactive properties haven’t been conclusively proved by science. However, mugwort’s spiritual potency is such that people are affected when it is an ingredient in incense, steeped in wine, or just by having it around them (hence its reputation as an herb to aid in dream work). Where wormwood often possesses a masculine spirit, Grandmother Mugwort is feminine and full of classic Crone energy. She is wily and will lead you in circles before giving you a clear answer; she can be a bit of a tease, appearing ornery one moment and crafty the next. Her secrets are given up only at her discretion, though she is not generally picky about who gets to use her plant children. She is of the opinion that we learn best by seeing for ourselves just how big a mess we get into, and she generally won’t interfere when people seek to add her power to something they are doing. Having her direct permission to use her powers seems a bit more rare, and it is a special thing.

Mugwort has a variety of magical uses, including aiding in dream work, divination, protection, and the creation of magical tools. She also adds a layer of refinement to some workings, particularly those relating to cleansing and banishing, since she has a scrubbing effect that clears out all kinds of energetic and astral clutter without the muscle that other herbs, like rue, have. Simply put, she gets the job done without a great deal of fuss, and she doesn’t need the muscle. We have both used fresh sprays of mugwort as miniature flails to cleanse the body’s energy field; the slap of the leaves and twigs had a very pronounced effect.

Exercise: Recels I

Find some mugwort growing in a field—it often dwells by the roadside like an ordinary weed. Sit with the plant for a few minutes and try to call on Grandmother Mugwort, asking her to bless you and to aid the power of the herb that you are about to harvest. Ask permission to cut the plant—Raven has found that if he doesn’t have permission, his hand literally doesn’t want to go near it. Cut it just before it goes to seed. Let it sit for a few days inside until it is wilted but still soft, and then bind it together with natural-fiber string. As you bind it, try again to feel the presence of Grandmother Mugwort. Make a loop on the end of the “stick,” hang it up, and let it dry thoroughly. When it is dry, take the mugwort bunch—your new recaning stick—and light the end with a candle flame, just enough to smoke. Wave the smoking stick around the area, and ask Grandmother Mugwort to cleanse the energy of the area. Breathe in the smoke—carefully, so as not to choke—and ask her if she will be your ally, and what she wants for that service. What you want is for her to be there whenever you purify a space, adding power to the inherent energy of the plant itself.

It’s best to make first contact with Grandmother Mugwort through her smoke, but once you’ve done that, you can also make a tea with a few bits of mugwort leaf brewed with it. Drinking herb tea literally brings the stuff of that plant into your body and allows the spirit to speak to you directly. As you drink the tea, relax and imagine her silvery energy moving through you. Ask her for her wisdom and her aid in opening your inner eyes at times when you are stressed and unclear. If she speaks to you and agrees to help, you can ask her for advice on what you can do to help your own signal clarity. She will likely have something to say on the matter . . . but if you ask, be prepared to grit your teeth and take her advice.

Juniper (Juniperus communis)

Raven: While Grandmother Mugwort is the lady I call on before client workings, juniper is what I use for my own work, especially shamanic journeying on my own. Unlike feathery-soft mugwort, a juniper stick is hard and prickly, liable to pierce your hands even more in its brittle state. It must be handled with more respect. I light the stick while carefully holding my hand under it to collect any fallen needles; they will be mixed into loose incense and burned on holidays. Juniper seems to prefer the work that I do in the back woods, solitary rather than communal, although I know that he is used communally in Siberia. His scent is sharp, clean, evergreen. Where mugwort opens the inner eye, he opens the inner ear, and other senses as well. I breathe in his smoke and things sound sharper and smell stronger. I can taste everything I recently ate in my mouth. He is a harkening back to an older time when other senses dominated, when the hunter’s flared nostrils sniffed the underbrush and he pricked up the ears to wait for the prey.

Galina: Juniper was the first plant that ever truly fascinated me, in the old sense of that term. When I was a child, juniper grew all around my parents’ house and the school, and I’d pick the blue berries and sharp needles and pretend I was mixing up potions, that I was handling something magical. Little did I know, I was! Juniper has a certain dry, wry humor that I find particularly appealing. I too tend to save the use of this plant for personal endeavors, and I find that he is an excellent ally to call upon prior to undertaking any journey work. He keeps me alert and aware, and he helps me manage my resources, including my own personal energies, far more effectively and efficiently than I would left to my own devices. He has power, a great deal of power, but rarely seems to show it. He keeps it instead well hidden, tightly leashed, until it is needed. Perhaps it is my Slavic ancestry—Juniper was the sacred plant of ancient Eastern Europe—but for me, Grandfather Juniper has helped me connect very, very strongly to my dead, my ancestors, and when I feel that connection blocked for any reason, he is one of the first allies upon which I call.

Juniper is native to northern Europe, northern and southwest Asia, and parts of North America. It varies greatly in size and form, depending on its habitat. In olden times, its trunk, in areas where it grew tall, was used as a sacred wood for temple pillars, and its branches were strewn and burned in the streets against plague. Juniper was said to be good against the “king’s malady,” an unspecified complaint that has been applied to different things through the ages. It is also one of the earliest known incense plants in ancient Greece. Its berries take three years to ripen and turn blue, and this was considered a sign of its great age and wisdom.

Juniper is the sacred smudging herb of the Siberian shamans, used in much the same way as mugwort, and for the same reasons. It can be substituted for mugwort in any shamanic ritual. Its purificatory powers are similar to that of mugwort, but subtler—where her smoke evokes a summer night, his evokes the cleanliness of a crisp winter morning. He can give the impression of coldness in the air, so consider before you choose between them which would be most welcoming to the spirits who might be called upon. Where Raven lives, juniper grows as a waist-high evergreen bush, and Raven gathers the twigs in the late fall just before winter, as juniper dries best in cooler weather.

Grandfather Juniper came to Raven as a Siberian shaman in a robe covered in rattling charms. His blue-gray hair hangs down in several braids, each tipped with bells or bones. He speaks in a singsong voice, his old weathered face severe, but his eyes may twinkle at you in occasional humor. He came to Galina as a lean, dark-eyed hunter crackling with carefully controlled magic. His face was equally severe but, as with Raven’s experience, there was a wry humor there and a certain protectiveness. He has a strong connection to the oldest of forest spirits and also to the spirits of wind and frost. Getting him to help is not easy—he may well test you to find out your level of attainment, on a scale that you may not understand, and if you fail he will simply start singing and ignoring you. It is always possible to come back and try again later, though, and he may even send you a vision of what you have to do next to get farther down the “path” to his satisfaction. If he agrees to work with you, he will want a great deal of formal ceremony every time he is used, or he will consider you disrespectful. He demands a good deal more in protocol and formality than Grandmother Mugwort and is far more aware of the hierarchy of power within any given exchange. It is best that anyone seeking to work with him become respectfully aware of these things too.

Exercise: Recels II

Find a juniper bush and sit with it. In the Northeast where we live, Juniper is usually found at the edge of woodlands, under the shadow of other evergreens. Don’t be fooled by the lacy Asian junipers that are sold as landscaping plants—they are a different variant and are ruled by a different grandfather spirit. You can tell Juniperus communis by its harsh, dangerous needles. Close your eyes, smell its scent, and ask permission to cut it. If you get a sense of permission, cut several sticks carefully and bind them with natural-fiber string into a recaning stick. Unlike mugwort, you want to bind and hang juniper at once, as the needles will begin shedding once it is dry and it will become too unmanageable to bind.

When you have a dry stick, wait for the coldest day possible in your climate that is not actively precipitating. Go outside to a wild place where a small fire can be lit. If possible, light it by an older method—see the Red World chapter for ideas. Stand and salute the four directions and the four elements, the sky and the Earth, your ancestors, and anything else that gives you power. Don’t skimp on the ceremony—he appreciates it. Light your stick with your fire and smoke down the area, and yourself; then sit quietly with the scent of the smoke and your eyes closed, and listen. Don’t try to follow any one sound of the wilderness over any other; just let them wash over you. Let yourself sink into the spirit of the place, and when you are at home there, ask him to be your ally and aid you in your purifications. Then open your eyes.

Perhaps you’ll see him with your mind’s eye; perhaps you’ll only hear him. As I said above, he may ask you questions or do odd things around you to see how you respond. If you feel his presence, but he refuses to respond, ask him to tell you in a dream or waking vision (or some other very clear omen) what you need to do to become worthy of his aid, if it is possible. Then sleep with a bag of dried juniper needles under your pillow, and see if you get anything. If he does agree to aid you, thank him formally and solemnly, and ask what his price will be. When you get an answer—and he may wait a while to let you know—make sure that you do it promptly. He is a proud Greenwight and will quickly abandon you if you do not show him respect.

Nettle (Urtica dioica)

Raven: Outside my door is a stand of nettles. Most people come and go without even noticing them, but once in a while new visitors will suddenly be stung, even if they didn’t seem to lean all that close. Friends tell me that I should get rid of them, but they don’t know that the Nettle plant is one of my friends and allies, and that stand of Nettles is my door guard. Father Nettle attacks only those who bring some kind of ill intent across my threshold or who want to use my resources and give back as little as possible; when a new visitor gets stung, I watch that person closely and hurry him or her out as soon as I can courteously do so. I’ve learned from experience that Father Nettle has a better nose for this kind of thing than I do.

Galina: This spirit is very no-nonsense, the epitome of lack of sentimentality and softness. I don’t work with Nettle overmuch, but I respect this family of spirits immensely. I have called upon Father Nettle for protective work, particularly in wardings that need to have an active, watchful component to them. Like Raven, I have found that this plant is an incredibly good judge of a person’s character, and I would heed its words (or actions) when it came to evaluating visitors. I like Father Nettle’s protectiveness and the fact that he strikes first and asks questions later. There’s sometimes a place for that type of forward-thinking initiative in this type of work. I like to keep a little Nettle handy when I see clients. One never knows when clients might grow belligerent or hostile, particularly if the answers to their questions aren’t what they wish to hear. If I am going into a gathering or situation where I know I will be met with hostility, I also call upon Father Nettle to guard my back and handle any malignancy tossed my way. Nettle is a most apt fighter in such battles.

Stinging nettle is native to all of Europe; nettle fiber has been found in Danish Bronze Age graves. Its smaller cousin, the lesser nettle (Urtica urens), is more common in Eastern Europe, and its southern cousin, Roman nettle (Urtica pilulifera), grows in the Mediterranean area. Nettles were used in Britain by the Roman legions, who would rub their joints with the leaves to keep their blood flowing in the cold, damp weather. All have similar value and uses, but Urtica dioica grows the tallest.

Nettle is a Fire plant, associated with the World of Fire and much loved by its lords. This is the herb of Muspelheim, the burning land, and its power is aggressive defense. Nettle sends curses back to their owner. Sprinkled around the house, it keeps evil away; thrown onto a fire, it averts danger; held in the hand, it wards off ghosts. Nettle is considered a “carnivorous” herb, meaning that it likes small offerings of meat and blood, and is used in purification baths and burned for exorcisms. The rune Thurisaz and Nettle get along immensely well, and it also pairs up quite nicely in warrior work with Alder, which is also an herb of Muspelheim and Fire.

Nettle is an aggressive defender, in the sense that it will not only absorb any harmful magic that is thrown at you or the space, but strike back if you let it. Due to its difficult nature, it’s nearly impossible to handle fresh in ritual, but dried or cooked nettle will lose its sting—physically, anyway. Nettle keeps its rabid-guard-dog energy when burned or sprinkled dry around an area. You can drink it in tea in preparation for any kind of guardian duty. Sometimes Father Nettle’s aggressive defensiveness will slip over into offensiveness, so it’s not a bad herb to use before any duty in which you will be armed and going into danger.

Because of its association with the World of Fire, Nettle likes being burned, but throwing it into a fire may make the fire burn longer and hotter—perhaps dangerously so. Take care that you have plenty of water around before infusing your little campfire with the power of the Fire World. On the other hand, it can be a symbolic substitute for fire in a place where you aren’t allowed to actually light a flame.

Father Nettle is exactly what you’d expect—fiery, prickly, and eager to attack and defend. He is a warrior plant and likes to have something to attack. Father Nettle is tireless, faithful, and enthusiastic, but if you do not give him a job, he will run amuck and overdo things. Make sure you set good boundaries with this one; he respects a good commanding officer, but will run roughshod over anyone who is weak or indecisive. Alder makes an excellent commanding officer for Nettle, and Nettle an excellent blade in Alder’s metaphorical hands.

Exercise: Guardian Nettle

Shamanic work can be dangerous, especially when you give of yourself to help others. Some people will try to take advantage of you or will become angry when you can’t fix them. Some spirits of the less-than-savory sort will be drawn to you in order to attempt to feed on you. You can be vulnerable while in a trance, especially if you do it in an outside area on land that is not yours. It can be useful to have a guard-dog spirit to watch your back.

Go find a nettle patch, and sit down a safe and respectful distance away. Hail the Nettle spirit as a warrior, and salute him. Ask him to help guard your back from attack. If he agrees, ask him what his payment might be, and be sure that you pay it. After this, you can plant nettles around your home if you own your own land, or carry a small pouch of dried nettles with you during situations in which you need protection. You can also ask him for strength of body, as nettles taken as a tonic eliminate waste and toxins from the body. It should be noted that this herb is a powerful diuretic. Father Nettle helps warriors get in shape. Nettles can easily be drunk in tea, or if you can get the new spring green tops, they are famous as a stir-fry green and a health tonic. Once thoroughly cooked, their sting is neutralized, and they are full of nutritious minerals. This is a good way to get the body of the plant into you in order to commune with the spirit.

Elder (Sambucus nigra)

Raven: Dame Elder—Lady Ellhorn they called her once, and I call her that still—is a powerful guardian as well as a healing plant. She is the guardian of the road to the Land of the Dead, as Angelica is the guardian to the road leading to the Upper World. In the spring, she is laden with lacy blossoms reminiscent of the lace on the dress of a regal woman. In the autumn, her berries are as dark as her Downward Road. When I call to my dead, I bring a bit of elder wrapped up in purple black cloth—some dried blossoms, a dried leaf, a bunch of dried berries, and most important, a piece of her hollow stem. It’s said that whistling through or looking through her hollow stem can help you see the road that the dead walk on. I’ve tried both, and I can say that if Lady Ellhorn has decided to aid you, it is indeed true. If you work with the dead, she is a wise guide and guardian.

Galina: I first encountered this spirit in healing work. I do not have any particular expertise in this area, but she came to me once when I was quite ill and offered aid, for which I was immensely grateful. I have found in my own counseling work that she occasionally comes forth for clients who are dealing with immense emotional pain, especially if that pain involves grief over the loss of a loved one. She has invaluable lessons to share in healing from emotional trauma and grief, in processing and carrying on. I have also found that she is able to cleanse away the psychic malaise that often attaches itself to people in states of depression or grief. She is an immensely powerful emotional balm. Many of the Norse healing goddesses, such as Eir, have alliances with her.

Elder is native to all parts of Europe and has been a popular medicinal plant since prehistoric times. It is associated with the thirteenth Celtic tree month, Ruis. The name elder comes from the Germanic names Hylde or Holda, and it is associated with Frau Holde in the Germanic myth of the young girl who falls through a well into an underworld. The elder tree was associated just as frequently with Hela, the Norse death goddess, or with various other unspecified queens and kings of the Realm of the Dead. In contrast to the earlier summertime brightly colored fruits and berries, elderberries last into the autumn and are purple-black. Elder wood should never be burned, as it is bad luck; in medieval days “Lady Ellhorn” was treated as a sentient being who should never be cut or burned. The Danes called her Hylde-Moer, or Elder Mother. When Christianity took over, the story was changed so that elder was supposedly the wood of Christ’s cross and thus was bad luck to burn; it seems that making sure that Lady Ellhorn was not burned was more important than the reasons why. It should never be used for furniture; supposedly a child laid in a cradle of elder wood will be pinched black and blue by invisible fingers. If an elder tree grows on your property, leave it be. If you must cut it to make way for a building, propitiate the tree spirit with vigor.

Elder is immensely protective and is hung over doorways and windows to defend a home from evil, snakes, and robbers. Hanging it in a barn protects livestock. It supposedly has the power to release people from evil enchantments cast on them by sorcerers. Elder leaves or berries cast upon a person or a location are a blessing. Flutes or panpipes made of elder call Nature spirits when played, and a staff made of elder (as the plant of Hela) allows one to see through glamour. Traditionally, green elder branches were laid in graves to protect the soul of the Dead person.

This tree was used in burial rites in many areas of northern Europe. All the way back to the earliest folkloric mentions, the elder tree is one of the two plants (the other being angelica) whose hollow stems led to their use in spells to slide through and visit the Underworld. The difference between them is that Angelica is the Plant of Light, by which those shamans whose alliance is with spirits of Light may safely visit the Deathlands, retrieve things for their clients, and leave quickly and safely. Elder, on the other hand, is the Tree of the Underworld and is the “tube” used by shamans whose alliances reside there; they may come and go as they please by leave of Elder Mother.

Lady Ellhorn is a dignified crone; stern, wise, and a bit critical. She is willing to help with any sort of healing, as long as she is respected and given the kind of deference due to a wise elder, no pun intended. She has very little sense of humor, though, and does not like being made fun of. Be careful to ask before you pick any part of her leaves, flowers, or berries.

Exercise: Conversing with Elder

Find an elder tree and sit under it for a while. The American variety, Sambucus canadensis, is smaller than the European variety, a shrub rather than a tree, but is linked to the same grandmother spirit. Sit by her and very courteously converse with her. Dame Ellhorn likes one to make respectful conversation for a bit before asking for anything, and the first thing you should ask her for is advice. Take it graciously, and then if she seems not to dislike you, ask for her help should you wish to deal with the dead in any way. If she agrees to protect you, understand that her price may be fairly high. If nothing else, she may want to continue giving you advice, and seeing you take it . . . about all sorts of things. As an ally, you can carry some bits of her blossom, leaves, fruit, and stem whenever you deal with the souls of humans who have passed on, and she will give you good wisdom on the process.

Leek (Allium porrum)

Raven: We think of herbs as magical, but we dismiss the spirits of so-called food plants because they are too familiar. We don’t see their power, but the ancients did. Father Leek is a protector of men in all walks of their life. When I see a young man who is unsure of himself, I feed him leek soup and ask Father Leek to help him. I ask the same if I see one who is too eager, who has no impulse control and no common sense, who needs a father to calm him down. This spirit is the oldest and tallest member of the Allium genus. He drives away evil spirits and lifts the immune system, the inner warrior. He gives virility, courage, endurance, and sureness of self. Father Leek has seen men go to war to protect their families, go to the fields to toil for them, and go to new lands to find a new life. He is the sword of the Green Man.

Galina: I’ve never understood why we are so ready to dismiss “food plants” when it comes to shamanic work. Cooking is one of the most essential, fundamental ways of nourishing a person: body, heart, mind, and spirit. Those plant spirits who have agreed to enter into this type of ongoing contract with humanity have the potential to be some of our strongest and greatest allies. Leek, whether the one seeking him out is male or female (for there are women who seek out the ways of the warrior as well as men), helps one develop a quiet confidence and bravery. He helps one find the means and tools to stay the course even when it is long, terrifying, and hard. He is a shining warrior and the teacher of warriors, and the old, gnarled veteran to whom they come to share their tales and find solace from the harshness of their fear.

The word leac in Anglo-Saxon meant any layered vegetable, or more specifically a member of the genus Allium, which includes onions and garlic. The Allium that seems to have the oldest history in northern Europe is the vegetable that we still call leek; to us it may be an obscure soup veggie in the back of the garden, but to the Germanic peoples it was a sacred plant of the highest order. It symbolized the male principle, being long and stavelike, and it was paired with flax (also known as lina) as the female principle. The spear and the spindle were symbols of male and female, and flax was spun, while leeks were shaped like spears or swords. Both Allium and flax have preservative qualities, and they were used together to preserve amulets made of flesh—for example, in the Icelandic Flateyjarbók (Flat-island Book), a farm wife preserves a horse’s penis by wrapping it with leeks and other herbs in order to make a cult object (likely for male fertility).

Leeks are carried as protective amulets in battle and are planted around the house to drive away evil. They are protective for men in general, and a man who puts bits of leek into ale drunk out of a vessel inscribed with the Nauthiz rune will never be deceived by a woman.

The Leekwight is very masculine and stoic, but with an inner fire. This is not the young, hotheaded warrior; this is the older, seasoned, controlled fighter who is nonetheless eager for the fight. The Leekwight is focused, goal oriented, and protective, and it is no wonder that this is a good plant spirit for men with a tendency toward rash and impetuous behavior. The Leekwight also seems able to calm down excess drinking, if it gets in the way of effectively doing what is necessary.

A female-identified person can also call upon Father Leek, although he is traditionally a male protector. However, he will also look after a woman’s male side, or help her to find a worthy male mate, or help her to win the respect of a male-dominated group. He is also a good protector and guide for women who are called to what are traditionally considered male pursuits, such as warriorship. While warriorship is neither male or female at heart, it has traditionally been the purview of men in our culture, and Father Leek helps women navigate and hold strong against any harassment or prejudice they might face in that pursuit. He can help a worthy woman rid herself of the burden of the type of feminization that says women should be dependent, weak, and passive. Introducing a girl child to Father Leek early on, and asking his protection over her, can go a long way toward shielding her from some of the more insidious messages of victimhood that still define what it means to be female in our twenty-first-century world.

Exercise: Leek’s Courage

While you can grow leeks in your garden—and that would be ideal—it’s also easy to find Father Leek in the produce section of the grocery store, and always pleasant to take him into your body as part of dinner. Ingest some leeks and let them seep into your bloodstream, then sit with him and ask him for his alliance. Holding and using a knife at the time is helpful, but it should be a utilitarian knife, and you should be doing useful things with it, like chopping vegetables or whittling. If he is willing to speak to you, ask him for aid in any of the above things we’ve mentioned, and make the requisite deal. Father Leek is fair, but he expects people to hold themselves to certain standards of courage and maturity, and if he cannot subtly guide them, he will eventually abandon those who are continually spineless and too paralyzed to do what must be done.

Flax (Linum usitatissimum)

Raven: My friend’s sister is one of the broken women. She has poor boundaries; she gives too much of herself; she is attracted to men who are not good to her. She lacks courage and confidence in herself. My friend worries for her and comes to me asking for help. I call upon Lina, the counterpart of Leek, the plant that flowed through the fingers of millions of women over countless years. Lina, Lina, protect her, guard her tender heart, weave her into a web of support that she need not stand alone. I fill a bag with flax seeds, and I handspin some raw linen thread to tie it closed. I give the bag to my friend and say, “Take it to her; give it to her as a good luck charm. Lina will watch over her.”

Galina: Flax is not a plant that I often interact with, for her world of women’s traditional work is not a world that I often have much to do with. For all that, I have encountered her in my ancestor work and when helping clients (usually female) who needed to strengthen their sense of self, self-worth, and personal integrity. She is very gifted at bolstering those women who, for some reason, have little sense of personal value, and she does it in a way that does not feed either vanity or immodesty. She teaches that value comes from craft, from work, from personal integrity, from those things that cannot be stripped from us with the passing of time. She has the power to connect one to generations of female ancestors who depended upon her blessings and her mercy to clothe their families. For those seeking a way to connect strongly with their female dead, I might call upon Flax for just that reason.

Flax is one of the handful of plants that goes back to the Mesolithic Near East, and it spread around much of the world during that time. It became the most extensively grown plant-based fiber crop in Eurasia. It is associated strongly with the feminine, and various goddesses are attributed to it. Home fiber production has nearly always been dominated by women—largely because, as Elizabeth Wayland Barber writes in Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times, fiber arts work well with constant child care, being portable and easily interruptible.

The spindle, and also the plant most associated with it, became the symbols of the feminine role, especially those of the bride and married woman. In the North, the ownership of flax was split between Frigga, the queen of the Gods who spins with her maidens and represents the lady of the house who supplies her family with clothing, and Holda, the Germanic goddess who is the old “spinster,” the independent cloth maker. One legend tells of a farmer who met the Flax Woman in a cave full of gold and jewels; she offered him treasure or the handful of blue flowers in her hand. He chose the flowers and brought the eternal riches of flax culture to the country.

Flax seeds are used in money spells, and placing them in your shoes wards off poverty. Mixed with mustard seed or pepper, they shield against sorcery. In central Germany, children were sent into the flax fields to dance for Holda, who would grant them growth. In Prussia, a maiden was sent into the flax fields with food as an offering to a god named Waizganthos, and she stood on a stool to show how tall the flax should grow.

Flax became the female counterpart of the masculine leek, and “linen-and-leek” charms were found at archaeological sites. Flax and leek were the equivalent of the Venus and Mars symbols today. Even though our ancestors could not have known the high estrogen content of flax’s alkaloid breakdown, flax’s feminine assignment is no accident; the Flax spirit is a very womanly creature.

Lina is almost stereotypically soft and womanly, giving and flexible, pliable in the best sense, affectionate and loving. She likes to be worked with and to be told that she is beautiful, and indeed a field of waving flax blooms is beautiful. (In the case of blue flax, water birds flying overhead have mistaken the field for a lake and tried to land on it, much to their surprise.) If she has a fault, it is that there is not much depth to her; she loves everyone who contacts her unconditionally, but her gaze is easily turned from one person to the next, and she has no loyalty—she is likely to forget you tomorrow. She is easily hurt, weeps copiously, and then quickly forgets what she was sad about.

Lina is a good ally for any woman who needs protection in a harsh world, or for a young girl who is coming to womanhood. Men who want to find a woman of a certain sort—like Lina—can ask for her aid as well, and she will look after a man’s neglected female side. In addition, in our modern culture, men who prefer to dedicate themselves to the arts of home, family, and child rearing as a career are generally denigrated and thought of as weak. However, there are a few brave souls who undertake this task because it suits who they are as people, and considering the social disapproval that they court by doing so, it takes a pretty brave heart to keep doing what they know is right for them in the face of all criticism. Lina can gently give them heart and support to keep going with nurturing duties even when all the messages surrounding them are designed to destroy their self-worth.

Exercise: Flax Seed

Flax seeds are quite edible and can be ground into powder and added to food, or used in baked goods. Menopausal women have put flax seeds in food for some time in order to raise their estrogen levels, but they are also safe for men. To work with flax, wear a linen garment. Bake some flax seeds into bread or pastry and eat them, and sit with Lina in you for a while. Sing to her, or smell some flowers, or do other things that she might like—remember, you are wooing her. Tell her that she is beautiful, and ask her to help you. Give her a good reason why she should—tell her about your need, show some vulnerability. It’s what she likes. If she responds favorably, as her price she may well want you to do something good for a woman who needs help.

Craft: Spinning

Learn to handspin with a drop spindle. (Get someone to teach you.) Handspinning wool is usually the first method learned, as it’s easiest—wool has crimp and spins up quicker. So you’ll probably end up learning on wool or some similar animal product, such as mohair or angora. However, for the Green World, one spins flax. Flax spinning is a tricky art, done with wet fingers. Once you have learned how to spin flax, spin three flax threads about an arm’s length long, then ply all three together. As you first spin and then ply, chant or sing this charm:

Lina, Lina, lead the way

To the Green World’s garden gate.

Knot the plied thread three times, once at each end and once in the middle, and wind it around a green twig. Carry it with you, and when you meet a plant spirit who is difficult to connect with, ask gentle Lina to speak to that spirit on your behalf and arrange an introduction.

Birch (Betula spp.)

Raven: There is something ethereally beautiful about a birch tree, one of the most revered and honored trees in the northern hemisphere. The Saami people say that they are the best trees to stand under during a thunderstorm because they are never struck by lightning. The inner bark of birch contains salicylates, painkillers drunk in birch tea. Birch Lady, as I have often called her, is a powerfully nurturing guardian. I once had to go broker a deal with the spirit of a local mountain, and it was the Birch Lady who stepped forward as a go-between. When I speak to her, she is a tall, ivory white woman who always reaches out and strokes my hair. She, like Dame Ellhorn, will chide me for not getting enough sleep, for not taking enough care of myself. Grandmother Birch is wise and windblown, standing tall and proud in the coldest weather. I carry bits of birchbark and rub them when I need her aid.

Galina: Birch was one of the first trees who reached out for me. She was my entryway into journey work, and her touch helped me very early on in balancing and integrating the immense emotional and energetic changes resulting from esoteric work, priestcraft, and particularly shamanic practice. Birch’s power is that of cleansing. She opens and cleanses, balances and integrates. There is a sense of the holy about her, and I have often called her the high priestess of trees. She is a teacher of magic, skilled at seeing that which is unseen and teaching those she allies with to do the same. In her oldest aspect, she is connected to ecstatic madness, the trance that breaks the heart and mind open to the Otherworlds and allows that inspired fire to pour fourth into Midgard. She is the tree of the priest, the mystic, the shaman. For all that, I’ve always found her very practical. There is a side to this tree that is about careful planning, careful crafting, and common sense. She is one of the first plant spirits who I personally would suggest seeking out because so much of what she has to teach involves spiritual cleanliness; purity (if it be not too old-fashioned a term); and an understanding of taint, taboo, and debt.

Birch trees have been used for their paper bark in northern and central Europe since Mesolithic times; we know because we’ve found it in archaeological sites. In every culture that reveres Birch, she is associated with mother goddesses of some sort. To the Germanic folk, she was the tree of Frigga, the rune Berkana/Beorc, which symbolizes growth and is a pictograph of woman’s breasts. Birch was also associated with purity, due to its light color, and beginnings, as it is the first tree to “step out” into a burned area and start the reforestation process. Birch is the first of the Celtic tree months, Beth.

A cradle of birchwood protects babies. The traditional witch’s broom was often made of birch twigs. As birch is a strong but gentle purifying tree, birch limbs have been used to strike possessed people or animals as a way to exorcise them. A birch tree hung with red and white ribbons outside a stable was believed to protect the animals inside from being hag-ridden, or bothered by faeries. Sprigs of birch twigs hung around the house prevented burned food or kitchen accidents. The Saami people would lay a person with chronic pain on a bed of fresh birch leaves (or would use dried leaves soaked in warm water), and cover that individual with the leaves as well. Birchbark can be made into dyes, medicines, baskets, shoes, waterproof boats, and sleds. It is also the source of the earliest paper, and it can be ground into nutritious flour in times of famine. Birchwood made skis, furniture, and many other things. In the frozen North, birch was definitely the “mother tree,” giving of herself entirely, adding to comfort and survival.

Grandmother Birch is a tall, white woman—skin like old ivory, flowing hair the color of rich cream, breasts that overflow with milk. Usually, she is an extremely motherly plant, treating those who come to her like children who need to be coddled. While she is usually a fountain of overflowing nurturing, once in a while she may turn fey and appear as aged and gaunt, with wild, tangled silver hair and gray white skin like that of a corpse. This is her oldest aspect, and perhaps her most dangerous; this is Birch as the Lady with the White Hand, whose touch upon the brow leaves a white scar that causes madness. It is unclear what causes such a change in her; perhaps it is the attitude of those who approach. Some say that it is because the individual is in such a bad way that all she can think of to do is to reduce them to a babe’s wits, a state in which they are more likely to be taken care of, at least as she sees things. Or it may be that this is the gift of ecstasy and poetic lunacy, and that it is the best blessing she may bestow in light of the person’s calling and wyrd. Usually she is loving and willing to help as she can.

Exercise: Birch Mothering

When you are feeling down and no humans can comfort you, go sit under a birch tree. Bring some milk with you, and pour it out as an offering. Ground, center, and breathe deeply. Put yourself into a meditative trance, and if possible, a deeper trance. We like to hum (tunefully or tunelessly) when reaching out to Grandmother Birch. Often the first sign of her presence is the faint touch of a cool, delicate hand brushing against your head. Ask her to give you some comfort, and then close your eyes and let her do her work. Your thoughts may wander, but that’s all right—she will do her work while you are distracted.

Alder (Alnus glutinosa)

Raven: I’m always a little wary of going to the Alder Man, because unlike other Greenwights, who simply make the connection or not, the Alder Man is likely to jump out and suddenly be nose to nose with you, his face contorted and that mad gleam in his eyes. I know the drill: I’m supposed to snarl right back. That’s because he likes me now. If I’d done that in the beginning, it would not have gone well for me. The Alder Man does not give out his power without great sacrifice. He asks a price, and it is always steep, usually a test of your mettle. The King of the Rivers is a powerful ally, but he reminds me of why shamanic work is dangerous, every time.

Galina: I love the Alder Man dearly and only wish I had more cause to seek him out. He first came to me when I was learning the gifts of fire, and he helped me through a fairly intense and grueling ordeal. As a spirit, he is a deeply associated with the Lord of Muspelheim, with the World of Fire, and with the power of fire itself. He’s gaunt, severe, no-nonsense, dangerous, and harsh. He is scarred with tattoos and other markings, and his hair and eyes are dark. I have found him a powerful and worthy ally. He has helped me begin to master the crafts of fire and to understand not only its power but its nature. He’s a hard teacher but delights in those students who master what he has to teach. He demands both respect and a certain spirit. Neither the passive-aggressive nor the brazen and impudent need apply.

The Alder spirit has a long history in northern Europe, and in some places he was worshiped as a god. Among the reindeer-herding Saami people, he was known as Leabolmmai or Liejbalmaj, the Alder Man who brought game to hunters. He was said to be the master of animals, and it is unclear whether he is another god of hunting who is associated with the alder tree or the actual Alder tree spirit taking on a local hunting god’s job. The first element in his name, liejp, refers to both the red sap of the alder tree (a sacred substance that was used to paint symbols on shaman drums and protect people from danger from ritual objects) and to menstrual blood. The symbolic power of the menstrual-blood man takes on more significance when we remember that alder was the tree of Loki, the ergi (gender-transgressive) shapeshifter god among the Norse. (Galina feels that menstrual blood is almost useless in magic, and certainly useless as a substance with which to feed allies, but that it does have some use symbolically in connecting to one’s female ancestors, if one is a woman, and in certain fertility charms. It’s certainly symbolic of the immense ritual power of taboo, and it can, at times, be used to tap in to this.) Leabolmmai was said to be the bitter enemy of Juoksahkka, the bow-wielding goddess of hunting, as it was their job to choose the sex of the unborn child, and they often disagreed over what that ought to be.

The alder’s red sap was used as a dye for clothes and the painted shaman drums, and was spat through a ring by Saami women into the faces of hunters who returned from killing a bear; this neutralized the bear energy and made it safe for them to come into their homes. It was used by the Celts to paint the faces of sacred kings about to be sacrificed. Alder produces two additional dye colors that were also used—green from the flowers and cinnamon brown from the twigs—and as such was triply sacred. The green dye was used on items to work with the faeries, and the brown to wrap things meant to be kept secret. The dyes symbolize three of the four elements—Fire, Water, and Earth.

Alder trees are native to all of Europe. An alder grove is actually one enormous tree that spreads by root runners; the entire grove is one entity. Alder is the tree of Fearn, the fourth Celtic tree month; in British folklore he is known as the King of the Rivers, with the Willow as his queen, due to the tree’s love for marshy land and riverbanks. In Germany, the Erlekonig, or Alder King, was a faery chieftain who tended to steal children. The inner bark was supposedly used in the flying potions of witches, but as it has no discernable hallucinogenic effect (and quickly induces vomiting), we must assume that they were being affected directly by the Alder spirit, through some kind of alliance. Alder has a long relationship with the element of Fire, as it makes the best charcoal. The tree was once a mainstay in smelting ore.

The Alder Man is mysterious and a little scary. He appeared to us independently as a thin, angular man, pale parchment skin stretched over the odd-shaped bones of his face, with piercing red eyes. His chin and nose and forehead protrude, almost like a Man in the Moon face. He dresses in fur skins and is tattooed (or painted, neither of us could tell) with glyphs and patterns the color of red ochre; bone earrings hang from his lobes. A knife and a bow hang on his back, and he carries a little bowl of red paint with which he touched Raven, still with that wide-eyed half-crazy stare. “Blood and Fire,” he said. He speaks in short cryptic phrases like that, and you have to interpret what he means as if it was an oracle. Before Galina’s fire ordeal, he appeared in a very similar way to her with words about Fire and Earth. He is very conscious of the fact that he is a sacred tree, and he becomes violent if disrespected.

The Alder Man has three great powers, like his dyes. He can help you connect with animal spirits, as his red side offers; this is the gift of the hunter and tracker. He can help you connect with the faeries, as his green side offers. He can help keep you hidden and secret—silent and unseen when your enemies arrive, able to move in and out of shadows discreetly—as his brown side offers. However, he will give only one of these gifts to any single person, so you must decide which you want.

Exercise: Singing Alder

If you dare, find an alder tree and sit next to it. Don’t sit under it, as you haven’t been given permission yet. Sing to him—he likes it when you put your proposition in song. Sing about your positive qualities and why he should work with you. Sing to him about the bargain you want from him, the ways you will put that gift to use, and how willing you are to make a sacrifice. After you have finished singing, close your eyes and breathe, and see if he responds. If he doesn’t, leave quickly.

If you manage to make a deal with him—meaning that you are both brave and lucky—it would be best if you could manage to take home a small part of the tree that renders the dye corresponding to your bargain. Make a dye of it and dye a strip of cloth, which you can carry when you are doing the act that requires his aid.

Fir (Abies spp.)

Raven: There is a row of fir trees outside my house, planted by the Finnish settlers who lived here for generations. They put them in because they missed the firs of their homeland in this New England woods of pine, oak, and colorful maples, or so we believe. They stand like a row of ancestral guardians, watching over the house, which goes back almost two hundred years. I went out to ask them if they had a purpose, and they told me, “Guard the house.” There is a reason that we bring evergreen into the home at Yule and that the fir became the most popular Yule tree, the only tree sacrificed for the privilege of coming into the home itself. Grandmother Fir is a home guardian. She is wedded to Grandfather Spruce, who protects the elders, the wisdom of the tribe. Together, this tall and sturdy pair looks after the weakest and most vulnerable. I carry a charm, a Christmas ornament that is a fir tree in the snow, for her blessing on my home.

Galina: Fir is the other spirit, in addition to Juniper, that fascinated me as a child. She turns up in a lot of faery tales, particularly Russian folktales, and from the very first time I encountered one of these stories, I knew she was magic. She protects children particularly, and one of the gifts she brings is a sense of wonder and magic about the world. She protects the spirits of the young, and in this she is a formidable guardian.

Supposedly Saint Boniface made the fir tree a symbol of Christianity after he chopped down a sacred Pagan oak and a fir sapling grew up in its place. The fir tree was the classic Christmas tree for hundreds of years, complete with Martin Luther’s myth (and various other myths) of seeing stars in the tree branches, or of seeing a glowing child speaking from a fir tree. Before that, however, fir species (of which there are over fifty, but only about six are native to northern Europe) were dug up and brought into the home, along with a lot of cut evergreen boughs, as a way to welcome the woodland spirits into the home and bless it. Evergreens were a sign of life in the deadness of winter, when all other trees had lost their leaves and were slumbering.

Fir is the traditional Yule tree and is sacred to the Ancestral Mothers and the living mothers as well, as Yule is known in Old Norse as Modraniht. It is also a secondary sacred smudging herb for Siberian shamans, used with juniper. It brings the blessing of the Earth with its scent and can be used for recaning or as an asperger for Northern Earth goddesses, such as Nerthus or Jord, or any land spirit, or the element of Earth in general.

Grandmother Fir is a powerful guardian. She came to us as tall and strong, black hair tumbling down her back in many braids, cloaked in evergreen and snowy furs, holding a staff. “I protect the Mothers,” she said, “for they are the hope of the tribe, and I protect hope.” In her capacity of representative of that which survives the winter cold, she does indeed guard hope, and she is especially protective of breeding women and children. Planting a fir tree outside the house, or even carrying a twig, can help protect mothers and children who might be at risk for abuse.

Exercise: Evergreen Protection

As you did for the birch, find a fir tree and sit under her branches. Instead of milk, offer bread and butter. Speak of your home and all the people in it, and your love for them. Talk about their worth and why they are worthy of protection. Ask Grandmother Fir for her protection, and wait. If you get an answer, it will be quickly; if nothing happens after a while, pack up and go home. If she speaks to you and agrees to protect your home, take some twigs with you and hang them over the most-used doorway wrapped in a bit of dark green cloth.

If you do forge a bond with her and you own land, planting a fir tree might be wise. At the very least, even if you only live in a city apartment, you will have to be careful of how you dispose of any fir trees you buy at Yule. Grandmother Fir has no problem with being a Yule tree, sacrificed for the sacred solstice, but she wants to be honored during and afterward. As you decorate the tree, thank her for her sacrifice, and hang the over-the-door bag on the tree for the duration, after which it is returned to the door. The disposal of any Yule tree should be undertaken with care—it should be carefully gathered up and either taken to an outside location to be burned or else carefully dismembered and burned in a large woodstove or fireplace. Never throw the tree out in the trash or mulch it—Grandmother Fir wants to go up in flames. The match should be set alight by the mother of the household or the oldest child, and Grandmother Fir thanked for her generosity.

5

The Brown World

Animals

Hail to the Hunter on the track,

Hail to the scent of the Prey,

Hail to those who eat green,

Hail to those who eat red,

Hail to those who eat all.

Hail to the keen ear and the sharp eye,

Hail to the life that gives itself to us.

Animal spirits are the entities that are probably the most associated with shamanism in fiction and in modern neoshamanic practice. How many times do we hear teachers promising to help a seeker find his spirit animal? Animal spirits have a much bigger fan club than plant spirits in modern neoshamanism, with many new people running around showing off how cool their “spirit animals” are. Oddly enough, they all seem to have “spirit animals” like Wolf, Bear, Cougar, Eagle, and Hawk. That’s not to say that some people are not honestly approached by those animal spirits—certainly I’ve met a few—but one wonders why there aren’t more people working with Rat and Chipmunk and Frog and Cockroach. The big, glamorous predatory animals seem to be the ones that all the would-be spirit workers scramble to obtain . . . as if such things could be obtained just by wanting them. No, with animal spirits, it’s best to put the call out and see what shows up, and don’t be disappointed when it isn’t Wolf or Eagle. Every animal spirit has something to teach. Every animal has its power.

Here we need to differentiate between the term totem animal and spirit animal, the latter of which is heard constantly in every neoshamanic workshop. Like Greenwights, animal spirits consist of either the souls of specific animals (usually dead ones, unless we’re talking about the classic witch’s “familiar”) or the grandparent spirits of the different species. These latter ones are what we’re talking about when we say Bear or Crow or Elephant, and some of them are quite powerful indeed. When people refer to “spirit animals,” they might mean these overarching vaettir, or they might mean smaller spirits of that species—perhaps animal ancestors—who have taken an interest in you and bother to show it. Totem animals are creatures that one admires, emulates, and attempts to make a connection with; ancestral totems are animal spirits who were revered (and perhaps worked with) by one’s forebears, and could theoretically be called upon for aid in a pinch. There are also occasionally ancestral connections to specific animals, and such connections entailed certain obligations. If a would-be contemporary shamanic practitioner decides to take up these obligations again, it is quite possible to restore such tutelary relationships, but that is a different thing from having a personal spirit animal.

Not all shamans or shamanic practitioners have a single special “spirit animal”; in fact, it’s not all that common in this tradition. Most either have several animal spirits whom they work with off and on when needed, or they don’t work much with animals. Some do have a strong and bonded relationship with one overarching animal spirit, but don’t think that one needs to do this in order to be a shaman or shamanic practitioner. You are as likely to make allies with any of the other spirits in this book—plants, Wind, Water, Fire, the dead—as you are to be approached by an animal spirit. It is not, as some neoshamanic traditions would have it, the defining moment of the shamanic experience, nor the defining characteristic of the job. Allies come from many places. The ones you admire from a distance may never become interested in you, and the ones who bless you with their presence may be the last ones that occur to you . . . and in some cases, the last ones you want.

Unlike the other spirits, we feel it’s wisest in this day and age to wait for animal spirits to contact and choose you. This is because most of us will never have an accidental encounter with the actual animal, unless we do a great deal of traveling and camping in wild places for months at a time. In ancient times, the human world and the world of wild animals were much closer together, and often impinged on each other. Humans were aware of where the wild animals lived and what their habitat was, and after the Neolithic agricultural revolution, most people had daily contact with domestic animals. An animal spirit who was interested in you might send one of its corporeal children close enough for you to get a glimpse, repeatedly until you were sure that the omen was correct, and only then would you be sent out to have your vision. Spending time around the actual animal was a way for you to learn lessons directly from that animal spirit. (Of course, if you already work closely with a particular animal and have a close relationship with them—for example, you own a horse farm and have worked with horses for twenty years—this advice need not apply.) In our contemporary age, we not only live lives far removed from the natural world, but as a species we have done untold damage to that natural world. We’ve harmed the ecosystems that animals depend on, so perhaps it is no surprise that the overarching spirits of our animal kin might be less inclined to take an interest in our well-being. After all, as a species, we take so little comprehensive interest in theirs.

On the other hand, this chapter deals with nine specifically chosen animal spirits, and you may not have a relationship with any of them, nor might they wish to have one with you. So how does one use this section, if you can’t just walk up and knock on their doors, so to speak, and be reasonably sure that they will open up and talk to you? It’s a difficult question, and one that had to be wrestled with as we wrote this chapter. First, let’s discuss why we chose these spirits, and then we’ll go into the solution to the problem.

There is no way that we could cover all the animals and animal spirits who are traditional to the areas of northern Europe where our tradition hails from. There are hundreds of animals in the ecosystem (thousands if you take all insect, reptile, amphibian, and fish species into account), and probably every grandfather and grandmother spirit of those animals has been connected with a person at some point. We had to choose nine, and selecting those few made this one of the hardest chapters to write. We decided to choose three wild mammals from predator to prey, three domesticated mammals, two birds, and a fish. Other animals that have been traditionally associated with the Northern Tradition include the adder, badger, beaver, bee, bull or cow, carp, carrion beetle, cat, cock, crane, deer (red and fallow), dog, eagle, eel, eider, elk (moose), falcon, fox, frog, goose, hare, hedgehog, lynx, marten, mouse, musk ox, otter, partridge, plover, polar bear, quail, rat, seal, sheep, stork, swallow, weasel, whale, wolf, and the ancient and now-extinct uruz, or aurochs, similar to our American buffalo but less shaggy. These all have their myths and fables, and there are probably more that we haven’t found yet.

However, we do feel reasonably certain that the exercises we’ve suggested for each one of these animal spirits can be used with different animals spirits of the same general sort. These exercises demonstrate how to go about establishing and maintaining a relationship with an animal spirit, after all, and can be easily adapted to suit one’s own practice. For example, Squirrel may never be one of your allies, but the exercise associated with Squirrel could be easily applied to Mouse or Hare or any other small prey animal. Bear may not speak to you, but Bear’s lesson could be applied to other large predators. Goat’s lesson about skin can be applied to Cow or Sheep equally well. We suggest that you ask the animal spirits to send someone appropriate over—and gift them well when you ask—and apply the most relevant lesson to who ever comes. (It may also be that they have an entirely different lesson to teach, and that’s all right too—let them guide the process.)

One note about genders of animals in this chapter: We alternate between he for one animal and she for the next, largely at random. Just because we randomly use she for Bear and he for Boar does not mean that you might not get a he-bear or a sow. The actual spirit who comes to you may be male or female, as it chooses. Your actual gender probably does not have nearly as much to do with that as you may think—it’s all about what that spirit thinks will be best for you.

When dealing with animal spirits in this tradition, one has to bring up the phenomenon of shape-shifting, and that is what we will be practicing in this chapter. Do not attempt any of these exercises until you have thoroughly practiced the Body exercise in the Beginning Place chapter and have become skilled at it. You need to have a good sense of your energy body as separate from your physical body in order to move on to these more advanced practices.

Shape-shifting is the art of temporarily (and occasionally permanently) reshaping your energy body for a purpose. One purpose might be to confer extended abilities onto your physical body. The two are linked, and while borrowing Reindeer’s legs will not change the structure of your own knees, it will have an effect on your physical legs. The reasons why this happens are long and fairly convoluted, but suffice it to say that because the two are linked, what affects one will affect the other to some extent. (That’s a two-way street; physical illness can drain the chi from your energy body and make it dull and diffuse.) These extended abilities are not permanent. They last only as long as you are concentrating, and it takes a great deal of concentration to make these connections on top of whatever activity you were doing that required this work, so sometimes the effects will last only a few seconds of crucial time. This is not a bad thing—please read and reread our warning about making permanent changes to the energy body in the Body section before starting these procedures.

Another purpose might be to shift only your energy body, after enough of it is separated from your physical body to journey about, into a shape more useful to journey with. Giving yourself a form with wings or fast-running feet can be a real boon in those cases. It’s important to remember that while Otherworlds are more malleable about certain physical laws than our own very heavy world might be, they do still have consistent laws of nature and physics that you must abide by. For example, you might be able to shift energetically into a bird form and fly in a specific Otherworld, but there will still be winds that you must cope with (which is why you want that bird spirit right there helping you), and simply trying to fly like Superman or turning into a floating blob might not get you very far. If you’re traveling in an Otherworld where you can do anything and be anything and you are never hampered by physical laws that you didn’t expect . . . you’re probably still in your own head.

Squirrel

Raven: My wife works with Squirrel energy. She scurries about, hoarding things for future use and rainy days, and is vigilant for possible ways we could be attacked. (All right, there’s a tiny bit of paranoia with any prey-animal totem, but that’s life.) I watch her alternate between periods of frenzied working and periods of flopping down in front of the TV, and I learn about Squirrel. When I lose things, I can often ask her to find them, and she knows where they are.

Galina: I have experienced Squirrel energy only from a distance, as it is not one of the animal spirits with which I work. I am constantly amazed, however, at the unfailing kinetic energy inherent in this animal. There is a very focused industry that never falters or drops the proverbial ball. Squirrel is an animal who can teach you to manage many projects and always stay one step ahead, but this gift comes through hard, frenetic, ongoing work. Squirrel’s wisdom is about work and preparation, and always looking out for shifts and changes, oncoming dangers and opportunities. It’s a very interesting animal spirit to encounter. The gift of Squirrel is about minding the little thing, and, by doing so, rendering the big things harmless. It’s also an animal who can easily navigate between the worlds safely and quickly. It’s unassuming and can go where other animal friends might not be welcome. It’s a powerful form to take, if you have its blessing, because you can creep in almost anywhere. In this way, Squirrel is a messenger, and the ease with which he can slip in and out of the most inhospitable realms is truly remarkable. It’s a talent a shaman might envy!

Why did we start with Squirrel? First, Squirrel is a sacred animal in Norse mythology. The great World Tree, Yggdrasil, is managed by three great animal spirits: an Eagle at the top, a Dragon at the bottom, and in the middle a Squirrel named Ratatosk, whose job is to run messages (and, one supposes, occasional insults) between the Eagle, the Dragon, and many of the other denizens of the Nine Worlds. Ratatosk knows all the nooks and crannies of the World Tree, all the paths from one world to another, all the hidden places . . . and, most likely, where all the bodies are buried, literally and figuratively. This is one aspect of the energy of Grandfather Squirrel: he notices things. Squirrel watches out of the corner of his eye, hypervigilant as are all creatures who know that they are prey animals at the lower end of the food chain. In fact, hyper-vigilance combined with an uncanny ability to avoid trouble is one of Squirrel’s most powerful talents.

Squirrel is an excellent guide for those who are just learning to journey with their energy bodies to other places, because Squirrel doesn’t encourage people to go blundering in, announcing themselves. Squirrel’s modus operandi for moving between worlds is the same as that for moving between trees: keep your head down, don’t draw attention to yourself, be discreet and hide when necessary, always keep your eyes open and watch your surroundings, and if something seems potentially dangerous, just freeze and blend in to the surroundings. Because the energy of many cosmologies translates naturally into that of a World Tree (with an Underworld at the roots, an Upper World at the topmost branches, and a variety of other worlds in between), Squirrel is a natural guide for people learning to walk between worlds. He’s not going to encourage you to do something stupid, because he knows that when you’re in a new place, it’s best to assume that you’re more likely to be on the prey end of the equation.

Exercise: Borrowing the Nerves of Squirrel

First, contact Squirrel spirit. Leave him offerings of nuts, fruit, and other edibles. This means putting them in a place where actual squirrels come and go. (This is another reason to begin with a common and easily accessible animal spirit.) If you can, sit and observe the squirrels from a distance. Do not attempt to come closer to them than they are comfortable with or to interact with them if they don’t seem to be happy with your presence. Remember that they are vigilant prey animals, and you are a large predator.

Then do some quiet utiseta in a squirrel-friendly place, and wait to see if Squirrel spirit comes to you. He is wary, so it may take a few attempts at coaxing. (Remember that if a particular spirit chooses not to deal with you, it’s not personal—spirits have their own reasons, which may have little to do with human lives. Just move on after a few attempts and try someone else.) If he does come, ask him what he wants for a gift, and come to some accord on that. Then ask him if you can borrow his high-strung reflexes and agility for a short time. If he agrees, go somewhere you can work with him in private (preferably outside) and follow his lead in the matter.

Borrowing a quality from a spirit is a tricky thing, and the process may vary depending on the spirit in question. Raven has generally found that the most common method is that you make eye contact with the animal spirit, and something passes from that spirit into you. Some animal spirits, however, don’t like direct eye contact, and they may bounce or press against you for a moment to pass on the gift. When it comes to borrowing the reflexes of Squirrel (or some other small, fast, agile prey animal), it feels like a net of electricity settles over you, shooting through your nerves. Visualize grabbing it and holding on to it, not with hands but with your whole body. Visualize your own network of nerves sucking in and holding that electric net, holding on to it hard. (You might want to practice this visualization as a dry run a few times, before even contacting Squirrel spirit. Try it sitting down and concentrating, and then try it while doing dishes or some other distracting activity.) The idea is to be able to hold it to the relevant part of your energy body, where it will affect your physical body, while doing something else at the same time.

Breathe. Hold the network of Squirrel nerves in place for a moment or two. Then try to move and keep it in place. Your body will want to move fast, perhaps a little jerkily. Try some simple movements, such as running about in a circle or skipping or jumping from foot to foot. Then try something like climbing a tree, which requires more brain power. Do not become overconfident and try something that is entirely beyond your physical abilities, at least not on the first—or fifth—time. While altering the energy body has some effect on the physical, it’s not a magic placebo, and it won’t give you superpowers. In addition, you could lose your hold on the Squirrel energy at any moment, so don’t do something that would result in a problem if you were to stop suddenly in the middle.

You probably won’t be able to concentrate on holding the Squirrel energy in place and also climbing trees and such for more than a few minutes, but that’s all right. This sort of thing is done in emergency situations, not for fun or for long periods of time. When you can’t hold on any longer, let go and thank Squirrel. Give him his gift; be respectful and friendly. Give him a few days before you bother him again or—even better—let him set the pace and decide when to come to you. Be sure to thoroughly ground afterward, as it will help you come back into “human” head and body space again.

Write down your impressions of what it felt like to borrow Squirrel’s reflexes and nervous system. Take note, also, of other sensations that might have come with those reflexes—urges to eat or do specific things, hypervigilance, fears or paranoias. Spirits can’t be sectioned out like grapefruits; every temporary gift will be accompanied by other essences of that animal, for better or worse. As time goes on and you craft a deeper relationship with that spirit, you might be allowed to borrow other things—senses, for example. You’ll notice, though, as you read through the next several sections, that no animal is lending you its heart. That’s because lending the heart is a very serious commitment, somewhere in the region of swearing eternal fealty and getting married when it comes to seriousness. That’s something that is offered only in rare cases, only after many years of relationship, and indicates that they will basically be your primary spirit ally for the rest of your life. So don’t ask, and you won’t get rejected.

Boar

Raven: Moving through the underbrush, through the swamp. Skin is too thick for mosquitoes to penetrate; the few who manage are ignored. The best treats are underground and can be rooted up. Nothing is safe. The whole world is a bounty to be feasted on. I am impervious and can endure anything.

This is the nature of Boar.

Galina: Rawness, unrestrained power, speed, the feeling of flying across the Earth, the snapping of underbrush heralding my passage. Strength and solidity; nothing will move me or turn me aside from my goal. I am fearless and fast; the world moves under my feet in a blur and every odor has color, sensation, taste—a library of information. My world is alive with the color of scent. I own the space between the breath of the winds. This is mine.

Boar (and its domestic descendant, Pig, who in spite of all insults is still a very intelligent and powerful animal) was once the sacred animal of Gods in many different pantheons. For some deities—such as the Norse/ Germanic Frey, who rode the golden boar Gullinbursti, and his sister, Freya, who rode a similar steed, Hildisvini—the boar was a noble animal who was renowned for both its fighting spirit and its delicious flesh. Boar was the sacrificial warrior who gave of himself that others might eat. Pig’s blood was a powerful purifying agent, used to sanctify temple spaces. In other areas, Boar was a creature of death—pigs devoured crops, children, other animals, manure, sometimes adult humans, and even its own young. Devouring demons were frequently shown with a boar’s tusks. Among the Celtic peoples, oracular pigs were given carved pieces of wood to poke at in order to tell the future.

Plate 1: Standing stones mark
the sacred track of the Sun around a
stone labyrinth that represents the
journey
to the Underworld. In the
center,
a traditional Maypole stands
(shown at left). The Maypole, in our
tradition, is not only male and female
coming together for reasons of land
fertility, but is also the pole from Earth
to Sky that joins the Worlds.

Plate 2: Raven’s worldwalking
shaman drum—named Talu, meaning
“story”—is painted with the world tree,
the Nine Worlds, and other symbols
for divination. To divine with it, Raven
places a small item from a client on the
surface and beats it from underneath;
where it stops, there is a message.
Shamans may have many different
drums for varying purposes; besides
divination,
Talu also helps Raven to
jouney between the worlds. Talu rests
on the hide of a reindeer, which is one
of Raven’s ancestral spirit animals.

Plate 3: The Runes are not only powerful symbols but also are a family
of powerful spirits in their own right. The Rune of Sacrifice, Ing (purple, center), is
important to our work because it symbolizes offerings to the Gods and spirits.

Plate 4: The Rune of the Grave, Ear (center), symbolizes the Underworld
and Ancestors.

Plate 5: Raven’s pendant, carved by Saami people in northern Norway, is a
representation
of the runebom. This is the shaman drum of the noaide, or Saami shamans.
You can see the separation between worlds and the spirit herds of reindeer. The lineage
of the circumpolar folk who followed the reindeer goes back to the Ice Age. It is quite
possible
that all the circumpolar Eurasian shamanic traditions, like the Saami and the
Northern Tradition, are descended from this early Shamanic culture. Raven wears the
pendant in honor of his ancestors.

Plate 6: The Rune of Cattle (green, center) is the most Indo-European of runes,
signifying the Indo-European invasions that overran the original northern populations,
bringing the Gods of sky and war and agriculture to the older Gods and spirits of the
elemental powers.

Plate 7: The Dragon, in our mythology,
coils around the bottom of the World
Tree and gnaws its roots, stimulating
new growth and cutting away the rotting
parts. The horn is a symbol of fellowship,
passed around the hall.

Plate 8: Offerings set
out in the snow for the
spirits. Part of being
in right relationship is
making the effort to
gift your spirit allies on
a regular basis. Here
the spirtis of Raven’s
land are offered grain,
beer, fire, and a stick of
sacred mugwort.

Plate 9: Stone tools invoke the
presence
of the oldest of ancestral
spirits, the Stone Age peoples who
survived so much so that we might
live today. Spindles with soapstone
whorls were common in Scandinavia;
examples have been pulled from
Viking-era excavations in Europe and
America. Spinning is a Neolithic art
that can be used for magical working
or to honor the female ancestors.
The “stones”of amber and jet are
sacred to our tradition, as they
symbolize Day and Night, light and
dark, and can be ground and burned
as incense.

Plate 10: When an animal is killed, nothing
should be wasted. Making bones into sacred
objects honors their spirits and keeps some
of their energy with you. (These are from
Raven’s goats.) Bones can be hung from drums
as rattling parts, and horns are always sacred.
Adding ribbons to sticks or bones makes them
into a wand to communicate with the wind
spirits, who love such things. The jawbone
with the ribbons is ready to be consecrated as
a náttúrhús
for the North Wind.

Plate 11: In the
depths of winter, we look for
the solstice and the rebirth of
the Sun. She is our greatest
source of life, and in the cold
north the Sun was especially
loved. Westerners tend to
think of shamanic traditions
as mostly coming from hot
climates, but in cold winter
climates,
offerings to the
spirits
of nature made the
difference between imminent
death and survival into the
spring.

Plate 12: Amber, as
the Sun’s stone, is sacred to
our tradition.

Plate 13: “God-poles” and “spirit-poles” are found in many spiritual traditions. For those with a
piece of land, they are an easy way to make a permanent outdoor shrine. They can be taller than
human height or much smaller. This is Gerda, a goddess in our tradition who guards walled herb
gardens; her pole is only three feet tall and thus easy to place in the front yard. This is a fairly
anthropomorphic náttúrhús, but they don't have to be that way.

Boar is a creature of dawn and dusk, preferring to nap during the heat of the day and the cold of the night, but coming out during the liminal times to forage. This reifies his position as a liminal creature—prey who can also be a predator, a sacrifice who can also kill. Pigs are the only livestock animals that have been known to eat their keepers, should those keepers slip and break a leg in the pen. Given a couple of generations loose in the wild, they quickly revert back to boar, showing that they were never really entirely domesticated to begin with, but were somewhere between tame and wild. They like to live in swamps and fens, which are also liminal spaces between earth and water. They roll in mud and wallow in swamp largely to keep cool in hot weather, but this puts them somewhere between creatures of water and of dry land.

The old Indo-European word for boar or pig was su, just like the traditional pig call of “sooo-eee”; the modern zoological name of the pig family is Suidae. Because of its omnivorous diet, ancestry as a swamp creature, and mostly hairless skin, boar flesh is supposedly very like human flesh in taste and consistency; cannibal tribes in Malaysia are said to have referred to human meat as “long pig,” although that may be a myth. However, this quality also made the boar the perfect sacrificial animal in many European cultures, as did the fact that he was hard to hunt down and kill without injury, thus risking “sacrificing” one of our own kind. Because adult boars range from one hundred to five hundred pounds, they can do a lot of damage when attempting to gore, bite, and trample someone. There is an incredible physical momentum in Boar.

Exercise: Borrowing the Guts of Boar

If you have weak digestion that shrinks at more than a few simple foods and is easily disrupted by your stress level, it’s possible to make a deal with Boar spirit to give you the occasional sturdy good-digestion day. First, make an offering to Boar. He likes food, and lots of it. Leave food in the woods, call him—and yes, you can use the “soo-eee” call; it is after all several millennia old—and come back another day. It doesn’t matter what food you leave; this spirit is omnivorous, but don’t be stingy. Boar can be a bit pushy, particularly if he feels that he isn’t being given his due, so try to start out on a positive note with him. Repeat this a few times, then go out and do utiseta next to a new offering of food. See if Boar spirit will come to you. Unlike Squirrel, Boar is dangerous and capable of harming you, at least on an energetic level, so be quiet and respectful. You’re not trying to fight with this spirit and make an enemy of him.

If Boar spirit likes you, ask if you can borrow his tough stomach and intestines that can digest so much. If he agrees, he may lie down next to you and lean into you. At this point, you should be able to feel your guts react. (Most people are not all that aware of their digestive tracts, or at least prefer not to be, so it might be a useful thing to spend a few days concentrating on the feel of your guts before trying to get Boar’s help in the matter.) Open yourself to the sensation of sharing guts with Boar, and start eating the food you brought. Because you are sharing an intestinal tract with him, he will get some of its life force while you’re eating it. Your job is to concentrate on holding the dual energy bodies together, not letting yourself get distracted and accidentally separating the two.

After you’ve finished eating, the best thing you can do is lie down and sleep. Boar will leave in his own time, when your digestion has moved a good way through its process, and if you’re asleep he can guide it without your interference. Keep notes regarding any sensations you feel and what you notice about your behavior and appetite over the next few hours. You may also find that Boar has his own ideas about what you should be eating—or what he wants you to eat for him, and you’re going to have to go along with that, or at least strike some bargain that he is satisfied with.

Bear

Galina: I have a strong ancestral connection to Bear. Bear is a berserker’s animal. She brings gifts of immense protective power, well-channeled force, and groundedness of purpose. Bear can be savage about protecting territory (and that includes those in her realm for whom she is responsible), but can also teach one to live in harmony with the environment. Bear is not aggressive in the same way that Boar can be, but she is fierce in protecting her boundaries. I have found that Bear spirit can travel safely to the Underworld and back, perhaps because of her connection to the berserkergang, the berserk warriors of the ancient Norse. Bear holds the wisdom of how to nurture and care for one’s tribe, how to ensure the continuity of a tradition, and how to sustain oneself in the harshest of climates. She is a powerful and very sacred guardian.

Here we come to the predator, the top of the food chain. More specifically, bear is the predator that can stand upright and walk for short periods like humans. Many northern Eurasian cultures saw bear as being the “older brother” of humans for that reason; because there are no lions in that region, bear is the king of the beasts—or the queen, in some traditions. The earliest known sacred place of worship was a cave full of deliberately arranged cave bear skulls, created during the Neanderthal era of the Ice Age. The cult of bear worship among Northern peoples—the Saami, the Finns, the Siberian tribes, the Ainu, the Tlingit, and more—seems to be a remnant of the same Magdalenian-period Paleolithic cult from twenty thousand years ago.

The Saami people of arctic Europe once had special rituals for hunting bears, largely to placate the powerful Bear spirit and keep her from exacting revenge on the tribe that had taken the body of one of her children. As with many of the circumpolar bear cults, the Saami believed that Bear was a mediator between humans and other spirits. Bears were hunted during their winter hibernation, but always awakened to be killed, as killing them in their sleep was considered dishonorable. After a bear was killed—assuming that it was successful—the hunter of the bear had to pass through many rituals to make him safe to be in the village. Birch saplings were twisted to create a ring, and this was placed in the bear’s dead jaws until it was butchered, at which point the ring was decorated with brass chain and the bear’s tail. Women spat birchbark juice into the killer’s face. No one could look him in the eye except through the special ring. Only the hunters could butcher and cook the body, and no one else could go near it until it was ready to eat. A speech of apology was given to the bear before the feast began, and afterward the ring was buried with the bear’s tail and bones in a sacred place. Finally, the skin was laid over a stump, and the women of the tribe shot arrows at it blindfolded in order to make themselves safe from the spirit who their husbands had disturbed.

In ancient Norse culture, certain special warriors dedicated to Odin were the berserkers, whose name comes from bersark, or bearskin, which they wore to make themselves magically invulnerable. The berserkers called upon the spirit of Bear to go into an altered state in which they did not feel pain and could keep fighting, roaring at the top of their lungs, until they were finally hewn down. Similar to this, one of the six impossible things used to bind the divine wolf Fenris was “the nerves of a bear,” implying that bears were impervious to pain and attack.

In personality, bears are reclusive and defend their dens, violently if necessary. The females defend their hunting territory and their cubs—whose most dangerous enemy isn’t other predators, but male bears. They prefer to hunt alone. Bears will abide each others’ company in pairs during mating season, but then they part until the cubs are weaned. Unlike wolves, which go mad without a pack and their place in it, bears are largely solitary and like it that way. Those for whom Bear is a primary ally may share this trait.

Bear does not take just anyone who shows up. There has to be some kind of affinity, and Bear is not impressed by people who think they’re tough and want a big, tough predator totem. (Relationships among the various animal totems are not always clear-cut. Even Bear gets out of the way for Skunk.) To woo Bear, you can start with honey. Yes, Bear really does like it that much—enough to track for miles and endure the swarm. Leave an offering of honey, and if you want to add something else, raw fish. The do some utiseta and see if you can make contact with Bear spirit.

If she comes, remember that predator totems are often very demanding. Some Siberian shamans have communicated this in notes taken down by scholars, reminding young would-be shamans that these often-glamorized animal spirits are, by their nature, not likely to be interested in much negotiation. We’ve found this to be true. If a promise is given and later reneged upon, unlike a nonpredator spirit, who will probably just withdraw its gifts, wander off, and never speak to you again, a predator totem may decide that it is within its rights to attack you or even your loved ones. If you want something from a predator spirit, be prepared to put a lot more work into placating it. Also, Bear is one of the spirits who traditionally initiates shamans. While any spirit can theoretically initiate someone if the situation is right for both spirit and human, Bear is specifically one of the major initiating spirits and may challenge shamanic practitioners who seek her out. Bear is a guardian. Just because she can be kind does not negate the ruthlessness with which she terminates any potential threat.

Exercise: Fishing with Bear

You’ll probably wonder why this exercise is about something as mundane as fishing with Bear. Why not attacking or rending or knocking down a tree? Two reasons: first, it’s best to forge a relationship with this spirit in gentler ways before you share her aggression, because the situation can quickly get out of hand—especially if you don’t have a lot of experience working with other animal spirits on a deep level. Bear herself may well be scornful of hidden agendas that center on self-aggrandizing fantasies of attacking people, and she may “arrange” for things to go wrong in order to teach you a lesson. She is more sympathetic to requests concerning food, which means survival and is more understandable. Second, the Fishing with Bear exercise is actually training for an advanced shamanic healing technique—which isn’t appropriate for this beginner’s book, but it won’t hurt anyone to learn it as groundwork.

For this exercise, you have to find a brook that runs no more than waist deep and contains fish. Ask your local hunting and fishing club about local rivers that have “runs” or swarms of fish, and when those occur. (In other words, do your homework and make the effort to go out of your way to find the right place and time, even if it takes you a year or more. If you can’t be bothered, you don’t have the patience for this job.) Lay an offering to Bear on the bank, and ask for her aid. Wade into the brook and make sure that it does not knock you off your feet. Then ask Bear to come into your hands, arms, and reflexes. When Bear fishes, she sees the twinkling of the fish and then strikes like lightning, slapping her paws together and catching the fish between them. Then she throws it on the bank to die and goes for another one. (You might want to have an assistant with a bucket on the bank to collect any fish that get tossed.)

If it works—if you are able to concentrate and hold the parts of Bear that she allows you—and you actually get a fish out of it, don’t waste it. Cook it up and eat it. Discard any noncookable parts in a raw pile for Bear with some honey, and when you eat the cooked fish, invite Bear to taste it through your mouth. She’s fine with cooked fish, and she did help you catch it, after all.

Reindeer

Raven: Reindeer spirit came into my life a few years ago, at the behest of my long-dead ancestor Uncle Noiade. I had been having health problems, and Reindeer gave me some crucial aid. When I asked what I could do in return, Reindeer told me that she was in danger, and that I needed to help. Some research confirmed this: many of the indigenous reindeer-herding people of the tundra and taiga have had to give up their traditional lifestyle in order to survive, and the herds themselves have shrunk drastically due to mismanagement from modern governments, global warming killing off their food, wolf attacks as a result of the disrupted ecosystem, modern diseases, inbreeding, radiation from Soviet nuclear testing in Siberia, and, most surprising, a lack of shamans to tell the herders where to take the deer and to propitiate the wilderness spirits for the survival of the herds. Nearly all the traditional shamans were converted or killed off over the past century.

Save the reindeer and the reindeer people? How could I possibly do such a thing? While the problem seemed vast and terrible, I decided that as a child of the modern era as well as a shaman of an ancient tradition, I would turn to the Internet. I created the website
www.reindeerspirit.info as a clearinghouse of information about the plight of the reindeer and the reindeer people, and listed various charities that are taking on the problem so that people could donate. It’s a first step. Hopefully Reindeer spirit will show me the next step soon.

I have reindeer-leather boots, and with Reindeer’s help I have charmed them to have a shadow of reindeer feet cast onto them—they make my clumsy feet more dexterous over slippery ice. I also have reindeer-fur boots of the traditional sort for deep snow—turned-up toes for skiing, and a sole made of pieces of fur going in three different directions, so that no matter how you turn your foot there is traction. They are the warmest things I’ve ever worn on my feet, without exception. They are as soft as bedroom slippers when I’m walking through knee-deep snow, and at the same time my feet are entirely warm and dry for hours.

Galina: I was first introduced to Reindeer through Kari, the God of the North Wind. I have a working relationship with Kari, and one day he arranged for a fellow spirit worker to gift me, out of the blue, with a reindeer skin. Once I accepted the hide, it turned out I was also initiating contact with Reindeer. I don’t work with her often, but I do honor her. She occasionally helps me in working with the winds and their magic. She has helped me to stay clean energetically, and has lent me her sight for the occasional journey. One thing in particular awes me about this animal: Reindeer thrives on rhythm. When I connect to her, it’s the vibrating drum of the heartbeat, the cracking of the ice, the rhythmic chanting of the glaciers. (Glaciers sing, each with its own unique song.) Reindeer is in the middle of this symphony, exquisitely aware of every note, every chord, every thrumming arpeggio of sound, and moves within it, rides it, uses it to aid in fleetness of foot. Reindeer is a magical creature, truly blessed by the Gods of the Wind.

Reindeer herding is an ancient profession, going back to the Ice Age. When humans left Africa and spread out over the continent of Eurasia, glaciers sheathed the upper areas of the continent all the way down to what is now Kyrgyzstan. The humans who spent hundreds of thousands of years in that frigid area learned to depend on the reindeer for survival, and some of their descendants—living much farther north now—still do today. At first they followed the reindeer and lived off the wild herds, but eventually they began to ally with the deer, tame them, ride them, harness them, milk them, and breed them. For a beautiful and heart-wrenching account of both the ancient reindeer myths and the struggle of the modern herders, we recommend Piers Vitebsky’s The Reindeer People.

One myth of the Saami people holds that Reindeer is fussy about cleanliness. The story explains how a young maiden marries Reindeer and goes to live with him in a tent on the edge of the tundra. He is kind to her and treats her well, but he has very strict rules as to how the tent should be kept and how often skins should be chewed for softness and thrown away when worn out. When she becomes lax and fails in her constant cleanliness, he leaves her. This fable reflects the reality that reindeer are very prone to parasites and diseases. They actually do better in arctic weather because there are fewer of those health concerns at subzero temperatures. When reindeer are raised farther south in warmer areas (or migrate there during the warmer months), it seems like every parasite and lethal insect in the world wants to leap on them. On a spirit-ritual level, it means that approaching Reindeer should be done only after some kind of purification, if only a bath. If you have psychic parasites that you have picked up along the way, Reindeer will not come near you. (It’s a good way to figure that out, actually, if you don’t have a shaman around to check you out.)

Reindeer are herd animals, although females tend to stay with the herd, and males tend to wander off for long periods of time. Unlike other European deer, both males and females have large antlers. The males go into rut in the fall and fight each other for the right to mate with the best females; after this they shed their antlers. The females, on the other hand, retain their antlers well into the winter, as theirs are for defending the young they bear from predators. (Some scientific studies have suggested that female reindeer actually have high testosterone levels during part of the year in order to grow those huge antlers and use them aggressively.) They don’t stay in one place, but migrate as the seasons change, often over a huge area, crossing roaring rivers and surviving temperatures that would easily kill a human being. They are made to survive in extreme conditions, and Reindeer can teach you a lot about survival . . . and about what you don’t need in order to survive. It is said that the North Wind rides a reindeer. It is also said, by the Saami people, that the heart of a sacred reindeer lies under the earth, and anyone who puts an ear to the earth to listen for it can hear it beating. Listening for the reindeer’s heart under the earth is a good thing to do as an opening to calling this spirit who has given so much to humanity.

Exercise: Borrowing Reindeer’s Legs

To contact Reindeer spirit, it helps to have a piece of reindeer fur—the warmest fur in the entire world, as the arctic peoples will tell you. Its winter overlay has hollow hairs that catch and contain the light and heat for warmth and insulation. While other animal spirits may prefer to be given some appropriate food, Reindeer’s favorite moss is hard to come by, and, anyway, what Reindeer seems to want right now is an offering of help toward her species’ survival. Check out the website listed on page 159 and make your offering, and ask for Reindeer’s help in running. Don’t worry that Reindeer will be upset about you holding a piece of a dead member of her species; Reindeer has sacrificed herself to keep many generations of humans warm with her fur and understands the need. Reindeer shamans of northern Eurasia wore reindeer-fur coats and boots like everyone else.

This exercise is especially useful for people who have arthritis or bad knees or some other disability of the leg that prevents them from even a light jog. While actually shaping one’s energy-body legs into something strengthening can help with physical disabilities, it takes the aid of an animal spirit to, at least temporarily, entirely bypass a physical disability and do the nearly impossible . . . such as run without pain when the flesh body would never allow such a thing on its own.

Do some utiseta, ideally in very cold weather (we guarantee you that Reindeer will not be sympathetic to your complaints about the cold, so bundle up and do your best), and see if this dignified, guarded spirit responds to you. If so, ask her what she wants in return for lending her legs to you on occasion, and do that. Then take a walk with her in the cold. Don’t presume to touch her; let her decide when to move toward you. Remember that she may decide to run away at any time—not because she is shy, but because she has decided that she’s had enough of you—and you will never be fast enough to follow her, so let her go off on her own, if that’s what she wants. If she drops back to walk behind you, she is ready, and she will walk right through you. As she does, feel her legs and hooves melding with your own energy body’s legs. You may go up on your toes for a few steps as you get used to it, which is all right. In fact, you might want to take your first running steps on your toes.

Reindeer have broad hooves that splay out sideways in order to move on heavy snow without plunging through it, and because of this their tendons give a characteristic click whenever they take a step. You might want to hang something that clicks on your footwear, like small pieces of hollow wood. (Raven actually wears bells when running with Reindeer, in honor of the people who belled and harnessed this ally.) The hardest part will be holding those reindeer legs in place, carefully and mindfully, as you run. The idea is not to win a race, but to do this piece of shamanic work perfectly, even if that means only a few steps. (Raven actually ran only twelve steps the first day, and he increased by just a few steps each day.) As soon as you feel Reindeer’s legs slipping away, thank her and slow to a walk. If she is willing, come back and meet her again the next day. She is a good companion for daily jogging.

Afterward, write down the sensations you felt for future reference, and watch yourself over the next half hour or so for specific food cravings or other unusual behavior. The residue of Reindeer spirit affecting you for a short while will not be harmful, but it’s good to be aware of what’s going on.

Goat

Raven: I keep goats. I have referred to them as “cats with hooves and crowbars.” They are intelligent, crafty, and never stop trying to escape, carefully testing each section of fence for looseness on a daily basis. Even the most cooperative goat can suddenly turn perverse and put her foot in the milk bucket for no apparent reason. They are frighteningly aggressive with each other—a new goat introduced to the herd will be brutally battered for the first week until the butting order is reestablished. When I milk the nannies, I have to take them in the order they’ve fought for—the big alpha doe first, down to the small omega doe. If I milk them out of order, the rank-jumper will be attacked. And I never turn my back on the buck goat. Still, I have a soft spot for them. As a shaman, I understand what it is to have a strong personality and to be forced into a job against your will and expected to somehow get a good attitude about it.

While my goats are clearly significantly more intelligent than my sheep—some of whom have been stupid enough that they couldn’t figure out how to back up—they seem to have fewer instincts in exchange for more brains. They can figure out a latch in minutes that the sheep wouldn’t even think to attempt, yet while the sheep graze carefully around the poisonous plants, the goats will eat them and die. This makes me think of what they have in common with humanity—our reliance on our brains to the detriment of our instincts, and our subsequent hubris—and often, our subsequent disasters.

Galina: Goats amuse me. They are amazingly intelligent and incredibly cussed creatures. They’re cunning and can find their way out of any enclosure, or so it seems. I envy their agility of mind and unrepentant stubbornness at getting what they want. I’ve encountered goats many times, and I’ve learned not to underestimate them, in either the physical world or the spiritual. If you tangle with Goat, sooner than you think you’ll have met your match.

The earliest evidence of goats in Neolithic Scandinavia is their bones in midden piles; the herding of goats apparently goes a long way back. There are rock carvings of them as well, dating from the Bronze Age. Goats are mentioned frequently in Nordic mythology, as opposed to sheep, which were just as common but had almost no place in the stories. Thor’s chariot is drawn by two goats, Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr, “tooth-barer” and “tooth-grinder.” He is able to slaughter them for dinner, eat them, and then resurrect them again in the morning as long as none of their bones are broken. Thor is often referred to as the Lord of Goats, perhaps not only for his team but for his temperament. Another mythical goat is Heidrun, who lives in Asgard and eats the leaves of the World Tree; her milk fills whole cauldrons to feed the legions of warriors in Valhalla. The prevalence of goats in subarctic myth reflects the prevalence of goats in ancient farming; they could cope with mountains, rocky soil, weeds, and poor grass better than cattle, and were a meat staple for thousands of years.

Goats are one of the animals that were once wild (and there are still colonies of wild goats in various places in the world, those who chose to remain children of the glaciers and rocky heights) but who entered into the sacred contract of domestication with humans, trading freedom for regular feed and protection from all other predators. Part of why we chose some hoofed and tame animals in our nine examples is because it is important not to dismiss livestock animals in favor of wild ones. Because we tend to be separated from both farming and wilderness in modern life, we glamorize wild animals and reject the tame ones that are eaten as food, sometimes to the point of hiding them away entirely so that we only see their meat as plastic-wrapped in the supermarket, and either ignore the fact that the meat was a living being or sentimentally assume that no animal would agree to be food for another species.

To be in right relationship with food animals, shamans and shamanic practitioners in this tradition must avoid either road. We must understand that when the spirit of an animal species enters into this contract with humans, it was done originally with mutual respect. Yes, Goat spirit—and Cow spirit and Sheep spirit and Pig spirit and others—did indeed pledge their mortal children to this compact, and they still carry those same expectations. The answer is not to give up the compact, but to return to its original rules—caring for those children in life as well as we can, keeping them under healthy conditions that do not make them distressed, feeding them well, and killing them quickly and cleanly.

In his essay “Domestication as Sacred Contract” in the book Honey, Grain, and Gold, Joshua Tenpenny writes:

With livestock animals, it is very much the same process. In the wild, these were prey animals. They have always been food. They understand this. It is all right with them. They have entered into relationship with humans, gaining protection from wild predators as well as a consistent and ample supply of food. The overarching spirits of these animals do not mind ending up as food, but they do mind suffering in the meantime. Up until recently, animals kept in substandard conditions would get sick and die. This was their means of ensuring a certain standard of treatment. Unfortunately, advances in modern medicine have allowed us to keep animals in increasingly unpleasant environments, administering a steady stream of antibiotics and other medications to prevent the deaths that would be the natural consequence of these living conditions. I consider this to be a breach of our sacred contract. . . . I recognize my point of view is a minority even within my religious community, but I do hope for solutions to these problems that treat these plants and animals as our partners in the food production process, rather than our property or our victims.

That doesn’t mean that any given shaman or shamanic practitioner in this tradition must eat meat, but if you do, you need to make a serious effort to find meat that was raised and killed respectfully and sustainably . . . and if you don’t, let that be because it doesn’t agree with your body, not because you believe that killing them is wrong. Goat spirit knows that it is a prey animal, and it is not ashamed of that fact. Goat spirit does not believe that it is wrong for us—or the bear or the wolf—to kill goats. An individual goat may not want to die in the moment, but Goat spirit understands and eases the transition . . . as long as there is mutual respect and kindness. If your reasoning is that the way animals are treated in agribusiness is often wrong, well, we’re with you on that, which is why we believe that it is worth it to support organic meat farming as a viable alternative, which it will be if enough people support it. Even if you don’t eat meat, it is a good deed to buy sustainable and cruelty-free meat as a gift for your friends who do, and to try to convince them of its higher quality in all ways.

We are also of the opinion that if you are working toward being a shaman or shamanic practitioner in this tradition, and you do eat meat, you should at least once have the experience of killing your own future meal as respectfully as possible, so that you can see how it should be done as opposed to how it usually is done. Killing your own animal for food—respectfully following through that process from beginning to end—changes forever the way you relate to your meat, and to food in general. It’s also a powerful connection to our Northern lineage ancestors, who had no choice but to regularly butcher their own meat to survive. We wouldn’t require this of the average person, but spirit workers in this tradition cannot afford squeamishness about anything concerning death. We are not allowed to be sentimental about this. Squeamishness, like avoidance or contempt or morbid fascination, is not right attitude or right relationship. It’s important that you get over it, because the spirits will sense it in you and challenge you about this constantly . . . especially if you hold predator or prey animals as allies. If you can’t get over it the first time, you need to do it again until you can. (Actually, that would be a fair reason for not eating meat—that you cannot at this time approach death with the right attitude, and you’re still too culturally screwed up about it to give proper respect to the animal spirit and its compact with humanity . . . but one would assume that you were working hard to get over that.) A good offering to the grandparent spirit of any livestock animal would be helping an organization that specializes in implementing standards for good treatment of domestic animals.

Exercise: The Craft of Tanning

In this exercise, you will tan an animal hide to use for shamanic purposes. If possible, use every part of the animal in some way. Even the flesh parts that we don’t want can be given to wildlife or processed for pet food. The skin is no exception, and wearing animal skins was the province of the shaman long after everyone else had taken to woven cloth and scraped leather. Every piece of animal hide, leather, or fur that a shaman wears should be acknowledged and thanked for having given itself in this way. (That includes bought shoes and clothing made from cattle. If you’re not sure whether a cow is the source, do a little utiseta and ask the animal to reveal itself.) You should be present for the death of the goat or other livestock animal you will be using, and make sure that its death is respectful, quick, and clean. If it is allowed, you should help with the skinning and butchering, and eat some of the meat with gratitude. Then the skin is your responsibility, and you will scrape all the fat, meat, and inner membrane off of it. (A number of good books in the Resources explain the process.) As you work, repeat a small prayer of gratitude to the spirit of the animal that gave its life to you, and to the overarching grandparent spirit of that species.

Tanning is done with a number of solutions. The earliest and simplest is oak-bark tanning, which is a matter of making a solution of oak bark (which is rich in tannins) and water, and steeping it like a barrel of tea. Traditionally, four barrels were set up with four different strengths of oak bark “tea,” and the skins spent a few days in each barrel, working up from weak to strong. Oak-tanned hides are beautiful, and the bark is easily obtained—rather than cutting down oak trees, talk to friends who heat with wood and ask them to save the bark that falls off their oak logs for you. The only drawback of this method is that the oak tannins tend to dye everything to a very dark brown. If you use oak-bark tanning, thank the oak tree when you make up the solution, and ask the Oak spirit to aid the animal spirit in making a lovely hide for you.

A more popular method involves alum and salt; in this case, you ask the spirits of the Earth to help with the skin. Alum tends to stiffen the skins, and you’ll spend the next couple of months “working” them—stretching and pulling. The medieval method of softening leather involved immersing the skins in lime water for a day to make the hair fall off, and then immersing them in a pit of dog or chicken dung to break down the fibers and soften them. (Herbivore dung was not strong enough to do the trick.) The skins were then cleaned (thoroughly, one would hope) and put into the tanning solution. The lovely, delicate commercial leather that one buys from tanneries today is tanned with a chromium solution, which we do not advocate for home use. It is a caustic, polluting, hazardous chemical that has to be carefully disposed of in ways that the average householder does not have access to.

Once you have your skin, remember that this is now a sacred object that is still tied spiritually to the spirit of the animal that offered it, even if the actual soul of the animal has gone on its way. It is, however, not unusual for the animal spirit to occasionally “drop in” through its skin. Making things even more complicated, the presence of a shaman or very experienced shamanic practitioner of many years has a tendency to “wake up” sleeping artifacts, even if only touched for a moment, so it not unusual for skins to awaken in this way. Placing a bit of food that the animal would have liked on the skin is a good periodic offering for its spirit. In some cases, it may want a mate, and you should keep your eyes open for the piece that will probably fall into your path somehow. Spirits have a way of making these things happen. When a female reindeer skin that Raven was gifted awakened, she wanted a mate. He ended up going through a website of reindeer skins from Finland where they displayed each skin separately, holding the doe reindeer skin in his lap and looking at each one until she said, “That one! He’s big and handsome.” The two skins are kept rolled up together, as mates.

It is also not unusual for a spirit worker to pick up a conventionally tanned skin and have its former owner drop in, expecting a relationship. It’s one of those issues of responsibility. Once you are aware of the spirit world, and it is aware of you in an active way, and you are gaining power from it, things change. Spirits will attempt to talk to you, and you are obligated to respond in some way for the sake of courtesy and gratitude. If you run across an animal spirit who is attached to a piece of its preserved body and it speaks to you, unhappy with its disrespected situation, you have a responsibility to take charge of the animal part until you can find the right owner for it. That doesn’t mean that you should go around stealing furs from people; if the spirit wants to escape with you badly enough, it will find a lawful way to do it. Then you pray to the grandparent spirit of that species to send the right human partner along . . . and be aware enough when that individual passes through to hear the call of “That one! That one! Give me to that one!”

When you are moved to pass on an animal artifact, it’s a good thing to sit down with its new potential owner and make an offering right there and then, with the participation of that person. This will reinforce how awakened artifacts should be treated and give the new owner a lesson in the wholly animistic worldview necessary to keep the awakened artifact happy and not attempting to move on.

Horse

Raven: Three waves of people passed through northern Europe over the many thousands of years. First were the hunters and herders who wandered north as the glaciers receded; we can tell from the creation myth—which has the snows melting from the mountains through the warm winds of the Place of Fire—that they saw the ending of the Ice Age. They had stone tools and lived in a cold world with wolves, frost, fire, deer, and the open sea. Then the first wave of conquerors—and intermarries—came, with their oxcarts and their agricultural Gods, settling in one place and farming instead of wandering. At this point the Mesolithic gave way to the Neolithic, and the hunter-gatherer Gods and goddesses of the first pantheon were relegated to “giants” by the new Indo-European-speaking peoples, who still feared and respected them, however, as the embodiments of wild Nature. The second pantheon of Gods were agricultural and oversaw farming and fishing rather than hunting and herding.

Then, thousands of years later, the latecomers rode in. While they spoke a branch of the same language as the earlier arrivals, they were warriors rather than farmers, and their Gods were warrior-Gods. They swept in on horseback—a sea of horses and armed people—and as it was said of the much later Huns, “their country was the back of a horse.” It was with the horse that they conquered the lands in front of them, and then they settled down to rule those lands. Three waves of people, three pantheons: Rökkr, Vanir, Aesir, as we call them today. But it is to the third wave that we look to celebrate this animal spirit—the third pantheon, and the beauty of its favored animal . . . pounding across the land like water and fire, bearing the amazed human on its back with speed he would never otherwise know.

Galina: My sister has a powerful Horse spirit, and from her I have learned two important things: that horses measure our capacity for kindness and that they will not tolerate being bound. Horse, more than any other animal I have encountered, detests and adamantly resists binding ties. It will enter into a relationship freely and willingly, but insists on freedom to come and go as it wishes, and equal partnership rather than subjugation. Horse is cagey and would rather hedge and dance away than commit to the exclusion of escape. Horse can teach one to work without the comfort of self-imposed limitations, as this spirit possesses a tremendous core of self-confidence and ease of being. Horse is a particularly good ally for those struggling with codependent tendencies. Horse dismisses that behavior with a toss of its head, a stomp of its hoof, and a disdainful neighing cry. It is a glorious animal, and one more than willing to partner with humanity, but it partners as an equal, not a servant.

Love not the world unless it runs like horses. Love not the wind unless it ripples wild manes. Love not the Sun if it cannot gallop, nor find hope in paradise if there be no pasture. Neither wind nor Sun can graze with angels, or dream in full motion while standing asleep, pressing high heaven and leaping for starlight, volcanic with fireblood and rock crop for bone: such magic is music and music runs hard— the footfalls of horses are whispers of thunder sagas of heart fire in ancient tongues— for what breath be holy if it prick not soft ears? And what loves the world if it does not love horses?*1

Norse/Germanic myth contains more named horses than any other animal, because so many of the Gods have a horse with whom they are partnered, just as high-ranking people in past days had a special horse to bear them. The most famous, of course, is Odin’s eight-legged horse, Sleipnir (meaning Spider), who was sired by the magic horse Svadilfari and borne by Loki in mare form. Horses were considered the best possible sacrifice to Odin, the leader of the Aesir, the Gods of the horseback wave. There were other divine horses as well—Heimdall’s horse was Gulltop (Gold Tuft); Gna, the messenger goddess, rode Hofvarpnir (Hoof Thrower); and so on. Sunna was pulled in a chariot drawn by two horses, Arvaker (Early Awake) and Alsvidur (Very Quick); we’ve mentioned the golden Trundholm chariot in the Golden World chapter. Daeg, the God of Day, rode on a horse named Skinfaxi (Shining Mane); Nott, the Goddess of Night, rode Hrimfaxi (Frost Mane). Heroes, too, had horses; Sigurd is given a horse named Grani by Odin, who tells him that it is a descendant of Sleipnir. In the Icelandic saga of Hrafnkel, warring over a sacred horse of Frey begins generations of trouble. A “horse” could also be a kenning (or poetic name) for anything that one rode on, sat on, or was otherwise borne up by. For example, the World Tree itself was referred to as Yggdrasil—the “Horse of Ygg,” or Odin in his aspect as the Hanged One—when he performed his nine-day shamanic ordeal to gain wisdom by hanging himself from its branches.

While horses can be tamed, there is always something wild in them, and it seems to be the primal wild part that you get when you call Horse spirit. It is rare that you will be allowed to ride on Horse spirit; that would come only after a long period of friendship. If you do get to ride Horse spirit, he would decide where to go, not you; you would be granted the favor of a lift, not any control over the situation. When Horse runs, he goes into an altered state of peace and serenity . . . and, indeed, this state of peace and serenity is the ideal state of Horse, no matter what he is doing. It is easily disrupted, of course; Horse never forgets that he was once a knee-high prey animal, and on some level he is still that fragile, frightened prey animal who shies away from potential dangers. The lesson of Horse spirit is to be able to get into the serene place even when your brain tells you that the world is full of frightening things, real or imagined; to run not in fear but in joy.

Exercise: Borrowing the Peace of Horse

This exercise is best done while running, or at least walking for a good period of time. Horses like to move around. They even do about half their sleeping on their feet. Horse excels at the art of the moving meditation, which is exceptionally good for joggers, athletes, stressed people, and people who have trouble with any kind of sitting meditation. First, go communicate with Horse. As with Goat and other animals who are kept tame by humans, you have no excuse not to find a horse farm and at least observe horses from a distance, drinking in their presence and forging a link to their grandparent spirit. Giving Horse’s children a treat is always an offering to Horse, as is helping out at a stable or giving aid to a horse rescue organization.

See if you can get a few horsehairs to twist into a ring and bring home—it shouldn’t be hard, as horses are groomed regularly, and their owners often have whole bags of such hair. This ring of horsehair will be the central piece of your spirit home for Horse. Give Horse some food that he loves, and ask if he will help you. Ask him to teach you the trick of finding peace in movement. If he agrees, go out and run or walk with him. He will probably run or walk beside you, and eventually you will feel something passing from his head to yours. Take hold of it, and hold on as best you can, without pausing in your movements. Feel his serenity pass through you, until you are in a perfectly peaceful state, aware of the beat of your heart, the passing of your breath, and your feet hitting the ground . . . and believe that nothing else is necessary during this moment of life. This is Horse’s gift. Afterward, it shouldn’t be hard to find some food that Horse likes—carrots and apples come to mind—and eat it while offering Horse a chance to taste it through your mouth.

Crow

Raven: Crows have always talked to me, even before I was given the name of their larger brothers. I figured out quickly that much of their language is insults—that’s how they show dominance among each other and establish a pecking order. They have often been messengers for me—when I lived in the city long ago, I often got lost, and if I could find a crow, I could sometimes ask it to lead me to where I needed to go. They would appear outside my window to wake me up in emergencies. They, like all of the Corvidae family, are dear to me.

When I journey in trance, I like to get to places quickly because I don’t want to make a client wait, and flying is the best trick for that. I shape myself into the form that my name gives me. I was taught how to do that by the Raven spirit, who is Crow’s big brother. Once he showed me how it felt to really be in a bird’s body, I realized how my idea of that was skewed and human-centered. Now I can fly fast, turn on an updraft, perch, and lift off without clumsiness. I’m probably still clumsy compared to an actual bird, but I’m definitely better at it.

Galina: Crows come with messages. They challenge assumptions; they prod and provoke. Most of all, though, they carry visions and information from the Realm of the Dead to the Realm of the Living, from the lips of the Gods to the ears of their servants. They know the keys to traversing the worlds, and if one is having trouble communicating with ancestors or finding that it’s difficult to establish a relationship with one particular ancestor, Crow can often be called upon to ease the way and facilitate communication. I work primarily with Raven, but I have found that Crow is friendlier toward the human world, more forgiving of faults, and more likely to take an interest in human affairs. They are blindingly intelligent. They tend to like pretty, shiny trinkets, and such things make good offerings. Crow teaches how to send messages and communicate between people in different Otherworlds. He can be particularly helpful when one’s signal clarity is blocked.

For the next three sections, we will move from the concept of borrowing qualities of the animal spirit—we figure that you’ve gotten the idea by now—to instead taking on the spirit’s whole shape during trance journeying. This is a different procedure than keeping the two energy bodies together while fully conscious and active. During trance work, most people walk about in their own form, even though it isn’t necessary, but it’s the form that they know, that they can move around most skillfully. When they take on other animal shapes—often to move across terrain that isn’t best for walking or to cover a lot of ground at once—they tend to shape themselves into a crude approximation of the animal’s form, and they don’t even know how clumsy and slow they are. No matter how imaginative you are, you can’t fully conceive of what an animal’s body feels like because you are constrained by a lifetime of habituation to a human form . . . unless the grandparent spirit of that animal helps you out.

Crows are the most common member of the Corvidae family, and they are found on every continent except Antarctica. The Corvidae—which include crows, ravens, jackdaws, and other birds—are known for having the largest brain-to-body-weight ratio of any birds, similar to chimpanzees. In other words, they are keenly intelligent and highly observational, learn quickly, and are not opposed to using tools to get what they want. Some have learned to communicate to an extent with humans, although they are also independent and somewhat perverse creatures who don’t like to be told what to do by anyone. Crows are also inveterate thieves who steal shiny items and hide them in their treasure troves, and they have been known to steal food right off the plates of picnickers. (There is a strain of the Sacred Trickster in the crow species.) Crows have been denigrated by humans since the dawn of agriculture for their habit of pulling up sprouting grain seedlings and eating them—a flock of crows can denude a whole spring field, leaving the farmers to starve. Scarecrows were erected to ward them off, and hundreds of generations of children were set to throwing rocks at crows and shooting at them with slingshot. They are also disliked for their noise, especially when they gather in loud groups. They learn to recognize individual humans and remember them years later—in some cases, bombarding them with garbage, if the human is one who has upset them.

They have a long history in mythologies the world over, both for their carrion eating—the ability to transform and recycle rotting garbage—and their intelligence. The combination of the two has resulted in the belief that members of the Corvidae family are messengers between the human world and the Underworld, unlike other birds, which are seen as messengers to the higher realms. The Corvidae have an inescapable association with death—a flock of crows is known as a murder. They are also linked with many different deities of death and war (the latter not because they are predators or fighters, but because they are scavengers that clean up battlefields). These include Odin, Hela, Morrigan, Bran, and Apollo. A Norse kenning for them was the blood goose, for their habit of eating dead bodies. They are teachers of hard wisdom, of dark secrets.

Don’t try to get anything by the Crow spirit. He will look at you with beady eyes and perceive this deceit, and then tell you harshly just what he thinks of you. Then he will laugh at you. His sense of humor is coarse and caustic, and if you’re overly sensitive, he’s not the friend for you. Roll with the punches, and he’ll appreciate you. Blunt honesty is more entertaining to him than polish and eloquence. (In fact, profanity is fine with him, and he uses it himself, liberally.) His teaching style tends to involve the occasional sharp peck when you’re slow . . . put up with it, or don’t be slow.

Exercise: Borrowing Crow’s Wings

Crows are fairly common, and if you put the word out to the Universe that you’d like a meeting with Crow, his representatives will probably start dogging you. If they don’t, that’s a pretty clear indication that Crow is not interested. If you see them appearing in trees near you and cawing to get your attention, pick a day and follow them. Crow is one animal spirit who can be easily approached in an urban area; his children have adapted well to our garbage-ridden cities. Follow the crows until they lead you to a place where many crows gather, and then sit and talk to Crow. If it’s a city park with distracting, noisy cars driving by . . . well, this is a good time to learn to do utiseta with distractions. That’s the kind of lesson that Crow likes. He’ll laugh at you if you complain that there’s just too much noise to concentrate. Crow likes noise and will have no sympathy.

If he’s willing to help you, ask him to allow you to take on his form when you journey internally. For this, you should first be able to put yourself into a fairly deep trance. Visualize yourself on the ground next to a high perch, like a tree, cliff, or pole. Wait for Crow to come for you. If he does, let him guide the lesson. Don’t shift yourself into some human idea of crow form. Let him do what it takes to get you there. It might be a gradual shift after he touches you, which will feel strange and disorienting, and you may flop about for a bit. He may even pick you up and peck you into shape. When he says that you are ready to attempt the air and flutter to the high place, follow him closely. If you can make it there, he will let you know where to fly next. Don’t go haring off on your own. It takes time to get used to moving a body that does not have human anatomy or neurology. If all you can do the first time is hop about on the ground and take short fluttering flights, there’s no shame in that. Practice makes . . . somewhat more skilled, anyway. Understand that Crow will probably taunt and insult you while he teaches you. Don’t let it discourage you; it’s just the way he works.

Your biggest job during all of this will be to maintain active concentration along with passive surrender to the experience, and do not get distracted by outside stimuli. If you do make it into the air and then a roommate bangs on the door and knocks you out of your trance, don’t fear—you won’t fall out of the sky and crash. You’ll just come back to your own body. However, it may take a little while for the feeling of being in crow form to entirely wear off. A short nap will help this, as will consciously realigning your energy body into human form. That is, after all, your body’s form, and you can always consciously go back there by mentally “mapping” your energy body to your physical form, one piece at a time if need be.

Ideally, once you’ve learned to do this with the entirety of your attention (and thus the majority of your energy body), you should learn to scale back your attention and use less of your energy body. To do advanced shamanic work, you will not only need to be able to journey in full trance with your entire awareness submerged in the experience, but also to be able to split your consciousness and put part of it into a useful “traveling” form while the rest of you is busy standing up, or working on a client, or singing, or drumming, or dancing, or doing energy work. Professional shamanic services—as opposed to shamanic practices designed only to bring nonprofessionals into better alignment with themselves and their world—require the ability to multitask your energy.

Seagull

Raven: I work with ocean spirits, and what Crow is to the land, Seagull is to the ocean—a messenger, a trickster, a liminal and amoral figure. The Gods and spirits of the sea are not above employing these messengers to fly the hundred miles inland that it takes to be there in the store parking lot when I arrive, chomping down garbage, standing in front of my car (or on the hood), and refusing to move until I acknowledge that yes, I need to go to the ocean and honor my allies there. Then, of course, they expect some payment for having made the journey to hassle me—gulls are extortion artists, but I throw them some popcorn anyway.

Galina: Seagulls can be pushy and loud. They know how to make their voices heard and get their fair share (and then some). I don’t work with Gulls myself, but I have observed them extensively in my work with our Gods and goddesses of the sea, and I live on a large river that flows into the Atlantic and attracts its share of gulls. They are high-flying scouts, and much of their wisdom lies in seeking out necessary resources or unexpected boons. They can be rude and are not afraid to be obnoxious in claiming what is theirs. There is something to be said for that type of boldness.

Norse folktales tell of a seagull woman who puts her wings aside when she goes on land, and they are found and hidden by a fisherman who forces her to marry him and bear him children. When she finally recovers her wings, she turns her row of children into gulls, and they all fly away together. This story is found in other forms all over coastal northern Europe, with the magical wife in the form of a seal or other sea creature, but it is the seagull version that we will emphasize here. No wild bird wants to be kept in a cage, but seabirds especially are wanderers. To be in one place for too long kills their souls—and “too long” could be a matter of hours.

It’s said in legend that the sound of the sea makes people restless and calls them away, and this is why young people ran away to become sailors; the sea whispered in their ears and suddenly any four walls seemed like a trap. Seabirds are born with that voice in their blood—in fact, it could be said that they are living incarnations of that voice, that their cawing is its aural channel to the world. Knowing this, it makes sense that when the mountain goddess Skadi divorced the sailor god Njord, one of her complaints was that the sound of the gulls kept her awake and made her restless. The sound of gulls can make anyone restless, if their energy manages to connect with the person. This is the greatest danger in working with Seagull—it can literally make you long to run away from home. That sea voice doesn’t care where you go, as long as you are moving.

Seagulls do not belong to any one deity in Norse mythology, although they seem to be much loved by various sea Gods, including Njord, the sailor god; Aegir and Ran, the king and queen of the sea; and their daughter Unn, the undine whose name means “billow” and who is affiliated with the Moon and the sea air. In many coastal Native American folktales, Seagull and Raven are enemies, both being tricksterish scavengers who compete for similar territory. However, their natures are different: Raven (like Crow) plots and schemes and thinks ahead, while Seagull lives for the moment. As an incarnated meeting of Wind and Water—thought and emotion—Seagull is driven by feelings as wayward as the sea spray and acts entirely on impulse. She doesn’t want to know where things stand. Nothing stands anywhere in her world of open water and myriad coastlines. She wants to see how things will turn out, because in her world anything could go any way at any time. Working with Seagull means learning to develop immense flexibility.

Exercise: Borrowing the Wings of Gull

Seagulls are long-distance flyers, which you can tell by looking at their longer, narrower, more airplanelike wings, in contrast to short-migration crows, which rarely fly more than a hundred miles from their home. Some gull species migrate and have been known to go from Maine to Labrador in search of food. Others don’t seasonally migrate, but have flown hundreds of miles inland—or, more strenuously, out to sea and back. To work with Seagull as a regular ally, it’s really best if you live near the coast. By near, we mean within the flight range of a gull, and reasonably able to visit the ocean on a regular basis. Sometimes one has to inconvenience oneself in order to deal with a spirit and gain its alliance. Should budding shamanic practitioners pack up their household and move to another area in order to be close to a spirit? That depends on how much that spirit means to you and your practice . . . and how much your shamanic practice means to your life. Shamans have done far more extreme things to themselves and their lifestyle because their spirits felt it necessary. If Seagull ends up being your main ally for whatever reason, you’ll end up living near the coast, because that’s what Seagull wants of you. Go back and reread the last part, the bit about her nature, before making eyes at her.

Go down to the shore and leave her food. This should be easy, because gulls abound on shores, and flocks of her children will gladly take your offerings. Sit and watch them, and ask her to come to you. She may; she may not. She is very flighty and wayward. More food may help. Trying again another day may help. Be patient, and don’t take it personally, because it probably isn’t personal. She may have just been distracted by something on her way over to you. If she does come, the process will proceed rather like the one with Crow, explained above, except that she may abandon you in the middle for no reason. Again, don’t take it personally. She combines the most changeable aspects of both her elements as part of her nature. She has a rough, slapstick sense of humor, though, and laughter or a joke can get her wandering attention quickly. Don’t work with her if you’re not much for humor or being funny.

One gift that Seagull can give, once you have learned to fly with her, is an awareness of where you are in space on the planet. This is particularly useful for those of us who have little directional ability. Seagull is intuitively in touch with her directional relationship to everything else—any given point on land or sea, and even the stars themselves. To us, the sea is an amorphous mass with no markings other than land masses. To Seagull, there is this part of the sea, and that part, and that part over there, and they are all distinct. Telling Seagull that the sea is an amorphous blob is like telling citizens of Chicago that their city is an amorphous blob and there’s no way to tell where you are. They’d probably look at you like you were crazy and point out the street signs. Seagull will likely just laugh at you, because she knows you can’t see the street signs . . . but if you establish a relationship with her, she might let you borrow the sense needed to see them. That sense can be like Dorothy’s magic slippers for a journeying shaman—an automatic intuition of where “home” is, and anywhere else you’ve ever been, from where you are now.

Salmon

Raven: Sometimes the air isn’t the best way to travel. When I journey, sometimes I hit water that is too large to fly over, or I need to find something underwater. That’s why I have energy forms in reserve that can run, fly, or swim. I also have at least one that can burrow underground. You never know what you will be faced with, and it’s better to be versatile. Consider the story of the goddess Cerridwen chasing the child Gwion Bach, who had stolen her magical potion. He became a hare and she chased him as a fox; he became a perch and she a pike; he became a salmon and she an otter; he became a sparrow and she a hawk; he became a grain on a threshing floor and she turned into a hen and ate him . . . and then found herself pregnant. Well, we do have to watch what we do in astral form. But it’s still good to be versatile. (Her child became the famous poet Taliesin, born with all the shape-shifting gifts of Cerridwen’s cauldron.)

Galina: I began to work with Salmon when Loki asked me to have the fish tattooed on my body. In one of our sacred tales, he took the form of a Salmon to escape pursuers. I was going through a series of grueling shamanic ordeals, and Loki offered to walk with me through this process, not an insignificant gift. In return, he asked me to have a salmon leaping out of the waves tattooed on me. This fish is associated with wisdom, a very magical animal, and her gifts lie in transmutation. If she chooses to share her wisdom with you, she can teach you how to subtly shift and alter circumstances to your advantage, how to unlock hidden sources of power, and how to ride the flow of wyrd to your best advantage.

Of all the different kinds of fish that swim in the rivers and oceans of northern Europe, the one mentioned exponentially more often in myths than any other is salmon. While the European ancestors found all fish valuable—and we do forget that fish made up a huge portion of the protein in their diets—it seems that the salmon was the king of fish. Celtic myth speaks of the Salmon of Knowledge, who swam in the Well of Wisdom and ate the magical nuts from the hazel trees surrounding it. (This salmon was, of course, killed and eaten by a passing hero.) A similar Welsh variant has the Salmon of Llyn Llyw, who was a wise counselor. In Norse myth, Andvari the dwarven craftsman hid his hoard in a cave under a waterfall and guarded it in the form of a salmon swimming in the pool below. Loki caught him in a net and stole his treasure, which Andvari cursed so that it would leave a trail of broken lives behind. Later, Loki remembered Andvari’s trick and hid in salmon form from Thor and Odin after he killed Baldur, but Odin found him and had Thor catch him in a net.

As a fish, Salmon spirit will have very different energy from the warm-blooded creatures you may be used to. Cold-blooded animal spirits are more pragmatic than compassionate. They may point out the obvious and not understand why you don’t do what is clearly necessary. They have much deep wisdom, especially about letting go and moving on, but they are not very sympathetic. Don’t expect it of them. When you talk to fish and frogs and snakes, you get what you get. Listen closely, because they’ll say it only once. If what they say is mysterious, wait and see if the meaning reveals itself—their minds are very different from those of mammals.

As we’ve discussed in other areas, taking on a spirit alliance often brings taboos and responsibilities. If you end up with a fish ally, you now have a responsibility to fish. It means that you will need to look into the problems of water pollution, overfishing, and sustainability. It means that you will have to think about boycotting water-based food that is gathered in ways harmful to the long-term existence of fish, and instead support sustainable fish harvesting. It means that you may have to help clean up rivers or interrupt campers as they dump their shampoo into the lake. The viability of your allies is linked to the luck that you build through your own deeds. This is the best offering you can give her.

Monterey Bay Aquarium has a Seafood Watch program that lists which fish by region can be safely eaten because they are sustainably farmed, and which to avoid. That information can be found at www. montereybayaquarium.org/seafoodwatch.aspx. Anyone working with the spirits of animals living in or around water should give some thought to how they interact with its flesh-bearing creatures. This is part of shamanism as well. It does not take you away from the physical world; it connects you more fully to it in a harmonious way.

Exercise: Swimming with Salmon

The first thing to do to make contact with Salmon is to take her into your body. Yes, really, this is necessary. Fish are very aware of the cycle of life and their place in it; they know that they are all food for larger fishes and mammals, just as smaller fishes are unrepentantly gobbled up by them. However, if you are going to do this in a ritual manner, don’t just pick up any old can of salmon. Make the effort to buy sustainably harvested salmon. By doing this, you are helping to keep her species, and fish in general, from dying out due to our greed.

Before you eat Salmon’s flesh, send her a prayer asking her to come to you and give her aid. Then eat, and be aware of her energy in each bite. Feel it passing into your body and suffusing you with salmon-ness. Then go to some secluded body of water and immerse yourself, as far as you can safely go. Call to Salmon, and ask her to come to you. If you know how to swim, do it; if you can’t, at least move around in the water. If she comes to you, just swim with her silently for a while. Let her taste you and decide if she likes you. She will know what you want; the other interesting thing about cold-blooded animal spirits is that they rarely care about verbal language. The best way to communicate with them is to picture the thought and punctuate it with body motions. Tell her, in this way, that you want to learn to take on her form for journeying. If she agrees, she will circle you a few times and then dive at you, probably from behind. Let it happen—let yourself feel your energy body shaping itself into fish form. It will be a much more painful and awkward transition than becoming a four-limbed mammal or bird, and you may have to work at not resisting it. Keep swimming, and if possible, duck under the water.

Then you swim with Salmon, in salmon form, for a while. Thank her, go home, and enter a trance. Visualize yourself back in the water, and see if you can connect with her again. If so, resume the salmon form, feeling how it moves, without actively being in the water. You might want to keep a bottle of water from the place you met with her around to use as an anchor, or else make a tiny salmon spirit house that you can wear on your body while doing utiseta.

6

The Blue World

Water

Hail to the Rivers that run to the Sea,

Hail to the Ocean that rises in Rain,

Hail to the drops that nourish the Earth,

Hail to the spring that comes forth from the depths,

Hail to the waterfall sparkling in Sun,

Hail to the blood that flows in our veins,

Hail to the element that makes most of our flesh.

In most Northern mythology, water surrounded the world of humanity. Whether it was the Atlantic, Pacific, or Arctic oceans, or great rivers, if you went far enough you hit water. For the ancient Norse, the world was surrounded and protected by a huge water snake. Water framed human habitation and consciousness all along the blue horizon. It is only in modern times that we can imagine a world where water is entirely bordered and contained, rather than being the constant border and container itself. Our ancestors depended on its bounty to sustain them. The Norse were avid and skilled seafarers and established trade routes that extended into Russia and Byzantium, and possibly even farther east. Compelling evidence indicates that they reached North America several hundred years before Columbus. Water was important to them, and they depended on it, feared it, and understood the need to honor it in ways we have sadly forgotten.

The first and foremost reason that our ancestors propitiated Water spirits was for aid in fishing. The net was the primary tool of fishing folk, and when the fish didn’t come to them, coastal people (or nomadic people who visited the coast for their yearly supply of aquatic protein) might go hungry. It was the shaman’s job to call the fishes into the nets, which involved asking the spirits of ocean or lake or river to sacrifice a certain number of their fish so that the humans might eat. The shaman might also sing luring songs to the fish themselves, but the communication with the Water spirits ensured that only a proper number of fish would be sacrificed. Balance would be maintained, and the spirits would not be angered and then withhold more fish the next year.

We tend to forget how much of our species’ primal protein was provided by water sources. In earliest times we tended to keep to coastline areas for the sheer amount of food the ocean provided. Our great migration out of Africa took place during a drought caused by the Ice Age glaciers tying up much of the landmass water, but when the glaciers receded, the coastline moved inward as much as twenty-five miles, and we lost the archaeological record of our epic journey. When we moved inland, we tended to follow rivers, and most human population centers are clustered around major water features such as rivers, lakes, and bays. Water provided food and transportation, a means for washing, and a source of primal nurturing. On some level we have never forgotten that we once crawled out of the ocean.

The second reason for propitiating Water spirits was safety in boating. Water is capricious and can capsize a small boat and drown its owners, sometimes leaving no trace of the bodies. For thousands of years, people went out onto the waters and never came back, leaving their relatives mourning. In many cultures of the Far North, where the ground is always frozen, the Underworld was under water, thus making the ocean the Realm of Death. People went forth and came back alive by the grace of the Water spirits, and often tossed coins, gold, or other offerings over the side of the vessel to please them. Even fishing by a lake had its dangers; stories abound of fishermen getting dragged in by water faeries with ill intent.

Clean water is also necessary for drinking and washing, and we all know that we are around 75 percent water ourselves—small oceans in bags of skin. The Blue World keeps us alive at our most basic level, and we are quite literally mostly made of the Blue World. It’s no accident that the mythological human realm of Midgard is the Nordic equivalent of the Blue World, surrounded by ocean and the undulating folds of the Great Serpent. No accident at all.

Ocean

Raven: I have always loved the ocean. If I could afford it, I would live right on its edge. I visit it several times yearly to work with my allies there, bringing them offerings and learning from their wisdom. They have helped my body to heal when it has been at its worst—I’ve joked that the next time my arthritis gets so bad that I can’t walk, my partner should push my wheelchair down to the shore and dump me in the surf, and the Ocean spirits will take care of it. As the River speaks to Galina, so does the Ocean call to me. I understand the song that calls to the sailors and makes them run from their homes, a song that prompts more than the urge to travel.

As I write this, the cleanup commences of the vast error of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The sea has been hideously mistreated by our species—not only oil spills but also pollutants, dead zones, mile-wide swirling vortices of trash, and severely depleted fish populations. We have a lot to answer for. The sea was our original mother, before the beauty of the land, and we have been assiduous in our destruction of her realm. There is no amount of apologizing or verbal propitiation that will make the smallest dent at this point. The best—the only—useful propitiation we can give to the ocean is to contribute in some way to its cleanup. It doesn’t matter if you only go to a beach and pick up the trash that you see—do something, if you intend to have anything at all to do with the volatile and capricious spirits of the ocean. Our credit with them is at an all-time low. You would do best to remember that when you approach the shore with intent to make any kind of alliance.

Galina: I learned to truly love the ocean through my devotion to Ran, Aegir, and their daughters. My adopted mother often took me to the beach in Big Sur, and we’d make offerings to them and while we were at it, spend some time picking up the trash. She taught me to love and respect the ocean, but to never, ever turn my back on it. Elemental Powers behave according to their nature, after all, and nothing any human being does can change that. She taught me to love the water in its grace and in its beauty, but also in its anger and in its fury. Water has never been an easy element for me to connect with, but her example made it a thousand times easier.

My kindred regularly makes donations to the Big Sur Land Trust in my adopted mom’s memory, and through her influence I have learned to be mindful of how I treat the Earth’s waters and its bounty. I believe that we as a species owe a blood debt to the oceans that we will never be able to repay. We have raped and plundered our waters with little thought and even less respect for the creatures that call those waters home. We have trespassed, and sooner or later I think we will have to pay a terrible price. Part of the fundamental job of shamans and shamanic practitioners is to restore balance: with ourselves, our Gods, our spirits, our ancestors, our world, and the Otherworlds. We create and maintain, and teach others to create and maintain, right relationship with everything in our worlds. That might sound daunting, but it’s easy to begin with something small.

Begin with your own self and your own mindfulness. Begin with the way that you yourself choose to relate to your world and all the beings in it, large and small, human and not. I stopped buying pearls and shells (which I loved) when I learned how they were so often harvested in ways harmful to the ocean. I began to be mindful of the fish that I ate, choosing to eat only those types that were sustainably harvested and taking more care with how I dispose of my garbage. We don’t get to claim a relationship with the spirits of our world without giving any thought to what we’re doing to theirs. We have a sacred obligation to respect the land and waters and their resources. We have no right to do this work otherwise.

The only rule of thumb in dealing with spirits is respect. There are very few absolutes. As I write this, Japan is recovering from a colossal earthquake and tsunami. This is Elemental Power unleashed: immense, terrifying, utterly devastating. Ages before we as a species existed, the Elemental Powers held sway. We would do well to remember that in our interactions with them.

Modern Neopagan thought tends to class water as gentle, healing, flowing, and other rather tame adjectives. While those qualities are indeed found in water, in Northern Tradition shamanism we explore the most destructive side of an element in order to truly understand it, and, make no mistake, water can be an incredibly powerful and destructive force. This is most clearly shown when we examine the mythical Gods and spirits of the northern oceans—Aegir and Ran, the king and queen of the ocean, and their nine undine daughters, who might pull you in and devour you as quickly as they might bless you. While all Water spirits are deceptively dangerous, the spirits of oceans—which are the largest bodies of water—are the most dangerous of all. Imagine a storm at sea, and consider that we must see the sacredness in its fury before we can truly love the sea for itself. The ocean loves to eat people. This is one of its integral qualities, and we must never forget that. On the other hand, for those who are drawn to the ocean, it can be a source of great healing and joy.

Ocean spirits are a plurality that works as one. This plurality versus singularity of spirit is a complex and subjective phenomenon that varies with each human’s perceptions and how the spirits choose to interact with them, but in general we have found Earth spirits and Air spirits to be much more distinct and separate. Water spirits tend to be singular when they are associated with a smaller, contained body of water, like a stream or lake, but the ocean hosts a multitude of spirits, and they may approach you singularly or as a localized group moving and singing in unison. Don’t worry too much about it—Water is changeable and capricious by nature, and Water spirits will do what they will. You don’t need to understand in order to behave properly and respectfully. Understanding is oftentimes a luxury that we are simply not given at first.

When making offerings to the Ocean, don’t throw in anything that is not edible by local sea life, and don’t throw in anything that isn’t biodegradable. We’ve given the ocean far too many of our trash offerings already, an unfortunate reality clearly revealed by the giant swirling island of garbage in the Pacific. In fact, the best offering is, as we’ve mentioned, to clean things up and take our garbage away. The best course is to do it in a mindful manner, using your Intent to extend your small cleanup of one area of beach to hopefully spread out through the ocean and help it to clean itself further. The Ocean spirits are as quick to wrath as they are quick to play, so keep your own mind serene and respectful as you work, and never turn your back on them. It might be construed as disrespect.

Exercise: Greeting the Ocean

Having the Ocean as an ally requires actually visiting it. While certain sea deities can be propitiated inland (check the Resources for this information), the actual Ocean spirits want you to show up and get wet. If their aid is truly required, buy yourself a bus or plane ticket and go. Stand on the shore and announce yourself to them, and then do whatever cleanup you can find to do. If it’s a particularly clean beach, you might want to go find a dirtier one and clean it a bit, and then go back to the cleaner one. When the work is done, sing to them—they love singing of any variety, and it doesn’t matter if you don’t have a great voice or can’t stay on key. Continue singing as you walk into the water, to whatever depth seems right. (Don’t go too far in if you are not a strong swimmer or have little experience with swimming against ocean currents.) If you brought a little food with you, release it into the water. Be careful not to accidentally drop in wrappers or plastic bags—that’s incredibly offensive.

Ask the Ocean spirits to bless you and to show you what you need to work on to improve yourself. This is one of their specialties, and they’ll probably offer this to you anyway, so asking for it is a way of acknowledging that it will happen and declaring yourself ready and willing to change. Then spend about an hour moving in the waves and seeing what emotions come up. Remember that Water has an affinity with the emotions and that Ocean—containing the deepest water—has an affinity for all the deep hidden emotions that we bury in our subconscious. Facing these emotions—at least a few, at least to some extent—is a way of proving yourself worthy of an alliance with the Ocean spirits, who can taste hypocrisy on the flesh of your body. So watch your feelings and allow yourself to experience them. Were you annoyed because you were knocked over by the waves? Were you timid; did you have trouble letting go to the experience? Were you outright frightened by the ocean’s power? Did you experience wild joy? Did grief well up in you, or anger? These feelings are keys to buried emotions and experiences that you need to work on.

Take some ocean water home with you in a large bottle and hold it while you deal with them. Once you’ve shown the Ocean spirits that you are willing to access your own depths, they can be great allies for healing, both physically and emotionally. They can also help with divining, and a good second exercise is to pour your bottle of seawater into a glass bowl and scry with it. Try swirling it with your finger or gently sloshing the bowl back and forth to simulate the tides as you gaze into it. Seawater is cloudy, and that’s normal—it is full not only of salt but of the bodies of dead plankton. Ask for the Ocean spirits to grant you a vision, and deliberately blur your eyes as you stare at the bowl. Then, quickly, refocus your gaze while looking at the center of the bowl, and see what image jumps into your mind. This is your message, and while it will probably be vague and subjective, remember that water by nature is not sharp or structured. Meditate on your vision for one turn of the Moon, and if you figure out its relevance, remember to thank the Ocean spirits again.

River

Galina: I fell . . . well, perhaps not in love, but into deep affection and deeper flirtation with a River spirit once. My mother had taken me to Paris, and in retrospect I realize that this city gifted me twice over: I learned to work with and honor city spirits from Paris herself, and I learned about the magnetism, wisdom, and power of the River spirit of the Seine. He wasn’t the first River spirit whom I encountered, but it was the first time I truly realized how remarkably independent and powerful this family of spirits could be. Of all the denizens of the Blue World, I resonate most easily and work most effectively with River spirits. I find them as compelling as the Ocean spirits and far more accessible and willing to interact with humanity.

Early on, I connected to a River spirit during one of my own shamanic ritual ordeals. I was in Belgium, by the La Lesse River, waiting to be escorted by a senior spirit worker into a Neanderthal cave, and for the first time I got the sense of a river’s presence. She was very, very old—this family of spirits is ancient, and she was quite used to dealing with humans. She was very friendly and calmed me before my ritual. That brief experience made me look at rivers differently—attuned me, if you will, to the presence of their spirits. Since then, I have acquired several River allies, including the river that runs behind my home.

The name for spirits of freshwater rivers and streams is näckar in Old Norse, a cognate of the English word nixie. Of all the denizens of the Blue World, River spirits seem the most intimately connected on an ongoing basis with humanity. Many of them are intertwined with us and the health of our civilizations. My own sense is that they are more accustomed than many of their kin (except perhaps Rain) to working with humans. They’re a very communicative group, though no less deserving of honor in light of that. In other words, just because they do not demand by virtue of the power of their presence the same degree of respect and awe that the Ocean spirits might in no way means that they do not deserve it.

Humanity has lived one way or another in relationship with River spirits since our very early history. Cities were, more often than not, built along waterways. The Nile had its own heavily propitiated god, Hapi, and the Tiber River in Rome had its own sacred holiday. The power of the river for transportation and communication was integral in many ways to the expansion of early civilizations, the rise of trade, and the wealth of Renaissance merchant towns. Our ancestors were avid seafarers. Evidence indicates that the Vikings had extensive trade routes extending, via rivers, into Russia, Byzantium, and possibly even India. (For more information, read Nordic Religions in the Viking Age, by Thomas A. DuBois.) The power of the river ensured the wealth of the people.

Our alliance with and reliance on rivers through countless centuries is a large factor in the understanding that River spirits have of our proper relationship with them. Our ancestors had a very ancient contract with these spirits: people gave offerings to the River spirit, and the River spirit provided people with a mode of communication, transportation, and trade. It provided water for the crops and community, it provided fish for the bellies of the families in its domain. Food, drink, wealth, sustenance on all levels; these are the gifts that well-honored River spirits can bestow. They also provide a measure of protection. Think of a river moat surrounding a castle, or a rushing river border of a town rendering it impregnable. In time, after you have developed a relationship with a given River spirit and have taken the time to consistently maintain ongoing offerings, the River may take those things that need to be cleansed. It washes away taint, and you may purify spiritually soiled items in its waters. (Be sure to gain its permission first.) Having a river at the border of one’s property can be particularly beneficial in staying under other people’s psychic radar. Its rushing waters absorb and diffuse negative energies, and if the River spirit is fond of its human neighbor, it can augment a practitioner’s house shields by helping to conceal them. Just as many spirit workers will put bowls of water around their house prior to seeing distressed clients (to absorb any jagged or negative energy or to confuse any malicious spirits), so too a river bordering one’s property can augment one’s personal household defenses. But first, right relationship must be developed.

Exercise: Offering to the River

Find a river where you can go and be relatively undisturbed. Decide in advance the offerings you are going to take when you introduce yourself. Clean water, wine, cornmeal, tobacco, blood meal, beer, and food are all good choices. (Make sure you remove the substance from any containers before offering it, as it is not a good offering if it destroys or damages the river ecosystem.) Cleanse yourself and go to the river. Sit down by the edge and introduce yourself respectfully. Express your desire to honor the River spirit. The name of the river is usually at least one of the names of the River spirit too, so it’s all right to use it. Carefully present the offerings. Spend time sitting by the river and connecting to it, listening for its voice, the touch of its presence. Be respectful. It would not be inappropriate to clean up any garbage in the vicinity. We also recommend making an offering in honor of the river to an ecological organization, like Scenic Hudson (www.scenichudson.org) or Save the Frogs (www.savethefrogs.com); frogs are integral to river environments and are, in many places, gravely endangered. The River spirit is usually deeply connected and responsible for all the creatures depending on its bounty. It is the caregiver for an entire ecosystem. Anything that you can do to help preserve those ecosystems is a good offering. It’s an act of alliance and friendship. Continue visiting the river regularly at least once a month for several months, and give the relationship time to develop. This is important: you’re not just priming a spirit to fulfill whatever request you have. You are developing a relationship that you will then be expected to properly maintain. Think of it as cultivating a friendship that, ideally, will be mutually beneficial and rewarding to you both, which is, in effect, what friendship is.

Be aware that River spirits are quite communicative not just with human beings but with each other as well—especially with each other. The Seine learned about Galina from La Lesse, for instance . . . essentially, they network as they flow into each other. Keep this in mind when working with them. Your reputation will travel.

Fen

Raven: I live on a property that is about one-quarter wetlands. It does make it difficult in the summer when the clouds of mosquitoes come—we make offerings to the Bat Mother, and ask her children to multiply and take care of them, and mostly we just stay inside when they are at their worst. We can’t build on those wetlands or camp on them or pasture animals. It isn’t even pleasant to go there . . . and that’s why wetlands are the epitome of land that guards itself from us humans, fiercely. The Wetlands spirit is, as you’d expect, foreboding and cranky. It is not friendly to me—or to any human being that I’ve met yet—but it will accept a certain amount of propitiation. It will also take things we don’t want, psychically tainted things, and suck them deep into its muddy depths.

Galina: Bogs were very sacred places to our Northern ancestors. They were places where deities were propitiated and offerings (weapons, gifts, sometimes even human sacrifices) were submerged. None of that, however, means that the bog or fen is a pleasant place. It isn’t. It isn’t in any way a place welcoming to humans, and that is as it should be. Human arrogance being what it is, it’s good for us to have some places where we cannot comfortably go. I respect the fen, the bog, and its spirit, but I do so at a distance. When I enter the perimeter of its territory, I do so respectfully, in order to leave offerings to the Gods, and I leave with equal respect. The bog is a place of silence, stillness, and death. The best gift we can give it is the gift of our protection. I honor the spirit of the fen by making donations to organizations dedicated to protecting the wetlands, my small way of trying to restore balance, of trying to undo the damage that human arrogance has wrought.

The wetlands are the place where Water mingles with Earth. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classifies wetlands into four categories: marshes, swamps, bogs, and fens. Marshes are filled with shallow water and weeds; swamps with deep water and woody trees; bogs with mosses and deep peat fed with rainwater; and fens are like bogs but fed with runoff water or underwater aquifers. In spite of being generally inhospitable to humans, all four types of wetlands are often buzzing with life. There’s a lot to eat in the wetlands if you’re not human, and in some cases even if you are. They are nurturing ecosystems even as they are filled with decay. It is this association with decay that gives wetlands their association with the Land of the Dead, and it is their liminal nature—neither fully earth nor water—that gives them their reputation as passages between the worlds.

Of all these words—which, EPA or no, originally meant the same thing—the oldest one is fen. This word goes back to at least 800 CE in most Germanic languages, and means exactly what it still means today. As such, this is the word we will use from now on in this section to describe any kind of wetlands. Fens go way back in prehistory as a place of sacrifice and mystery. Because the fen was both unpleasant and dangerous to live in, people considered it to be a taboo place, and what was taboo was powerful, an abode of the spirits. Sacrificial victims were bashed, strangled, stabbed, and thrown into fens to be given to the Gods when some terrible threat had to be averted. Weapons and other treasures were flung in as offerings as well. The fen’s reputation as a place where the veils between life and death are thin was helped neither by the occasional sucking bog that pulled in an unwary traveler nor by the bubbles of flammable gas that floated around and created the will-o’-the-wisp, or “corpse candle,” myths.

The “corpse candles” were considered to be faery lights by the Celts; they were called lambent light by the Norse and considered to be the lanterns that guarded the barrows of the dead. Either way, they could lead a person safely through the fen or straight into a sinkhole. One made it through a fen by being respectful and by propitiating the spirit. The Elder tree spirit is the guardian of the fen, as elders grow wild where there is ample water less than ten feet below the surface. If you want another spirit to broker an introduction to the Fen spirit, Dame Ellhorn is a good one to choose, as is the Alder spirit, as alders are also often found in wetland areas.

Exercise: Wooing the Fen

Fen spirits are notorious for being grim and suspicious of humans. Today, with the general threat to our wetlands by pollutants, the Fen spirit is even less likely to be immediately friendly. Start small. Leave the occasional offering in the fen, and ask nothing. (No spirit is ever obligated to help us, after all.) Then, after a while, make your offering and sit for a spell. Observe the life of the wetlands and appreciate it. Eventually you can work up to reaching out to the Fen spirit. Be warned that it is dark and swampy and may attempt to pull you in—if that happens, abandon the effort and leave. If it seems willing to tolerate you as long as you are courteous, you’re in luck. Don’t rush this process. Like many other aspects of spirit work, building a relationship with this spirit takes time, effort, and consistent attention. There are no shortcuts.

If you have an item that is filled with terrible energy (perhaps from some trauma) and cannot be cleaned enough to give away, you can take it to the fen and drown it in a sinkhole, with the permission of the Fen spirit. Keep in mind that you are not giving the nasty object to the Fen spirit as a gift. You are paying the Fen spirit to take it away to some Otherworld and transmute it into something else. In light of this, come with a sizeable offering as payment for this favor—food, drink, pretty stones, coins, and so forth. (In fact, whenever you go to a spirit or deity requesting a favor, it’s best to always go with full hands.)

Well

Raven: There are two wells in the basement of my house. One is a modern pump drilled far into the bedrock aquifer, like every other house in my rural town. It provides most of our water, but has little in the way of magical presence—perhaps it has not yet gained a spirit. The other is the old well that was dug when the original builders laid the fieldstone foundation of our house in the early nineteenth century, and it is—like many old wells—very much a gate to the Underworld. Like the story of Frau Holle, in which a young girl falls down a well and finds herself in a strange world, our old well is a pit that was once dug by hand, shovelful by shovelful. Within its dark depths a murky spirit dwells. I give it coins and candy, and scoop out the occasional drowned mouse or rat. (It seems to like to lure in small animals and drown them.) I ask it to be a drain for all the dark and negative things that may build up in my house, to suck them down its depths and give them back to the Earth. In return, I will never close up its dangerous hole, and I will respect its dark pull and leave that corner of the basement to the Well spirit.

Galina: As a child I was fascinated by old wells—and a little scared too. They’re potential doorways into other realms, and many have very strong and ancient spirits associated with them. They are powerful places through which to send messages to other realms. They can also provide a sinkhole for negative energies, which they carry away and transmute (though to do this, you really need to have a working relationship with the Well spirit). I’ve also found that their spirits are usually willing to communicate with humans and to carry messages, but in return, I always leave offerings and occasionally small gifts. I don’t have a well on my property now, but for those of you who do, it’s an excellent place to begin exploring the spirits of Water precisely because Well spirits are often fairly well-disposed toward people.

Springs were the first natural source of water that our ancestors built their villages around, and there are many old Celtic and Norse demigoddesses of natural springs, including hot springs or baths. The Greeks called them nereids, the guardian of springs. Wells have a long history of magical associations and holiness, which still hang on in the form of the wishing well, which accepts offerings of pennies in exchange for granting requests. Supposedly, creatures as diverse as nymphs, naiads, brownies, trolls, and frog spirits lived in wells and could either cause trouble (breaking buckets and the like) or give blessings. Goddesses frequently associated with wells were the Norse goddess Hela (as they were seen as doors into her Underworld), the Roman Sulis Minerva, the Germanic Alateivia, and the Irish Brigid, whose holy well at Glastonbury still pours out “red waters” rich in iron. The sacred water of the Glastonbury well was recommended for all sorts of ailments; one wonders if anemia was common in those days.

All wells have a spirit. A new well may have to wait a while to gain its guardian spirit, but if you move into a place with an existing well, it behooves you to make friends with the Well spirit by giving it a gift, traditionally a glass marble. Don’t put in any marbles with the iridescent coating on them; it’s not good for drinking water. Ask the Well spirit to be plentiful and clean and give your family its life-giving waters.

Exercise: Well Divination

Well divination is a traditional form of divination with water. It’s also one of those “magical” things that require the aid of the Well spirit to work at all. If you tried it without first contacting or propitiating the Well spirit and it worked, it was probably because the spirit decided that it liked you. Instead of hoping blindly, introduce yourself and be a real spirit worker, not merely a superstitious peasant.

If there is a well on your property or on property near to where you live that you have access to and that you will be living around for a while, go to the well and contact the spirit. Start with a few marbles, and wait for a feeling of pleasure to emanate from the well. Once you’ve got that, throw in a little food and drink, and then wait a couple of days. Then ask the Well spirit to answer a question for you, generally a “Will I get this?” question. Wait for some communication that tells you that it is acquiescing, and then throw in a small object that symbolizes what you want to come into your life. Toss down a bucket and get a bucketful of water, and check for the item. If it didn’t come up with the bucket, try again the next day. If you don’t get it back in three days of bucketing, you’re not getting what you wanted.

Lake

Raven: I live between two small lakes, both with lazy, accepting spirits. The smaller lake is all fishing grounds and lily pads, and its spirit is so sleepy that it’s hard to even get it out of bed, so to speak. She will sometimes come out in curiosity when I bring a new student over to “meet the Lake spirit” as an exercise, but generally she barely opens an eye when I call. The slightly larger lake has a spirit who is serene and accepting, and she knows many of the local spirits. I’ve done many a working standing up to my chest in that lake, singing with my arms outstretched, and the Lake spirit was easygoing and fine with whatever I did. A simple offering would be enough, and nothing fancy was required. However, I’ve met Lake spirits who were far less accommodating. Some were surly, some even dangerous. There’s one lake I know of that has a history of people accidentally driving off a pier and drowning themselves; its spirit is lethal and calls them in to their deaths.

Galina: Lake spirits always seem so vast to me, so immense, even when the lake itself isn’t that large. My adopted mom was Swiss, and two years before she died, she took me all over Switzerland. I first became aware of the unique presence of Lake spirits during that trip, specifically with Lake Lucerne. They are magical beings, and it always seems to me that they can easily serve as gateways for journey work, passages between the world, doorways through which one can path walk. Some are more interested in interacting with humans than others, but, as with any group of beings, that is only to be expected. They also seem very much our elders, and I caution, as always, that they must be treated with respect. In fact, you’ll notice that throughout this book, we consistently approach the Elemental Powers as though they are our superiors and elders. In many respects, they are. They are our eldest ancestors, ancient, intelligent, and never, ever human.

Lake spirits were referred to as sjörar in Old Norse, and as mentioned above, they can be very different in personality. Some like people. Some ignore them. Some eat them. If you are working with spirits and you plan to take a boat out onto a lake for any reason, it’s best to propitiate the Lake spirit first. Throwing them a small, shiny trinket or sharing your food and drink are most useful. If you’re going fishing, it’s especially important, because you can get them to help with guiding a few fish to your hook . . . and if the local spirits notice a spirit worker blithely ignoring them, they may be offended in a way that they wouldn’t be with an “ordinary” person, and you may be sure that you won’t get any fish at all. (In fact, in the worst case scenario, you won’t get any fish, your boat will be damaged, and you will be hurt. Do not take these spirits for granted.)

In many places in the world, old legends (or modern tall tales) speak of the spirits of specific lakes. In the Pacific Northwest, the spirit of Lake Chelan is a great serpent who was propitiated by the local Native Americans, and the spirit of Moses Lake is supposedly a spotted female goblin. One small lake near Berlin, Germany, has a legend of a Bull spirit who emerged periodically to help plow or wreak havoc. The spirit of Van Lake in Carmarthen, Wales, supposedly emerged once in female form and took a human husband, until he ceased to entertain her and she returned to her lake. It’s always good to learn the folklore surrounding a specific lake, because some Lake spirits, like the rusalki of Russian lore, delight in tricking and sometimes harming hapless individuals who fall into their clutches. It’s always good to know if you should follow some protocol or avoid specific things; often that knowledge is locked away in our folklore and faery tales. Water is the most temperamental of the Elemental Powers and, in many respects, the most alluring.

Exercise: Lake Healing

Sjörar can be incredibly healing entities, but you have to find the right one who is willing to help you in that way. This may require going around to different local lakes and ponds, making offerings, and assessing the nature of each Lake or Pond spirit and its willingness to be gentle with you. If you find a sjöra who has a gentle and human-friendly personality, and who seems willing to connect with you, ask it to give you a healing. Generally, during communications, a Lake spirit will come right up to the edge of the water where you’re standing—if you have the Sight, you can see it rising out of the water.

As with Ocean spirits, don’t put any offering into the water that the local aquatic wildlife can’t eat, and pick up any debris or trash that has accumulated. Also similarly, start by singing to the spirit, and walk into the lake as you sing. If you are a good enough swimmer to float on your back, this is the best way to receive a healing. If you aren’t, or if you’re not physically able, go into the shallows to a place where you can sit down on the lake bottom with the water coming up to your neck. If you can find a tree to lean against so that you can relax, this is useful; if not, you might consider bringing in something that will not be damaged by submersion that you can lean against, such as a legless chair or BackJack. The idea is for you to be at least partially relaxed and have only your face out of the water.

Ask the Lake spirit to help with whatever healing you need. Close your eyes and relax in whatever position works for you. Hum quietly. Keep humming until you go into a light trance, and stay there until the process feels done. That’s a hard state to qualify in writing, but we’ve noticed that usually when the spirit is finished and withdraws, there is a sudden jolting return to full awareness of one’s surroundings. The senses seem particularly sharp, and sensory input is surprisingly loud and bright. Leave the lake, give your final thanks (and perhaps a final offering), and return home. Water healings are often subtle and may take some time to show up, but water—because it is all throughout your body—is capable of making deep systemic changes that will affect the whole body or unconscious mind.

Waterfall

Galina: Waterfalls are places of power. This was one of the first lessons I learned when exploring the magic of water. When I was recovering from being “elfshot,” a terrible form of magical attack that damages the joints and causes tremendous pain, I had the opportunity to travel (to Iceland, of all places). In a national park I was able to walk and stand beneath a waterfall, and the tremendous cleansing power of its spirit was just wonderful and wonderfully healing. To stand in a rush of power such as this family of spirits possesses by their very nature is a tremendously holy thing. I have also learned that there is occasionally some credence to faery tales of trolls living near waterfalls and under bridges. A small waterfall courses down next to a bridge near the home of one of my colleagues, and the spirit there translates to my senses as “troll.” I have not spoken to him. He does not seem to be particularly friendly toward humans, and I always sense that he wants to be left alone in his little tiny bit of territory. I honor that wish.

Raven: One of the first sacred places that I ever had a close alliance with was a local waterfall in a forest park between my home and my high school. I never minded walking to and from school in any weather because I could go through the woods and see the waterfall. It was about a six-foot drop across a thirty-foot-wide river, and there was a space behind it where—if you were brave enough, which I rarely was—you could slide behind the waterfall and stand against the wet stone, watching the fall less than a foot from your face. I would throw offerings behind it or (on brave days) scale down the bank and slide them into crevices behind the falls with my outstretched arm. I knew the spirit of the falls, who was different from the general spirit of the long Nashua River. I talked to him, and he gave me courage to face the brutality of daily torment as a “nerd” in public school.

One day, the paths were all blocked off and I could hear the sound of machinery. I later found that part of the public park had been leased to a power company, which turned it into a hydroelectric plant. I know that hydro is a cleaner power source than fossil fuels, and I understand the need, but they tore out the whole waterfall and built a plant across it. The River spirit, being a thing of many miles, managed to do all right. The Fall spirit did not survive. Where once I could see a furiously glowing, roaring blue spot when I looked down on the park from the overhanging hill with my Sight, now there was only blackness. My friends and I sat up on the hill at night, lighting candles and holding vigil for some hours, mourning the death of the Fall spirit. It was the first time I understood that spirit friends could die.

Up until that time, the park had been a friendly place where families could go in peace. Crime happened right outside it, where it met the edges of civilization. I remember sitting on the hill, holding my candle, and feeling the Forest spirit’s wrath. I wondered then about the relationship of that small patch of forest—whose spirit I was aware of even if I’d never spoken to her—to the waterfall in her center. I could feel that she reverberated with a fury that seemed to creep into every tree and make it creak with menace. I learned palpably on that night that no spirit of Nature lives in isolation without relationship to the others around it, even if we only know them singly, like the mail carrier who may have a spouse and children we will never see. Was the forest spirit his lover, his mother, his friend? Was I anthropomorphizing even to make those comparisons? I may never know, but after that the remaining parts of the park seemed unwelcoming to everyone. I could never bear to walk through it again, but I was told that the outskirts of the park became a place of muggings and gang activity, and children were kept from its paths. I will always believe that the Forest spirit took her vengeance on humans for the death of the waterfall.

The term for Waterfall spirits in Old Norse is forskarlar, which literally means “falls-men.” It was believed that they lived behind the falls in rich caves that no one could find unless invited. Searching for the home of the forskarlar on your own would yield only hard, wet cliff. Water faeries of all sorts were said to be drawn to waterfalls, and their reputation was one of both beauty and danger, which is true. Waterfall spirits are both beautiful and aggressive. It’s said that the roaring of the falls is their voice, constantly singing and shouting their joy and rage. Waterfall spirits are givers of joy and courage. The smaller the waterfall, the more it’s about joy; the bigger the fall, the more likely the spirit is to be aggressive and more interested in granting you similar attributes. Waterfalls possess enormous energy; the only time that they stop is when the river dries up (if it’s a small stream) or when winter in cold climates freezes everything solid. Even then, the frozen falls convey a sense of motion, and while the forskarlar may drift toward slumber, they are not entirely hibernating.

Exercise: Waterfall Courage

If you are timid and hesitant, or facing a huge and ugly situation that threatens to overcome you emotionally, and you live near a waterfall, see if you can make friends with the spirit. Visit the waterfall for several days running, and give it some kind of offering—perhaps sing to it or toss a cup of good liquor at the falls. If you can reach behind it safely, you can wedge something into the rocks behind the flowing water. (Obviously, if the waterfall is too large and powerful to approach safely, be respectful of its power and stay a safe distance away. Forskarlar are not the most gentle of Water spirits.) It may take a while to get its attention; these are very focused spirits who ignore most humans.

If you get its attention and make an alliance, ask it what its price is for a shot of courage. Be prepared to meet that price, whatever it is. When you’ve paid (and come back, if that’s necessary), sit down by the waterfall and ground and center. Lower your shields and open yourself to the pounding rhythm of the falls. Concentrate on its rhythm. Let the sound penetrate you entirely; synchronize your breathing to it, and hear it pounding in your blood. When it feels done—for “done,” read the Lake exercise—thank the Waterfall spirit and go forth on your quest.

Rain

Raven: One of the first folk divination methods I ever learned was rain divination. I read it in a book of folk customs and tried it the next time I baked cookies. To do it, you wait until a good rainstorm, sprinkle a light coating of flour on a tray, stand under the eaves, ask your question of the Rain spirit, and then run out into the rain with the tray. I generally stayed out long enough to spin around three times and then ran back inside. I then looked at the pattern formed by the raindrops in the flour. I’d blur my eyes and see if any image formed—and sometimes it did. It’s the kind of divination that makes no sense unless you understand that it is the spirit’s help you’re calling on.

Galina: Rain spirits both delight and annoy me. My primary elemental ally is Fire, and I’m afraid the Rain spirits take full advantage of the fact that I have little standing in their world. They are playful and quixotic like that, but not mean-spirited. I suspect part of their readiness to tease me lies in the fact that I really hate to get wet! Still, they are delightful spirits. It’s always been my sense that they actually really like to communicate with humans, which makes them an excellent family of spirits with which to begin one’s explorations of the Blue World if, like me, working with the wisdom of Water comes hard. Rain spirits are also quite benevolent, and their water captured during rainstorms can later be used to cleanse and purify one’s head, person, and even home. They’re chatty and friendly spirits in general, though one should not underestimate their power because of that. They are one of our earliest elemental spirit allies.

Rain is a Water spirit who has learned to fly with the Air spirits . . . or, more specifically, who has been snatched up by them and carried through the air to enrich the Earth or fill the inland streams. Just as some people are not wholly one thing or another but carry within them near-equal characteristics of both, Rain spirits are just a little more Water than Air, enough to list them in the Blue World chapter, but they are close kin with the denizens of the White World, the storm and blizzard and whirlwind, with whom they dance and cavort. Rain spirits are short-lived—they are born again each time out of the ocean or large lakes, but sometimes live only the length of one rainfall and then dissipate when the storm ends.

Rain spirits must be some of the most propitiated spirits in history, taking a place perhaps only after the Sun and Death herself. When Paleolithic hunter-gatherer-herder culture gave way to Neolithic agriculture, an adequate supply of alternating Sun and rain was absolutely necessary. A drought could kill a whole tribe or village, so people all over the world did their rain dances when dryness threatened to do in all the crops. Part of a shaman’s job was to lead the propitiation of the Rain spirits (or in some cases, do it themselves), because calling rain is not about controlling the elements or ordering them about, but asking them as allies and perhaps even coaxing or entertaining them. Any spirit associated with weather is going to be fairly capricious and interested in entertainment. It’s really quite a ridiculous fallacy to suppose that we can ever control, bind, or otherwise own any elemental spirit, no matter what fantasy fiction and certain books on “magick” might tell you. Northern Tradition shamans and shamanic practitioners learn to coax them, propitiate them, develop a relationship with them, and ultimately, hopefully, ally with them. It is a relationship that can seem like it is between equals, but it is actually always between limited humans and immense but generally well-disposed powers.

You must remember when working with the Rain spirits—as opposed to the Storm or Wind spirits—that it is a blessing to get wet. Doing it from underneath a porch or an overhang is an insult. To work with the spirit of a particular rainstorm, go out and stand in the water. Take your clothes off if you’re worried about getting soaked. Like all Water spirits, Rain spirits like to be sung to, but dancing in the rain works just as well. Dance for the spirit and ask if it—and its kin, which is most important, because this one spirit may not last long, but its kin will hear and know—will be your friend and ally. Raven leaves drink out for the Rain spirits, in a cup filled to only a hair’s breadth below the brim, so that the rain can fall into and overflow the cup. Galina routinely goes outside during the rain and pours out offerings, allowing the rain to dance and play in them as they flow.

Exercise: Making a Rain Stone

Using a rain stone is an old folk tradition for bringing rain. This exercise will teach you how to make one. Find a fist-size stone that feels like it has an affinity for Rain spirits. (To find out, go sit in the rain with the stone and sing, and see if the stone gives off a gentle, pleasant “vibration” on a subtle level.) If you find the stone in the ground, wash off the dirt and hold it in your hands. Tell the Stone spirit that you are making it an emissary to the Rain spirit. Then set it in a high place—like the edge of a roof—and leave it there for nine rainstorms, whether light passing showers or heavy downpours. (The stone must actually get fairly wet in order for the rainstorm to count.) If you live in the desert, you will either need to wait a long time to collect your nine rainstorms, or send the stone to the roof of a friend who lives in a wetter climate. During each shower, put out a cup or bowl and gather some rainwater, which should be saved in a bottle or jug. Place the stone in a box painted light blue, and wait until the rain is needed, then take it out and put it in a bowl. Remind it of its duty to call the Rain spirits and intercede for you. Pour the saved rainwater over the stone, put the bowl aside, and wait. If the rain stone does its duty, you will have rain within a day’s cycle. If it can’t, put it back out in the ground and find another rain stone.

Blood

Galina: Blood is integral to so much of the work that I do. It must be blood consciously drawn, not menstrual blood. (That is waste blood—blood that would have nourished life but is discarded; blood that takes no personal sacrifice or effort to shed. Biology is not sacrifice, and there is as much power in the intent and act of sacrifice as in the blood itself.) It must be drawn with Intent. I keep diabetic lancets in my kit at all times, and also carry a blade that, in a pinch, could be used to prick a finger. The amount isn’t what’s important. A single drop drawn with Intent will do. Blood is the most precious substance that can be given. It contains not just the essence of who you are now, but a link to every single one of your ancestors. It places you within the wyrd. It provides context for who you are and where you are at any given moment. It announces you: who you were before this life, who you are, who you have the potential to become. It is the most binding thing you can give.

I work regularly with the runes. This family of spirits expects regular offerings of blood. It cements the bond between the rune worker and this family of spirits. To give one’s blood to a spirit is to give that spirit a key to unlocking any shield you might cast. It is an act of trust and commitment. Because of the power contained within the blood, giving my blood to the runes is ample payment: it is the equivalent of paying a mercenary in solid gold. They feast upon the power contained there and in return partner with me in the work that I do. I also routinely give my blood in offering to Odin. It is a re-recognition of the bond and commitment that already exists between us. Our Gods and spirits are not squeamish. At some point, every Northern Tradition shaman or shamanic practitioner is going to have to get used to the idea of shedding a bit of his or her own blood now and again.

I have also found that for it to be the best sacrifice possible, the body from which it comes must be honored. We must value that which we give. Maegen (personal might) is carried through the blood. This is in part because of the inevitable connection to our ancestors inherent in this substance. Our veins are redolent with power. The quality of this energy is affected by how well we maintain our physical vessels. I learned, as someone who regularly works with blood magic, that far from dismissing the contribution of the body, it required that I learn to honor the body wisely and well.

Raven: Shedding blood is part of the job for me. My kit contains a bag of diabetic lancets, of course, but I have also my ceremonial belt, sewn with brass disks that have very sharp edges. If I need blood suddenly to make an oath or propitiate a spirit, I can have it instantly. It is my spiritual essence, complete with a little life force as a gift. I’ve also found that when you start propitiating in this way, you may be in the middle of doing some ritual or magical working (or perhaps just handling a natural object that could be made sacred, like a tree branch), and you suddenly “accidentally” cut yourself. I take that as a sign that Someone wants an offering now, and I don’t get angry or upset over it. Actually, these days, I tend to see any accidental shedding of blood as a sign that Someone wants Something done. Even if it’s just a hangnail or a cheese grater scraping my knuckles, I’ll ask if there’s something that I should do with this blood. If nothing comes up immediately, I’ll save it—perhaps on a bit of cloth, which is allowed to dry in a safe place—because more often than not something will happen later that week that requires a bit of dried blood to throw in a fire, another way it can be offered. I encourage spirit workers of all sorts to do this as well.

Blood is the ocean within us. When the red iron is removed, its constituents are remarkably like saltwater. It flows through us in rivers, collects in the great four-part sea of our hearts, sweeps nutrients through us, and brings waste back to be collected and removed. We are mostly made of water, and most of that water is in the form of blood. We are walking fountains of salty blood in the shape of human beings. Since the earliest times, blood has been a sacred substance. We give our own blood in offering, and it unites us with our ancestors in this great Work that we are engaged in, this restoration of our sacred, sundered traditions. Sacrifice is essential to what we do.

The Northern Tradition in general is said to be bloodier than other ancient faiths and more preoccupied with death and violence. This may or may not be true, as many ancient religions have been revived in a very euphemistic way with all their modernly unacceptable practices carefully covered up and denied. It may just be that few of the individuals who have revived Northern Tradition religion are heavily invested in making it seem unbloody or nonviolent. In any case, there is no question that the shamanic side of the Northern religion is fairly violent and bloody. Our Gods and spirits are far less willing to sanitize the relationship between life and death, blood and power, and the importance of sacrifice. We are not allowed the indulgence of contemporary squeamishness or sentiment. We’re expected to get our hands dirty, because if we can’t, we have no right to be doing what we’re doing. If we can’t connect ourselves in actual practice to the struggles of our ancestors, the cycle of life and death, sustenance and sacrifice, without turning away, we can’t do this job properly.

When most people cut their own runes, they traditionally smear blood into the carving in order to charge it, and that’s only one of the many ways that they will use it. As shamans and shamanic practitioners, we’ve learned that our blood is one of the best sacrifices to a god, although one shouldn’t necessarily hand it over to any spirit. While many Gods are fine with food or alcohol or the promise of some deed in their name, some of them want your blood, period. There is no way to get through spirit work in this tradition without learning to regularly shed a bit of blood for sacrifice. Your blood is your life force, and a bit of the code that built you. It’s the most personal thing you have to offer. Spirits like that. However, there’s no reason to open your veins every time you want to show appreciation. A little of the powerful red stuff goes a long way. We use alcohol swabs and diabetic lancets, easily available at almost any pharmacy, for blood magic; it’s clean, safe, and a drop or two is enough.

This may seem harsh, but we believe that there is no place for squeamishness in a spirit worker, especially when it comes to blood. This is a sacred and powerful substance, and we should never have an attitude of revulsion toward it. Yes, one could speculate that the fainting or fleeing reaction of some ordinary folk to blood might be considered a spiritual remnant of avoiding that which is taboo (what the Germanic and Norse people called wih or ve, too sacred for ordinary people to touch) but shamans and shamanic practitioners aren’t ordinary. We are technicians of the sacred. We are carriers of the holy with all the responsibilities and binding obligations that entails. The proper attitude of a spirit worker toward blood should at the very least be the attitude you’d take toward a horn of consecrated mead. It is powerful, it is beautiful, it is the source of Life. To let disgust color your interactions with it is blasphemous, and you should work on purging that attitude at once.

Exercise: Ancestor Stone

You will need an alcohol swab, a stone, and a diabetic lancet for this exercise. Find a stone, preferably from where you were born, but it could be from your current home. It doesn’t have to be store bought; in fact, it’s better if it wasn’t. It should be a good, simple, solid rock, about the size of your fist. Choose a stone that you feel is willing to work with you in this capacity. As you will learn in the Black World chapter, honoring the ancestors and working with them regularly is a tremendously important part of Northern Tradition practice. Many ancestor workers begin their ancestor rites by calling to their dead. This is sometimes done by tapping or pounding on a special rock with a stick. This is a good tool, symbol, and piece of shamanic technology by which to begin that process.

Find your stone and clean it off. Take a cleansing bath and set up your space in whatever way is comfortable for you prior to a small ritual working. Quietly hold the stone in your hands, and call to your ancestors. Tell them that you are ready to begin honoring them and would like to know how to do that well. Take an alcohol swab and wipe off your finger. Then prick your finger with a diabetic lancet. Smear the blood on the stone in the shape of the rune Othala. This is the rune of ancestral connections, odal land—the old word for “land”—inheritance. Speak, chant, or sing the name of this rune over and over. It is about a solid, strong, ancestral house. If you have to prick your finger again, go ahead and do that, but make sure that Othala is clearly delineated on the stone itself. Offer this to your ancestors. Tap on it with a stick (this does not need to be large; I know of one woman who uses a pretty chopstick), and call to them. Place this on your altar to be used in ancestral workings in the future.

Craft: Net Making

Once you’ve made an alliance with a Water spirit of some sort (or more than one), you can make a fishing-net altar as a focus for them. It’s okay to fold items for different sorts of Water spirits into one net altar, although if you work very intensively with them you might want to make more than one. A net altar doesn’t have to be as large as a traditional fishing net—it can be small, perhaps a foot square if you don’t have much room, and you can hang it from the ceiling or wall. Larger items can be put directly into the net, while smaller ones that might slip through the holes can be tied on to hang like a mobile. You can add Water-spirit houses, small bottles of water, ribbons in watery colors, shells, seaweed, sea floats, driftwood, river stones, bits of water-tumbled glass, dried or sculpted fish, or whatever other physical objects are connected to your Water spirits and help you form a bond with them.

The fishing-net altar also creates a bond with ancestors who fished for their sustenance and asks for their blessing on our dealings with these spirits. It is also a piece of knot magic, in which the energy is tied, knot after knot, into the piece of work. It’s good practice in creating a solid focus for the energy of a very slippery and changeable element.

Exercise: Net Altar

Start with the cordage. If you’re a spinner, you can make your own cordage out of any fiber—just spin thickly and tightly and then ply about three strands together. While you spin, commune with Water spirits. Spinning the cord while sitting by a body of water can be a good way to do this, or at least have a bowl of water from a natural source near you. If you decide to buy cordage, try to find natural fiber twine—hemp, cotton, tow flax, or some other plant-based fiber. Decide how long you want the net to be, and add about a foot to that estimation. Then cut strands of this length. How many? Assuming that your strands will be fastened about an inch apart, calculate how wide you’ll want it and cut that many.

You’ll want to acquire two sticks that are a few inches longer than your width measurement, and another stick for a shuttle (which can be a yardstick or other flat stick) about the same length. Its width should be approximately the ideal width of the spaces between knots. For example, if you want a net that is 30 inches long by 20 inches wide, with spaces of about 2 inches between knots, you’ll cut twenty-one strands (twenty plus one at the far end) that are 42 inches long (length plus a foot of extra length for knotting and tying to the poles), find two sticks that are around 24 inches long, and a shuttle stick that is around 24 inches by 2 inches.

Tie the strings to the first pole, about an inch apart. Lay it on the ground or hang it on a wall with the strings hanging down, whichever is a more comfortable position for you to work. Work the shuttle stick in between the strings just below the end stick, going over every other string and under every other string. Then tie every two strings (one “over” string and one “under” string) together in a simple overhand knot. If there is an odd number of strings and one doesn’t get knotted, that’s all right—it will be knotted on the next round. Remove the shuttle and put it through under the knots. This time, the strings that were “over” will be “under” and vice versa. Knot the strings to their neighbors on the other side—if you knotted string 1 and 2 on the first round, on this round you knot 2 and 3, and 1 is left alone. Repeat these steps over and over, moving down the strings until you have about half a foot left. You’ll see the characteristic diamond-shape fishnet pattern emerge as you work.

As you knot, put your Intent and energy into the net. If you have a water chant or short song, repeat it each time you tie a knot, or tie a knot on every line or stanza or the like. You’re literally weaving the energy of the Water spirits into the net. Tie off the strings to the second stick, hang your net from the ceiling or wall, and tie you objects onto it. Ideally, keep a bowl of water on a table underneath it. This will provide a marvelous focus for when you need to contact the Water spirits but can’t be outside to find bodies of natural water (for example, during a cold winter when lakes are iced over and the spirit is dormant).

7

The Red World

Fire

Hail to the spark that wakes all our nerves,

Hail to the warmth of the bonfire between us,

Hail to the flame that tempers the steel,

Hail to the song of the pot on the coals,

Hail to the embers that light our way home.

Fire was fundamental to our ancestors. Without it, they never would have survived the harsh northern winters. They’d have had no way to cook their food, warm their homes, or develop crafts like pottery, glassblowing, and metalwork. Fire brought health, warmth, beauty, and craft into their lives. It also, as all the Elemental Powers do, carried with it the potential for danger and harm. Most of all, fire demanded and continues to demand respect.

Fire is one of the most difficult elements to write about, at least for us. While this element is intensely quixotic, it is also passionate and demands certain protocols. It doesn’t much care for the static cage of the written word, something we’ll discuss a little further into this chapter. It is one of the two most ancient of elements, and its nature is that of heat, force, creation through destruction, movement, and beauty. It is never, ever still.

We did not steal fire. In the Northern Tradition, fire is part of our world, essential and integral to its creation. It is a force that enables us to resist entropy. The first thing to know about working with Fire is that it demands acknowledgment. More than any other Elemental Power that we have encountered, honored, and learned from, Fire wants recognition of the debt we owe it, recognition of its majesty and tremendous power. While we refer to learning its medicine as Fire “mastery,” there is no mastering Fire. We do not control it. We partner with it at its whim, and that whim is based on our willingness to show the proper respect. As a student of mine once put it, crudely but accurately, don’t fuck with Fire.

The second thing to know is that Fire is alive. It will not be bound. It will not be contained or controlled. It might allow you to think that it has been caged, but if it does so, it does this either for its own amusement or to bide its time until it can slip whatever bonds you have tried to place on it. Then it will laugh and merrily devour your world.

Making Fire

Galina: The very first thing I ever learned about fire work was how to make fire from flint and steel. As I was learning more and more about what being Odin’s shaman meant, I was pushed to commit to gaining what we call Fire mastery, knowledge and practical skill in application of an element’s mysteries and power, its “medicine.” The very first step to doing so, in our tradition, is learning to make fire yourself by some ancient method. This is in part an homage to our ancestors. Without fire, they would never have survived for us to be here today. Fire was essential to their world, to their health, to the growth of civilization. Think about all the things we have that are dependent on some type of fire: cooking, plumbing, central heating, metalworking, glass shaping, electricity. Fire enabled our ancestors to tame their world and craft something better for their children. I was required as part of my training to go outside when it was windy and cold and make a bonfire using flint and steel. It’s not easy, and struggling against the wind while engaged in a battle of endurance with the biting cold gave me some small, infinitesimal taste of what our ancestors must have gone through in the frozen North. The sense of triumph when the char cloth flares into flame, and then again when the tinder starts crackling, is an amazing thing. My tribe will never freeze.

Raven: In Siberia, new shamans are given firemaking tools that have been blessed by their teachers and the spirits. The first time I read about that, I was seized with a fit of wistfulness. I had only the spirits and no human teachers in my attempts to reanimate this long-dead shamanic tradition. Just for a moment, I wished that I’d had an elder to acknowledge me and give me sacred tools. Then I shrugged it off and went on with my life.

Then I visited a dear friend I considered family, a woman whose husband—whom I’d long admired—had died a few years earlier. She was still giving away his things, and out of nowhere she brought out his firemaking kit and asked me if I wanted it. It contained copies he’d made of copper tools from a kit found in a Norse burial, and his children were not interested in it. Out of nowhere, what I’d wanted had come to me. The shaman who served the Goddess of Death clutched the sacred firemaking tools, given to me by a dead loved one, and was grateful. I went home and learned how to make fire, in the name of the ancestors and all my dead.

Exercise: Your Tribe Must Not Freeze

Before you can work with fire or commit to learning its mysteries in this tradition, you must learn to make fire with flint and steel. So much of fire work is about communication, particularly from master to apprentice and teacher to student. That is the nature of fire, because each fire is part of the same fire. Each fire kindled is part of that first, ancient fire that sustained our ancestors, part of the fires bubbling and crackling away in Muspelheim, part of that great conflagration at the beginning of our time. Each fire is a powerful, living connection to every person who ever gazed into its beauty or depended on its mercy or fled from its might. It is, in a way, our most ancient, eldest ancestor. Communicating its mysteries face-to-face taps in to a deeper lever of its medicine. It allows us to connect in a very fundamental way to that unbroken thread of knowledge and experience stretching all the way back to the time of the beginning. So if you are able, find someone to teach you how to do this in person.

It is not difficult to learn to make fire. You must have the following tools: A piece of flint large enough to be held comfortably in the hand, a steel fire striker (we recommend
www.ragweedforge.com; he usually has a nice selection), char cloth, and tinder (birchbark, cotton balls, bits of paper, etc.).

This method works because in striking the flint, small flakes of steel are knocked off and heated. It’s friction, basically. It can take some practice to catch the spark on the char cloth, and even more to get out of the habit of holding back. You really have to strike as though you mean it. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Before you try to make fire, you must have char cloth to catch the spark. This is cloth that has been specially prepared so that it is will catch and hold a spark, without either putting it out or going up in flames. To make char cloth, we recommend getting a small tin box. Altoids tins are perfect for this. Pack it tightly with small squares of cotton or linen cloth—it must be natural fabric. Untreated cotton works best, and we recommend gun-cleaning cotton cloths. Punch a hole in the top with a nail. Place it in a fire for fifteen minutes. Galina just puts it right on top of the burner on her gas stove; Raven puts his in the firebox of his woodstove. The box will smoke a lot. Be sure to use kitchen tongs to remove it, as it will be quite hot. Let it cool completely, then open it and test out your now blackened cloth. You have just made char cloth.

When you have your flint and steel striker, your aim is to strike a small spark onto a piece of char cloth. Strike downward hard, at roughly a 45-degree angle. Don’t be afraid of it. Sometimes there is a tendency to hold back on the strike, but you really need to put some strength into it. It may take some time to get the hang of it, but keep practicing. Some people hold the striker in one hand and strike the flint down on the striker, while others hold the flint and strike down with the steel striker. It doesn’t matter which way you choose.

Once you catch the spark on the char cloth, enfold it in your tinder and blow. (Cotton balls make good tinder, believe it or not, and we both carry some in our firemaking kits.) Keep blowing, making sure the tinder is lightly enfolding the char cloth so that air can pass through. It will flare up pretty quickly into flame, and when it does, you put that in the rest of your prepared tinder and fan it into a fire, slowly adding sticks, twigs, and eventually wood. To practice this effectively, you need only to get to the point where the char, enfolded in tinder, becomes flame. You can do that even if you live in an apartment. Just be sure to have a fire extinguisher and water at the ready. Fire is tricky and mischievous and high-spirited, and it will escape you if it can.

Galina keeps a portable brazier at her house for lighting small sacred fires. Raven has a fire pit in his back field for large bonfires. If sacred fire is required, flint and steel is the best way to go about making it (using a fire bow is also a good choice). It is perfectly acceptable to light a candle from your tinder so you don’t have to go through the trouble of kindling flame a second time should your tinder go out. Camping candles that are enclosed to protect against the wind are best. Carrying a few candle stubs with your kit is a good idea. It’s the final lesson of fire survival: as soon as you have fire, you make more fire, just in case.

Need Fire

Galina: I haven’t learned how to use a fire bow yet, largely due to lack of opportunity to learn. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time, however. In using a fire bow, we’re tapping in to the medicine of the rune Nauthiz: grueling, desperate need. I can’t speak about the fire bow from experience, but I can speak about Nauthiz. This rune’s power is all about necessity, the horrible, severe necessity that overrides any moral impetus in favor of survival. It is endurance in its most brutal form. It is a fire kindled out of pure desperation. This is the crash survivor who must eat the bodies of his fellow dead in order to survive until rescue. It’s the refugee who endures countless horrors to get her children to freedom. It is that internal fortitude and resiliency beyond mere strength that we sometimes have to summon forth in times of great crisis. It is need, utter, implacable, undeniable, terrible need. This is the flame that devours, that rages like the forest fire tearing down and scouring clean everything in its path.

Raven: Two forms of firemaking are older than flint and steel: fire bow (also called bow drill), which is echoed in the shape of the rune Nauthiz, and the even older fire twirl, which is echoed in the shape of the rune Cweorth, the funeral pyre. Funeral fires were always lit with the older method, out of respect for the ancestors. And if you thought that the sense of elation you got from making fire with flint and steel was amazing, wait until you’ve quite literally rubbed sticks together and made fire.

This exercise is optional, and something of an advanced version of the last one, but fire made this way has a special nature that is different from matches or even flint and steel—it is lit and used for rituals addressing a dire need, an emergency; it’s the absolute last resort when you don’t know what to do. It is the way that you ask the spirit of Fire to burn away the obstacle when everything else has failed. You never know when you will be in that situation, so it might be worth it to learn this skill.

Exercise: Fire Bow and Fire Twirl

These two arts will take you a lot longer to learn than flint and steel. It may take up to a year of practice to get either of them right, and that’s why it’s best to be trained by someone knowledgeable. However, if you haven’t got anyone and you’re on your own, there’s no harm in trying it yourself.

First you need to find the right wood. It should be well dried and ideally wild gathered, not anything pressure treated from the lumberyard. You want a wood that will make good coals, such as willow, aspen, or balsam fir. The traditional bow-drill wood of the subarctic was spruce.

There are four parts to a fire bow. Most people refer to them as the Board, the Spindle, the Handhold, and the Bow. We call them the Earth, the Tree, the Sky, and the Wind. A fire twirl—the older version—has only the Earth and the Tree, with the hands spinning the upright piece in a hole in the horizontal piece until friction creates enough heat to make fire. If you are called to start out this way, you can do so, but it will take very strong hands and wrists and forearms, and a great deal of endurance. The fire bow allows people with less arm endurance to master the technique.

For the Earth, or Board, you want a branch about as thick as your wrist and cut to about a foot long. Use a section that is not full of knots or branches. Split it lengthwise three ways with an axe, and place the middle section—which should be split down to a small flattish board about an inch in width—out in the Sun to dry for a couple of weeks. Don’t let it get rained on or dampened. When it is dry, carve a very small gouge on the top side, about an inch from one end.

For the Tree, or Spindle, whittle down a stick to the diameter of the first knuckle of your thumb, and about half the length of the Earth board. Whittle the last inch of each end into a point.

For the Sky, or Handhold, take one of the other splits from making the Earth board and cut it to the length of your hand. Shave it smooth and sand it if necessary; the point is to make it as comfortable for the hand as possible. Spend some time just sitting and bearing down on it with your hand, and see if it feels all right. On the flat side where your hand won’t be pressing, gouge a hole about a half inch deep that exactly fits one end of your Tree.

For the Bow itself—which we call the Wind in this system—find a green branch as thick as your index finger and as long as your forearm. It should be flexible enough to bend slightly but not splinter or break. This may take some experimenting with different sticks to find the right wood. If it splinters, use a denser wood. If it won’t bend enough, you can carve away some of the wood on the inside of the bow. Finding a branch that is already slightly bent may help. The bowstring can be made of any natural fiber—cotton, hemp, jute, or rawhide, for instance. Synthetics such as nylon tend to melt under the heat and friction. Make two slight grooves encircling the ends of the bow so that the string won’t slip. Bend your Wind bow slightly, and tie it in place with the string.

Now you kneel to call down the lightning, holding the Wind bow in your dominant hand. For the sake of explanation, let’s say you’re right-handed. Place the Earth board in front of you, and say, “Earth to earth, hold fire for me.” Put your left foot on the end of the Earth board that doesn’t have the hole to hold the board in place, keeping your other knee on the ground.

Wrap the string of the Wind bow around the Tree once, holding the bow so that its shaft is on the outside of the Tree and its upper string loop is the one closest to your hand. Push the downward point of the Tree into the small gouge in the Earth board and say, “Rooted you are, and you will call the lightning.” Put tension toward you on the Tree with the Wind bow—it should feel like it wants to pull it out. Fit the Sky handhold on top of the Tree and say, “From Earth to Sky, the lightning dances.” Bear down on the Sky with your left hand. Point the bow slightly downward and away from you. Say, “Wind, feed the fire!”

Then begin stroking the Wind bow back and forth while keeping a firm weight on the Tree. The Tree should be turning enough that eventually you see a little smoke form, first at the lower Earth end and then at the higher Sky end. If both ends aren’t smoking, go faster and harder until they do. Then stop and take the Sky away, and carefully lift up the Tree without disengaging the Wind bow. Rub the Sky end against your face and nose, which should be sweating and greasy by now. This lubricates it with your natural body oils and will stop that end from smoking, letting you concentrate on the Earth end. It also marks the kit as your own, and lets Fire smell you. Recap the Tree and keep sawing away. Repeat this procedure two or three times until the Sky end of the Tree is shiny and hard.

By this time, the hole in the Earth board should be burned in. Stop and lay everything down, and carve a notch from your blackened hole out to the edge so that the accumulated powder has somewhere to go. The notch should take up about an eighth of the circle of your burned gouge, and should be sliced right out of the board to make a channel. Just cut two lines and cut away all the wood between them. Under the edge of the notch, put some tinder—char cloth and cotton balls are good, as is fresh birchbark or paper. The hot powder will accumulate there and hopefully ignite it.

Then reload, saying your prayers again, and drill slowly and with firm pressure until you see smoke on the bottom of the Tree. The powder should be accumulating in the hole—don’t speed up yet. It should be black; if it’s light brown you’re not pushing and sawing fast enough. When the notch is just about filled with powder, lighten up on the Sky and start drilling really fast. This should create heat and a whole lot of smoke, surrounding you. When you’ve got a lot of smoke, stop and pull up the Tree. If the smoke continues to come up from the pile of powder for more than a second, you’ve got a coal. (If the smoke goes out right away, replace and keep going.) If you think you have a coal, blow on it and see if it flares up. Then you feed it tinder and you’ve got fire.

It may take many rounds of practice before you can find the exact combination of the right wood, the right amount of pressure, and the right amount of sawing speed and tension. It took Raven months, in fact. Keep practicing, and keep up hope. (This is another good reason why you don’t want to be just learning this art fresh when you’re in that dire situation.)

Smoke

Galina: Fire transforms. That is its nature. Air fans Fire and augments its transformative power. One of the first sacred functions that I learned early on when I was training as a priest was how to burn sacred herbs and use the smoke to purify people, places, and things. I never gave any thought to Fire’s role in this process; for years I thought it only a technique of Air, and perhaps Earth, from which the herbs are drawn. It wasn’t until I began to apprentice to the Gods of Fire, learn its mysteries, and carry a tiny bit of its medicine that I came to understand what a tremendously powerful and holy partnership was in play every time I burned a recel of mugwort. Fire’s power here isn’t just that of transformation, but also a gift of communication. Fire helps us to tease out and awaken the blessing spirit of the herb. It accesses the herb’s deeper power and sets it forth in our world. Fire is generous and keeps the natural world from growing stagnant. Through its power to break down and transform, it helps us to partner better with the spirits of certain herbs.

Raven: While we touch on the powers of cleansing smoke in the Green World of plant spirits, it is most appropriate to introduce the concept here because sacred smoke is the pairing of Fire and Plants. The burning of powdered amber, as we explored in the Golden World chapter, reflects Fire’s partnership with the long-fossilized sap of trees. Inhaling the smoke—the blood-perfume—of burning plants may seem cruel and barbaric when you think about it, but it is a sacred act.

Plants—especially trees—have an interesting relationship with Fire. We consider forest fires to be a terrible event, but they are a part of the temperate-zone forest cycle. Fire breaks out naturally every so many generations of the Green World, cleanses choking underbrush, creates space for sunlight to enter, and sweetens the forest floor with ashes. Without this periodic purification, forests become dark, dank places where the only real growth is at the top. I’ve spoken to trees, and they dream of dying in flames. It is the best death that they can imagine.

Exercise: Sacred Smoke

Fire is purifying and transformative, even as it kills, and when the bodies of the Green World’s denizens go up in smoke, something beautiful happens. An essence is released into the world that had been contained within them, and when we speak of this we mean more than just volatile oils being physically released into the air, although that’s part of it. Any specific plant may have purifying properties, for example, and waving it about it the air spreads a certain amount of its power . . . but when that plant is devoured by fire, a measure of its power is released that is greater than if it had simply decayed and gone back to the Earth. In the second case, that power would have been reserved for the next generation of plants to grow; when we burn a plant, we release that spiritual essence into the Otherworlds. We can breathe it into our bodies, or infuse the aura of another person, or spread it over an entire area.

Our first historical accounts of smoking, anywhere in the world, are associated with shamanic activity. Somewhere along the line, the ancestors figured out that certain substances, when burned and inhaled, created a variety of altered states. In some cases, smoking the plants was safer than taking them straight into the body, especially when the plant might cause nausea or other unpleasant symptoms that could interfere with the trance state. In some cases the plants were dangerous enough that their smoke could only be inhaled from a distance, as incense. This was the beginning of incenses and recels.

Since you’ve already read the Green World chapter—one hopes—you understand the procedure for getting to know the spirit of a plant. For this exercise, you can either roll dried plant matter and actually smoke it or just throw it on a small fire as incense. However, if you smoke recreationally, you might want to work with the plants as incense to maintain the right attitude. You also shouldn’t do this exercise with any herb that you currently smoke recreationally.

If you are addicted to any smoking herb, quit. By addiction, we mean that if the idea that you might suddenly be banned from ever smoking it again, starting now, sends you into paroxysms of great distress, you’re addicted, and you need to work toward quitting. Addiction does not reflect right relationship with anything, and if you’re involving Fire with that addiction—and anything that is smoked involves Fire—then Fire has the lawful right to eat you, and just might if it feels like it. Don’t think that being a shamanic practitioner will get you out of that fate if you continue to disrespect Fire in that way. If anything, it will be worse because you should know better, and more is expected of you.

Galina was an avid smoker of tobacco when she first began shamanic practice, and one of the first challenges she had to face was breaking that addiction. She still smokes ceremonially when doing ancestor work or when working in some way with the spirit of the tobacco plant, but recreational smoking is no longer part of her life. The tobacco spirit is acknowledged as an ally and thus it cannot be abused or misused. Consider it a good exercise in the discipline necessary for shamanic practice, and break those addictions now. It’ll serve you better in the long run.

Drying plants removes most of their water, which can interfere with fire, and in most cases keeps the greater part of their essential oils intact. Regardless of which method you decide to use for this exercise, make the fire in one of the ways listed above, thank the Fire spirit for coming, and thank the plant spirit for giving its body to this lesson. Then either roll up the herb and breathe it into your lungs carefully and mindfully, or cast a good deal of plant matter onto the fire so that it smokes. If you choose this latter method, sit just at the edge of the cloud of smoke and breathe. Every other breath, turn your head and breathe fresh air. Keep an eye on your senses and feelings—what do your intuitions tell you about the essence of the plant spirit who Fire is bringing to you?

Do this exercise at least nine times with nine different burnable plants. None of these should be traditional entheogens such as hemp or henbane or even tobacco. Go simpler than that—use any of the plants in the Green World chapter, or coltsfoot or mullein or lavender or marshmallow or catnip, or other plants whose smoke is beneficial but mild. Write down your experiences, and thank the Fire and the plant spirits. If you use amber, thank the Sun as well.

Steam

Galina: Sauna is part of our heritage. It is part of the ancestral legacy of anyone who comes from northern European or Slavic lands. Our ancestors knew about the healing and cleansing properties of a good sweat, and in Finnish folklore, right up to the present day, the sauna is viewed as a holy place, a place of magic, and a liminal space. While I knew about saunas for years and years, I actually experienced one only a few years ago during my Nine Worlds ordeal cycle. For my Midgard ordeal, part of the process was cleansing using a sauna. What a powerful way of inducing a lightly altered state! It was incredibly relaxing and at the same time energizing. Part of the sauna involves being lightly struck with birch bundles to open the pores and liven the skin. I came out feeling incredibly clean, as though I had been cleansed from the inside out. Now when I find myself spiritually stuck, or exhausted from the work, or in need of energetic cleansing beyond what I normally do, I seek out a traditional sauna (Russian bath houses can be found in most big cities nowadays). Even if the only sauna you have access to is at your gym, you can still pay homage to the spirit of the sauna and enter the sauna itself in the proper, respectful mind-set.

Raven: Fire is the most purifying element, but it needs to be diluted and mixed with another element or it is not safe for human life. (This, by the way, is an object lesson about the nature of purity, which should be deeply pondered.) Steam in a sauna (or banya, the Russian word for it) or other steam bath is one way to accomplish that. It was the best way to keep clean in frigid northern climates, and it was often the place to give birth, to recover from illness, and to worship. In medieval Germany, saunas became associated with public baths and therefore prostitution, and they were eventually phased out by prudish public opinion. In Russia, banyas were associated with Pagan worship, and magicians were rumored to do their clandestine magic in these locations. In many ways, the little steam house was the last vestige of the Pagan temple, and still is in many ways. In Finland, the saying goes that “you should be in sauna as if you were in church.”

Exercise: Cleansing with Steam

Fire is capable of partnering with the other elements, and with Steam, we see the partnering of Fire and Water, with Fire dominant—which is why steam can burn and why water becomes light enough to float through the air. The steam created can seep into our pores, open us up, and cleanse out the gunk. This is the gift of fire and water, heat and steam: a tremendous internal cleansing on all levels. Check with your doctor or healthcare practitioner first before using a sauna, as it can be physically somewhat grueling. If you’re not sure if you can handle it physically, start with a short period of time in a mild sauna and work up from there until you notice heart palpitations or other problems, and then stop.

A full Northern Tradition sauna ritual is included in the book Wightridden: Paths of Northern-Tradition Shamanism, and the exercise here is a silent and solitary version of that. Start by placing the stones on the oven, and feel the shape of each one. Appreciate their stone-ness, and their earthiness, and ask the spirit of the Earth beneath your feet to bless them. Then touch the water in its bucket—you can add a bit of essential oil at this time if you like, perhaps birch or pine or rosemary—and ask the spirits of all the cold northern rivers and lakes to bless it.

Then light the fire, preferably with flint and steel or an even older method. As you do this, ask the fire to bless and cleanse you. Sing to it if you can, because it likes song. It can be a wordless or nonsense song, or a song of praise to Fire, one of our most ancient ancestors. Wait patiently and sing or meditate while the fire warms the room and the stones.

When it’s time, pour the first dipperful of blessed water over the stones, and in your mind, concentrate on the miracle of Fire melting the Ice that held the northern world in its grip, exposing the mountains and forming lakes, rivers, and hot springs. Our ancestral tradition remembers back to the melting of the Ice Age, a miracle that still survives in our creation myth. Whisper, just loud enough for you to hear, “From Fire and Stone, all creation.” With this, you call the spirit of the original Fire, the spirit who saved those long-ago Ice Age people huddling with their dogs and reindeer, people who would eventually spread across several continents.

Then you sit and breathe and periodically pour more water on the stones. Feel the steam caress you like a lover. Steam is a sensuous creature, gentler than you might think. It will eventually become hard to breathe in there, which forces you to concentrate on your breath. With each out breath, picture the toxins running out of your pores and down your body. Remember not to lick your own sweat—the concentrated toxins can give you a bellyache. Don’t leave your body—stay with the experience, breathe, sweat, recite the names of Gods or ancestors, pray, and when you’re done, walk out into the air. The relief on your skin and the feeling of cleanness is unsurpassed by almost any other sensation.

Make sure to end by washing the sweat off of your skin, and make sure that you thank the spirits of Steam and Stone before you put out the fire.

Embers

Galina: One can actually scry directly in fire or in its embers. Both work equally well, though it’s usually much easier on the diviner to use the whispering embers. If you have an affinity for fire, those embers will tell you things, show you things, open doorways to wyrd. I’ve always had that affinity. The first spirits I was ever able to see were spirits of fire. I watched the fire as a child and saw them dance. I could see the individual beings. Later on I learned to gaze at the embers, and I’d see into their world. They showed me the ways that they read fate through the crackling of burnt wood, the whispered compliance of ash, and the deep red heat that ties it all together. I learned to quiet myself and listen to the snapping and crackling voices, like the glottal stops and clicks of some arcane language. It’s possible to follow the rhythm even if one doesn’t quite grasp the vocabulary. Best of all, because fire also consecrates and cleanses, when I feel particularly blocked as a diviner, I’ll often light a fire and gaze at it, using the dance of the flame to still my mind and aid my concentration. If I am uncertain about the meaning of various natural omens, it is always to fire that I turn. I send an offering into the fire, usually tobacco or cedar, sometimes a little sweetgrass or other fragrant blessing herb. Alder is particularly appropriate coming from a warrior. When the fire burns down, I’ll gaze at it and ask for aid, and always knowledge comes. Fire may be high protocol, but it is also a very loyal ally. Its vaettir can cut through the vagaries of wyrd in a way that we often cannot. They reach for and taste the heart of a thing.

Raven: My favorite form of fire scrying is, ironically, staring at the smoke. I always start out staring at flames or embers, but sooner or later my gaze is drawn upward. Smoke, which is the meeting of Fire and Wind, gives me dancing, writhing images. It is one more way that Fire can speak its secrets. Remember that in Western magical practice—which is descended from older elemental arts—Fire is associated with the sense of sight (as Water is taste, Air is smell, Earth is touch, and Spirit is sound). Fire speaks to us through the eyes, and its language is a constant stream of visual chatter that we can sometimes, if we are open enough, learn to unravel.

Exercise: Fire Scrying

In order to ember gaze, you first have to have a fire, either in a fireplace or a fire pit. It’s best if you can kindle it in the old way, either by flint and steel or a fire bow. Make offerings to the Fire and ask its aid. Once the Fire burns down to glowing embers, settle yourself in front of it and ground and center. Then ask Fire your question, and still your mind. Gaze at it and look for patterns, listen for its rhythm, and follow where it leads. Scrying is a difficult art to describe because there’s no telling how the knowledge is going to come to the scryer. It’s rare with Fire to see images, but usually there will be patterns and the knowledge of how to untangle them. Be patient and be sure to thank Fire (and perhaps offer another small gift) when you are finished.

Consecration

Galina: Above all else, fire consecrates. It makes things holy and removes taint. Our ancestors knew this. Sacrifices may be consigned to fire. Fire renders them sacred. Anglo-Saxon Heathens carried fire around their holy places to consecrate them, and contemporary Heathens still sometimes do this today. I often keep some sort of fire, usually just a couple of candles, burning when I divine for clients. Fire is not only one of my allies and therefore might help me in my divination, but it can devour any negative energy the client may bring in and help to protect me. I’ve used fire directly to cleanse blockages in people, but that technique is well beyond the scope of this book and needs to be taught directly. Handling fire takes skill, proper teaching, and a great deal of courage and respect. It is, however, an amazingly powerful way of cleansing people and opening them up energetically. A skilled Fire master can reach into a fire pit or a bowl of flame, lift out the fire, and use it to wash over the client’s head or blocked energy point. Fire working, by the way, isn’t without peril. If you grow lax or lazy, or otherwise neglect protocol (even from ignorance of that protocol), you will get burned. It doesn’t matter the precautions you take; fire will burn sense into you. I’ve also discovered as a fire worker that I require fire to maintain my own internal energetic balance. If I go too long without working fire, too long without taking its medicine into me in the ways that I have been taught, it negatively affects my health. Fire is vitality, after all.

Raven: There are three primary fire runes: Kenaz (the forge, which reminds us of striking flint and steel), Nauthiz (the fire bow), and Cweorth (the fire twirl). It is this last rune, whose meaning is “purification,” that reflects the nature of this exercise. I use fire most often to cleanse houses, a priestly/shamanic job that I’m often called on professionally to do. I begin in the lowest part of the house and work up to the top, going around each room (and sometimes each closet) with saltwater, mugwort smoke, and a lit candle. While this is cleansing with all the elements, Fire is the real workhorse here. Even the cleansing nature of the herbs cannot be released without Fire. Saltwater cleans up the mess, but Fire consecrates the space. That’s more than just cleansing. It is bringing vital energy back to the space. I often sing the Cweorth rune as I make my way up. (We’ll go into galdr, or shaman-song, in the next chapter.) When I reach the top of the house, I open the windows and let the wind, finally, blow the candle out and take Fire into the sky.

Exercise: Cleansing with Flame

Before a ritual, light a large candle. Greet the fire and ask for its blessings. Ask it to cleanse your ritual space of any negativity or malignant or stagnant energy. Ask it to render it sacred space. Then, as you carry the candle around the perimeter of your working space, ask Fire to ward it against all ill-wishing spirits, all negative energy, all those who would do you ill. Thank Fire and leave the candle burning for your ritual. You may also run Fire over objects to cleanse them (a candle works well for this). Be careful, though, as you want to cleanse the auric field, not set the items on fire!

Dance

Galina: I suppose, given that I worked as a ballet dancer professionally until I was twenty-two, that it was inevitable that I would be tapped to learn fire dancing. I started working with hand lamps, small steel lamps containing a wick, which have a tight lid and can be filled safely with lamp oil. They fit between the fingers, and one can dance with flame in one’s hands. I often use them in cleansing rituals to purify people, places, or things. I didn’t actually start with the hand lamps. That came after several months of regular training—first I had to learn to work a fire bowl and handle fire directly. This was far more frightening, and one of my colleagues, upon being presented with the opportunity to learn, actually refused. I’ve seen the same thing happen with glassblowing: one look at the blazing furnace and some folks decide it’s just not for them. The potential for injury is too great.

My developing skills with fire culminated, a year or so later, in a seven-hour ritual ordeal in which I danced for Surt, the Lord of Fire, and the court of Muspelheim. I earned the right to dance with fire. I earned it with blood, sweat, and many, many tears. Now I use fire bowls, hand lamps, and even steel fans with six blazing wicks. I don’t do poi (Polynesian fire spinning) because of an ankle injury, but this too might be an option for some of you. Fire likes movement, and its medicine can be accessed through dancing. Even if you don’t have the approval from Fire to handle any of the tools I mention (and again I emphasize that you should find a corporeal teacher to learn these techniques), you can still dance. Movement and the kinetic heat it evokes are all part of fire work. This is Fire, working with Earth, the physical form, to bestow its power on a spirit worker.

Exercise: Fire Dancing

Fire is all about movement. Even at its most balanced point, it is never, ever still. It has its voice, its song, and its dance. Fire dancing, or indeed any type of dancing, is very, very pleasing to these spirits and can help you connect to the medicine. So even if you can’t fire dance per se, dance for Fire. Learn to move; connect to its rhythms through the movement of your body. You might feel foolish at first, but Fire is an intense kinetic element, and learning to honor it through such physical work (martial arts might work as well, and Fire loves singing) is immensely pleasing to it.

The Fire Within

Galina: I am positively awful at the technique that is sometimes called tummo, but it is the one of the earliest lessons that you will have to learn with fire, after learning to use flint and steel. The word tummo is not Norse; it is Tibetan. I don’t know what the Norse term for this is. I was told to master it by Surt and didn’t bicker about taxonomy with the Lord of Fire. Tummo is the ability to raise one’s internal body temperature at will. It is the kindling and tending of one’s internal fire.

There are two parts to tummo; the first is maintaining the body’s energy stores. This means eating properly, getting enough sleep, and energetically building up a store of energy. The second is actually learning to adjust and manipulate the body’s internal thermometer. There are several techniques by which one can do this. I struggle with it in part because the internal switch for me is tied very strongly into the berserkergang, the battle rage that I inherited from certain of my ancestors. I haven’t yet mastered the art of losing one without the other! This is simply a matter of the way I am wired, however, and it will probably not be the case for everyone. Anyhow, the Lord of Fire ordered me, in the dead of winter, to venture outside and go about my business without a coat or anything more than a light sweater. I was to learn this technique or freeze. I achieved a bare minimum of skill with it. It was a very cold winter!

Raven: I was first taught this technique by my first love at the age of fourteen, the son of a traditional Gardnerian Wiccan high priestess who watched me shiver while we waited for the bus. He casually put his hand on my solar plexus, told me that the third chakra was the home of the inner fire, and that all I had to do was this—and he triggered something—and I would never be cold again. We broke up a month later, and he moved away, but I retained the skill and practiced it often at school bus stops in New Hampshire winters. It does use up psychic energy at a fast rate, though, and if you haven’t eaten well or if you are generally low-energy, you can burn yourself into a shivering shock rather quickly. This just means that you have to prepare well for this gas-guzzling technique . . . and ask the spirit of Fire to help you.

Exercise: The Fire Within

Begin by focusing on the movement of your muscles, the contraction and release, the internal friction. That is heat. That is the spark that must be caught and tended. Feel that heat contained deep within the muscles. Feel the warmth of the blood running in the veins. Focus on the internal sun, the solar plexus. If you are able, feel the snake of power running up the spine. Focus on those kernels of warmth, of internal heat, the speeding up of molecules. Grab the heat in your mind’s awareness, and feel it expand. Feel it expand, and feel the fire of your solar plexus expand until it fills you and radiates from you. Feel the internal rhythms of your body speeding up. Breath is an excellent tool by which to access and command one’s internal energies, and this is an example of the way Fire and Air may partner in a specific goal. Air, after all, fans fire.

If you are having trouble, find a fire-colored stone of any sort, and wear it on a long chain so that it hangs at your solar plexus. Ask the spirit of Fire to help you spark your internal warmth. Do this by placing your stone under your char cloth and tinder pile, and sparking a fire on top of it. With tongs or long tweezers, lift the stone out from under the fire without letting it go out. Wash off any soot, and put it around your neck. When you practice this method next, press the stone into your solar plexus and ask the spirit of Fire to spark the internal flame for you.

Glassblowing

Galina: I have studied glassblowing for about a year and a half, and the first thing that I have to say is this: find a teacher. This is not a craft that you can learn well on your own. It’s also a fairly dangerous one: I’ve taken second-degree burns as the result of one brief moment of inattention, and I know of glassblowers who’ve had worse. Fire does not fool around. It demands reverence, respect, and, most of all, attention. Fire likes attention. It is the great exhibitionist of the elemental world. So before you attempt to engage in this particular craft, find a good teacher. If you’re not sure where to begin, call the art department of your local college. They might be able to recommend someone. It’s not as uncommon a craft as you might think.

Exercise: Fire and Sand

Glassblowing is like a well-choreographed dance. It requires that same level of mindful concentration, diligence, and, above all else, practice. Looking into the furnace, generally kept at least 2050 degrees Fahrenheit, is like looking directly into the depths of Muspelheim. I always offer a prayer to the denizens of that world before beginning my practice sessions.

With glassblowing, you see immediately how one must partner with Fire, court it, earn its respect. There is no mastery here. There is only partnership and the dance of skill. Best of all, the tools of glassblowing haven’t changed that much since the time of our ancestors. The same tools and techniques are still in use today across the globe, and this in itself is a powerful point of connection.

So find a good glassblowing teacher and learn to make a bowl. This might take awhile, as you will first have to master several fundamental techniques. Once you have the basics down, though, make yourself an offering bowl that can be used on your altar and in your work to collect offerings for the Gods or your ancestors. When you look at glass, no matter how utilitarian it might be, understand that you are holding in your hands one of the creative mysteries of fire. You are holding in your hands the result of a magnificent alchemy that mirrors the creation of worlds, a time when ice and fire collide. You are holding in your hands something very ancient and very, very sacred.

8

The Gray World

Craft

Hail to the spirits who come to the door,

I open this path for you

To speak to those who can hear,

To sing to those who will listen,

To aid those who will feed you,

To love those who love you,

And I am one of those.

Making spirit objects is an integral part of shamanic work. Unlike occult magical practice, you can’t just go into a store and buy something ready-made—at least in this tradition, shamanic objects are almost always handmade (or, in some cases, heirlooms or special gifts). This is because they need to be made with Intent, with energy pouring into them during the making process. Crafting something is a means of bringing something to life. There’s immense power in the act, and it forges a connection between the tool and the maker like nothing else. It’s possible to energize any ready-made object with Intent, but we are working not with simple magic or energy work. We are working with entities and their energies, and the process of creating a sacred object transforms your hands into doors through which their energy can pass. It makes it that much easier for the spirit of a tool, its vaettir—or kami, to use a Shinto term—to become a partner and conscious ally.

Shamanic objects don’t always have to be made by the shaman or shamanic practitioner, but if they are made by someone else, he or she needs to be a crafter who understands those energies, the purpose for which the object will be used, and how to craft it in a way that opens it to your Intent. Siberian shamans, for example, had a number of sacred metal items that would be added to their ceremonial coats as they grew more skilled and powerful. They got those items from “sacred smiths,” metalsmiths who were specially trained to make shamanic items. (In many cultures, smithcraft was considered holy work on par with shamanism and priestcraft.) Today there are few crafts-people who can do this for a shaman, but some are still around and not impossible to find. However, we still suggest that would-be shamanic practitioners master at least a couple of the craft skills, because it’s just better to be able to do this yourself when necessary. For those who work with animal spirits, it is especially important to take care in acquiring tools made from animal parts. The animal spirits may not take kindly to a supposed ally using their children without respect. Be sure that any animal parts you acquire were respectfully killed.

If you do decide to adapt an existing object into a spirit home or shamanic tool of some kind, we suggest at least remaking it in some way—taking pieces of it apart and reassembling them differently, decorating it in a way that changes its look, polishing and rehabilitating it, anything that can provide enough making energy to solidify the Intent and let the spirits get a handhold. One of Raven’s spirit figures is an 8-inch Santa made out of birchbark, bought for him by a friend. It isn’t the classic American Santa, but rather a cloaked-and-hooded European Father Frost figure. An ancestral spirit of his claimed it, and in order to give the spirit more of a foothold, Raven took away Santa’s toy bag and added bits of animal fur to his clothing. He also hollowed out the inside and put sacred items in it—pine needles, stones, and so on. It wasn’t handmade, but it was “remade” with enough time and attention to detail to establish the Intent and create the spirit channel.

Almost any handcraft can be turned to shamanic work. Some provide a direct way to work with an element and its nature. Glassblowing, for instance, allows us to work directly with fire. Some handcrafts offer a direct way to work with a specific spirit, such as carving a staff out of birch or tanning an animal hide. Some, like drum making, involve using a mix of craft methods to make a traditional object. Others are more general purpose, such as sewing ceremonial (or even everyday) garments while working Intent into them, and then embroidering them with sacred symbols to add layers to that Intent. We couldn’t describe every Northern Tradition craft in this book; an in-depth look at all such crafts would require its own book (which is still in the planning process). So if you have a craft we didn’t mention here, and a shamanic use for it has just exploded in your head, by all means give it a go. Learning one of these traditional crafts is also a powerful way to honor your ancestors, because the dead whose sacrifices and struggles made it possible for you to be here today depended on many of these crafts for survival. We can read all we want about how things were a hundred or a thousand or three thousand years ago, but there is a special kind of knowing that comes only from doing as our ancestors did, and for however brief a time, entering into their world through the magic of craftwork.

Most shamans and shamanic practitioners in this tradition will have at least one object for each spirit they work with. Some will have entire altars or elaborate shrines to that spirit. Others might simply have a pendant, a single item in a bag of small objects, or even just a small tattoo. It depends on their relationship with that spirit and what that spirit wants of them. Many will also have items that are practice-specific, tools for each type of working. Use of a single tool for a single purpose is good practice because that tool will retain its energetic signature better, and will probably need less cleansing (unless it’s a tool used for a particularly energetically “dirty” job, in which case it’s best kept to one purpose in order to clean it regularly, perhaps in a special way).

Language is a powerful thing. If you want to remove a concept from a people’s collective consciousness, if you want to make it impossible to conceive of an action, remove the terminology that describes those things. Make it impossible to frame it in conscious linguistic expression. The American government knew this in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when it ripped Native American children from their families and confined them in special schools, where they were beaten for speaking their language and practicing their native religions. Native peoples are still struggling to recover from this horror. Language shapes our experience and our comprehension of what is possible. Every word that we reclaim or coin anew is a victory over those who sought to destroy our ancestral ways. Because of this, one of the most important things that we are crafting in this tradition is an array of language to describe our practices that is uniquely ours.

The Northern Tradition lost many of its ancient words for shamanic workings and items, due first to the civilization that replaced the old tribal ways of life, and second to invading Christianity. It would be great, for example, if we had a word that was the equivalent of the Buryat term ongon. This word indicates a figure (abstract or otherwise) that is used as a container for the energy of a spirit, their “home” in our homes, as it were. Raven finds himself absentmindedly using the word ongon in the meantime, describing his various spirit figures. We have considered trying to enrich and restore our working vocabulary of terms by looking to Old Norse and Old Anglo-Saxon, which give us náttúrhús (Old Norse) and gástærn (Old Anglo-Saxon), both meaning “spirit house.”

As we mentioned in the introduction, we aren’t going to discuss how to master any of these crafts. We’re going to assume that if everyone reading this is a competent adult, you should be able to find someone to teach you whichever ones you are drawn to. Neither of us has mastered all of these crafts, nor do we practice most of them, except once in a while; we have our specialties, and we work with those the most. Don’t feel that you have to learn them all. Not every shaman is also a master craftsman, nor do you need to be. In fact, supporting spiritual craftspeople who do know how to make a shamanic object to order, ready to have a spirit invoked into it, is a valuable gift to the world.

Drum

Raven: My drum is named Talu, which means tale or story or tally or accounting in old Anglo-Saxon. She is made of reindeer hide and birchwood. She is rather vain and likes pretty things and to be told that she is beautiful. I sit out in the back field and beat her, first slowly until my heart aligns with her beat, then more quickly, like the hooves of a running reindeer. She takes me places. The rhythm seizes my body, rocking it back and forth. I see us in my mind—I am no longer the drummer but the rider; she is no longer the drum but the thundering beat beneath me that carries me across the worlds, out of the noise, to a place where I can better hear the spirits. Sometimes, if you can’t get yourself open enough to hear the spirits from where you’re sitting, you need to go someplace closer to them. My drum takes me there.

Galina: My drum is male, and I do not speak his name to others. I did not make him myself, but he was handmade by a Native American craftsman. He is a world walker, and I use him to open doorways to the other worlds. I asked a spirit worker artist to paint an image of the World Tree with the Nine Worlds and a valknut on his face, and I hang various tokens and charms from the sides and the crossbar. On the back, inside the frame, I have hung a strand of seed casings and a raven’s foot, all of which rattles in counterpoint when I strike him. He has a rich, resonant tone and watches over me when I travel.

In his book Drumming at the Edge of Magic—which we highly recommend to anyone interested in shamanism who is drawn to the Path of Rhythm—drummer and drum historian Mickey Hart points out that almost everywhere one looks, “where there is a shaman, there is also a drum.” The Soviets knew this when they attempted to destroy the indigenous practices in Eurasia, and they attacked the Siberian shamans first by destroying their drums and criminalizing their possession. While not every shamanic tradition in the world uses drums, nearly all the ones in circumpolar Eurasia do. More important, the still-existing shamanic tradition closest to northern Europe—the noiade of the Saami people—uses an oval drum called a runebom. We are convinced that the ancient Germanic peoples who came into Scandinavia so long ago learned drumming both from the Saami and from the aboriginal Scandinavians, and though that knowledge may have died out eventually among their folk, it was still kept by the Saami people. More crucially, that knowledge stayed with the old Northern spirits as well, and remains today to be passed on.

Those sound generators we call “rhythm instruments” were likely the first musical tools, probably starting with whacking sticks against each other, or against some surface. One of the oldest known drums is the slit drum, merely a horizontal log with a deep slit carved in it that is played by beating it with sticks; by adjusting where the blows fall, the players can create a number of different and interesting tones. The ringing of wood against wood was one of the first musical tones that human beings sought to deliberately recreate with musical tools. Another was the sound of slapping skin (including hand clapping), which probably predates even wooden sticks. The sound of slapping skin is the direct ancestor of the skin stretched over a frame, which is the classic drum of a million shamanic ancestors.

Rhythm is everywhere in the animist view: it is footsteps, hoofbeats, the beating of bird’s wings, the ebb and flow of the tides. It is the vibration of each note, making it distinct from each other; likewise it is the light-wavelength vibration of every color. It is sunrise and sunset, rain and wind, sleeping and waking, hunger and satiety, the four-count backbeat of the seasons, the return again and again to each solstice and equinox. It is the stroking of a lover’s hand, the patting of a mother on her baby’s back, the in and out of the sexual act that made every one of us. It is the beating of our hearts, the pulsing of our blood, the flashes of electrical activity across our neurons. It is birth and death and rebirth and death. When we are aware of and one with our environment, we realize that we live buried in onion layers of rhythm within rhythm within rhythm. Everything has a language. Rhythm is a language with a thousand dialects.

Knowing this, it could be said that all the rhythms that we make with our hands are simply reflections of these experiential rhythms. When we become aware of this (am I drumming wings? Hoofbeats? Tides? Seasons? Traffic?) and enhance it, opening to the specific energy that filters through us and letting it pour forth, the Path of Rhythm becomes a real conduit for magic. This is the real power in it, not just the mild trance that science has shown to be an easily re-creatable side effect of rhythm. However, most people are going to want to begin with that mild trance, and it’s a good beginner’s space.

Making a drum requires skill in a number of crafts, and it is best to master each of them before attempting to create one’s shaman drum—or, alternately, to study under a master drum maker. As such, it seems like an inappropriate craft to begin this section—shouldn’t one begin with single-step crafts that aren’t so intimidating? The truth is that all crafts are intimidating—or at least learning to do them well is intimidating—and that won’t stop anyone who is being pushed by the spirits to learn them. We’ll describe the process of making a traditional drum, and if the spirits want you to do it this long, hard way, you’ll study for however long it takes to get there. If this craft doesn’t draw you but you’re still meant to have a drum, be assured that someone will gift you with one.

Exercise: Making a Traditional Spirit Drum

Ideally, in the shamanic practice of our tradition, the shaman builds his or her own drum as part of a weeklong retreat. To begin, spend time on a piece of land, ideally one where the landwight is well disposed toward you. In fact, we suggest that this be the first order of business, because a cooperative landwight can help you find the right tree. Saami folk make their drums out of pine or birch, mostly due to its availability. Ash wood is good as well, as it recalls the World Tree, and oak will do, although it is harder to bend. Make offerings to the spirit of the tree, who must be willing to sacrifice itself. Sing to it, and ask that its spirit pass into the drum.

Second, cut down the tree, split its wood, and saw out the long narrow board from the heartwood that will be the drum’s frame. Each end should be cut with a bevel at least 2 inches long, facing in opposite directions so that when the board is bent in a circle, the two beveled ends overlap and join perfectly together. The length of the board will determine the diameter of the frame; for an 18-inch or thereabouts frame, you want at least 5 to 6 feet. Have the ideal measurement ready before you start. Smaller drum makers might want a littler drum; there’s no shame in that. As the tree is cut, sing a song to it in praise of Earth, who gives us these resources. Place the board in a stream, lake, or pond overnight to soak while you rest, meditate, and sing.

Third, build a fire the next morning, ideally a sacred fire (see the Red World chapter on making fire with flint and steel), and place on it a large cauldron of water, preferably from a lake or river or stream. Sing a song in praise of the Fire spirit, and burn the rest of the tree, sending it off to the heavens. Draw the board from the water, visualizing that you are a midwife drawing a baby from the watery womb, ready for its new life. Sing a song in praise of Water while you do this. (See the praise songs at the beginnings of each elemental chapter.)

Fourth, lay the wet wood across the cauldron—or if you can do it, several cauldrons—and steam it until it can be bent by the hands. You have to keep moving it around so that all parts can catch the steam, removing it, bending it, and then putting it back to steam again. When it can be bent far enough to be tied in the shape of a hunting bow with a leather belt, do so and then sing the praise song for the Hunter (see beginning of the Brown World chapter). Put it back to steam, and keep bending it and constricting it with the belt (or a few belts if need be) until it makes a full circle or oval. At any point in the steaming, a song can be sung in praise of Air. The four elements must be present and active for any birthing, including the drum, but Air is last, of course—it is the last element to come into the infant’s body at birth, with the first breath drawn.

Keep steaming the wood and cranking down the strap. This should be done quickly—don’t delay. No part of the wood can be allowed to dry out. If any part looks like it is starting to dry out too fast, dunk it in the boiling water. You can sing songs to the fire to keep it going, and to the drum to keep it bending. This part of the ritual symbolizes how shamans are cut and bent, submitting to their fate to become tools of the spirits, and you can also sing about that—about your own struggle and how you will yield to get through it.

Traditionally at this point, another tree would be found that would act as the “mother tree,” and the frame would be bent around this tree, strapped in place, and left to dry. The mother tree would act as the mold for the drum frame. The problem with this method is that it is nearly impossible to get the frame off the tree afterward—we can’t figure out how it was done; perhaps some magic that we don’t have? At any rate, we suggest strapping it around the mother tree for the space of a blessing and a song, then removing it and strapping it around a tree stump of large diameter from which it will be easier to remove. Make a small shrine out of the stump’s top, and leave the frame overnight. When the frame is entirely dry—which may take place overnight or over the span of a couple days, depending on the weather and humidity—remove it, drill two holes in the overlapping area, and hammer in two small pegs. If necessary, apply wood epoxy, if you’re not sure that mere pegs will hold. When the epoxy is dry and firm, sand the frame.

Find a skin for the head—deerskin, goatskin, whatever you like. Ideally it should be from an animal that you got to know while it was still alive and saw killed. Some of the animal’s blood should be saved to anoint the inside of the drum frame, giving it life. Thoroughly scrape, stretch, and dry the skin, and then soak it overnight in the water of the great cauldron. Stretch it over the frame while wet, trimmed so that it extends only a couple of inches beyond where it wraps around the back of the frame, and punch holes in the edge. As you place the skin on the frame, meditate on how we ourselves are a skin stretched over a frame, how we are drums for the Gods to make music and magic upon.

Select a piece of wood that is a good shape for a handhold. This will be used as the lacing anchor. Sand it smooth, and then drill it with holes. Lace rawhide through the edges of the skin, and attach the rawhide to the piece of wood. It should “float” in the center of the back of the drum. Adjust, retighten, and allow the skin to dry. The tightening is done to the four directions—East, South, West, North—asking for blessings from all these directions. When it is at its best tightness and makes a good sound when struck, nail the skin to the frame with tacks, or lace it to the frame (which keeps it adjustable, but requires drilling a series of holes around the back edge of the frame), or—as they used to do—peg it to the frame with birch pegs.

Then fully awaken the drum in a ritual, which will vary depending on what its purpose is to be. Sometimes a person might make a drum, thinking of one purpose, but the drum that is made will actually end up being for a different one, so the spirit of the drum should be asked before it is forced into a job. The drum will give you its name, and then it is alive and your responsibility. It will be a working partner for you, and you must take care of it.

Weaving

Raven: In many cultures, the spirits who rule Fate are women, and they do the women’s work of spinning, weaving, and cutting . . . only they do it with our destinies. When I weave, I first give thanks to the Fates (we call them the Norns in this tradition, and their names are said to be Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld) and ask them to be skillful with my wyrd, my destiny. As an offering, I ask them to take some of the weaving energy I put into the cloth and use it for their work. I’ve found that they take embroidery for this as well. As I work, I begin to see the warp as the threads of What Is, What Was, and What Will Be, and the weft as the threads of What We Choose To Do. The two together may turn out any number of ways. A cloth woven with this awareness of wyrd, taking the energy of wyrd into itself, is very powerful when made into a garment and worn. It can bestow clarity of sight, especially into the causality of past and future.

Galina: I rethought the power of weaving when I read one of the earliest accounts of the Norns, the Norse Fates: they are pictured as women weaving on a great loom, except that the loom is strung with intestines and weighted with skulls, and they weave with the blood and guts of our lives. Weaving is a mighty and magical act. Now, I don’t weave myself; I’ve no skill at textile work of any kind. I learned to knit and crochet largely because it formed a connection with my grandmother and other female ancestors who excelled at those things. It’s also for practical use—it’s easy to work charms into something knitted, as each stitch binds the magic to one’s will, just like weaving. I don’t possess much talent in this area . . . but still, I work with Spider, and I learned from this spirit that the magic of weaving is the magic of ordering a life. All magic starts with weaving: weaving reality, weaving will, weaving thought, weaving emotion.

Weaving is not a round art like spinning; it is an art of crisscrossing lines. It is a magical art along the lines of two rather than one; of I-Thou rather than I-Eternal. You have two sets of threads going in opposite directions that may or may not be very different, and they intersect along every possible point, creating a beautiful and useful pattern. Sounds kind of like a good relationship, doesn’t it? Actually, that’s the first exercise we give for this craft as a shamanic tool—cementing spirit relationships.

You can actually weave spirit cloth, or, rather, spirit-energized cloth. The simplest method is to visualize something over and over while weaving a piece of fabric on a loom. You can even chant if you like—the rhythmic bang of the beater is excellent for keeping time and creating a trance state. Because it takes a long time to weave something, that’s a lot of time and energy to put into a piece of fabric, which will make it all the more potent. The article can be a wall hanging for the house or a piece of clothing to be used for a spiritual purpose. It can also be used to make a power bundle, a collection of power-infused items wrapped in handmade cloth and used as a reservoir of power. Another method is to actually weave a symbol of the desired goal into the cloth, using tapestry-weaving techniques.

Any weaving undertaken with Intent, of course, is all the better if it is woven using thread spun with Intent. While we mention flax spinning in the Green World chapter, spinning of any fiber is a good place to start with spirit cloth. Fibers are traditionally all spun clockwise, or sunwise, so that they can be plied counterclockwise, or widdershins. The idea is that if all fibers are spun in the same direction, any two fibers can then be plied together afterward. However, for certain special uses—banishing evil energies or spiritually binding others against their will, or for some specialized advanced workings with the dead, the opposite is true. Special threads are made (usually out of wool that is naturally dark) that are spun widdershins and plied sunwise, and either used as thread or woven with the first thrust of the shuttle from right to left.

If you weave clothing with multiple parts from energized homespun thread, it’s best not to waste any of it. Unlike regular fabric, where one cuts off chunks and throws them away, unused and discarded cloth made with Intent becomes rather like hazardous waste. (In fact, it’s good to get into the habit as early as possible of cleaning up after yourself. The best way to dispose of fragments of power-infused items is to carefully cast them into a sacred fire made the old way, as we described earlier in this book. They may also be buried.) It’s better to learn piece weaving—the art of weaving specific pieces of cloth already the right size and shape for the garment parts—and make simple geometric garments that simply need the pieces hand-stitched together. The threads between each section, if you weave the pieces on a single warp, can be cut evenly between the garment sections and turned into fringe. If it’s long fringe, beads or bells can be tied to it. The less you waste of all this work, however, the better. This means that closely fitted garments are probably out, but, then, shamanic clothing should be loose and comfortable enough to move around in. If you want something closely fitted, do what the ancestors did and lace it tight around you.

Exercise: Weaving Cloth with Intent

If you want to weave a shamanic item, such as a piece of clothing dedicated to a particular spirit, or a ceremonial item, such as a ritual altar cloth or vestment, start with the warp of the loom. As you thread it, name off a quality of that spirit or a blessing with each strand, or just repeat a simple mantra or rhyme with each strand you pull through the heddles. When the loom is fully strung and you are ready to start the weft, wind the weft yarn onto the shuttle as if you were winding up a spring, ready to unwind and spring its energy into the warp. Singing or chanting as you wind helps. As a first project, we suggest making a piece of cloth—however small—in the colors appropriate to the spirit you are working toward a relationship with, and have your Intent be to find ways for you and that spirit to work together harmoniously. Visualize them in the warp—the eternal, balanced in tension—and yourself as the changeable, adjustable weft.

Take several deep breaths and begin to weave, concentrating on your goal. Make the first pass of the shuttle between the warp threads with your eyes closed. Then, with each pass, sing or say something—a line from a prayer or praise song, a simple chant, a spoken phrase. Bang! The beater becomes the exclamation point at the end of the sentence, and then you start over. You can get into something of an altered state from the repetitive motions combined with the repetitive words. When you start to get tired and lose the thread of the Intent, stop and work more another day. Weaving is an art that takes patience; it’s not about instant gratification.

When you cut the piece off the loom, be careful and waste no thread. If the warp is energized thread, carefully cut the little tied bits off and burn them. Hang the fabric out under either Sun or Moon for at least a few hours to introduce it to the world, and then craft it into its final shape. It goes without saying that you should keep your loom and other tools as energetically clean as possible. Cleanse them regularly if you must. Honor them as they honor you by providing support for your work.

Mask

Raven: I put the mask on my head, blocking out the light. The cap settles on my head, fitting perfectly—my assistant knitted it with Intent to fit me—and the fringe swings rhythmically, hypnotically across my field of vision. I stand and walk across the grass—one step, two steps, three—and it begins. The little flashes of world that I can see between the swinging cords begin to fade out, and my inner vision opens up. The bells and coins clink a rhythm. I walk a few more steps, and then I can’t walk anymore. I feel my assistant’s hand gently easing a chair under me; as my ass drops into it I begin to rock back and forth. The world shrinks to myself and everything beyond the opening that begins in the back of my head. I whisper my question to the void, and the voice of the spirit I am seeking comes in loud and clear. It’s the best shamanic tool Neolithic technology can provide.

Galina: Just touching my fringed cap allows me to access the threads of wyrd far more deeply and quickly than I am otherwise able. It takes me away and down into those ever-changing threads of power, fate, and memory. Sometimes when I divine for people, I keep it in my lap; simply touching it opens me up. If I wear it, I run the risk of being taken by a god or goddess as an oracle—not possessed by the deity, but used as a mouthpiece. It is exhilarating and terrifying. I’ve also found that my fringed cap can help me unblock and stay clean if I feel energetically clogged for any reason.

One of the tools that we were told by the spirits to make was a mask, but not of the ordinary “false face” sort. The mask in question is a cap with long fringe that goes all the way around and hangs to the shoulders, and at the end of each piece of fringe is a coin or bell or key or other small bit of metal—things that clink and have enough weight to make the fringe hold together and sway. Raven got the message first, but didn’t understand what it would do. After it was made from a knitted cap with long yarn fringe, we realized that it was a surprisingly effective altered-state tool. We theorize that something about the mostly blocked vision, the swaying of the fringe, the slits of light, and the sound of the rhythmic jingling all conspire to trigger something in the brain into a trance state. We ended up making Galina one as well.

We researched and actually found pictures of similar masks in photos of circumpolar shamans—although not exactly the same; most involved dangling ribbons or leather fringe, attached to stiff hats rather than close-fitting knitted caps, but the idea seemed the same. It was written about by the scholars as a mask to “blot out distractions,” but it seems to do a lot more than that.

Besides, our masks were a good example of using thread as a way to create something with Intent. They were knitted by Raven’s assistant, and knitting is another rhythmic activity that involves, basically, making elaborate knots. Knot magic is discussed in the Blue World chapter in more detail, but knitting runs along the same lines. Each time you knit or purl, it “locks” the thread, and you can visualize locking certain energy into the piece. We refer to this as the energy of the shaman hat, the archetypal energy of thousands of years of spirit workers and their wisdom. The hat was energized to help us connect with their stored wisdom, and also as an antenna for better “signal clarity.”

Exercise: Shaman’s Mask

Learn to knit a simple hat that fits close to the head and comes down to about the middle of the forehead. Remember that the weights on the ends of the fringe will pull the edge down farther, and make allowances for that. As you knit, with every stitch, or “lock,” ask for the wisdom of the ancients and for a clear mind that hears the spirits easily. Don’t knit loosely; you want thick or doubled yarn, tightly knitted. The hat can also be made in another way—for example, out of cloth or leather—but it should be hand stitched and each stitch made with similar Intent. Another way to get the energy into it is to embroider the hat or to make a band of embroidery that surrounds it. Chain stitch is the best stitch for this job—it’s also a symbolic “lock” repeated over and over again.

When the basic hat is complete, cut three strands of yarn more than twice as long as you want the fringe to be, and attach the middle of each strand to the edge of the hat. (Because ours were knitted, we could simply loop the yarn through the edge.) Braid the six paired strands hanging down, and tie a coin or bell or other sort of jingle or clinker onto the end. Repeat as many times as necessary to put fringe around the whole edge of the hat—ours took sixty or seventy braids. Then go someplace quiet, ground and center, and put it on. Walk around a bit, or rock back and forth, and see how it works. It’s one of those tools that is better experienced than described.

Stone Knife

Raven: The stone blade was the first blade, the first tool that made the difference between tearing the meat off the bones with our teeth and taking it off using a much sharper tooth that was not attached to us, one that could sever all the things we needed severed in order to eat and build. Obviously, I don’t need to use stone blades for everyday work—although I did butcher a rabbit using an obsidian knife rather than a steel knife just to see how well it worked—but I do use them in shamanic work. People often come to me with something that needs to be cut off—usually an energetic bond with someone or something that they no longer want to be attached to, but can’t seem to shake off themselves. I find and isolate the bond and cut it with a blade that has been “energized” so that it has an energy body of its own, with a sharp edge that can cut the cord in question. Stone knives are even better for this job than metal ones, as they hold energy better. My black obsidian blade flashes, and then I smoke the area of the wound with sacred herbs to cauterize and begin the healing. The ancestors watch and nod in agreement.

Galina: I walk the warrior-shaman’s path, so while I appreciate the skill and power of a stone blade, almost all of my working blades are steel. Still, there is something immensely primal in making and working with a stone blade. Many may not realize that flintknapping was at one time a crucial craft. It takes precision and an understanding of stone. A well-made stone blade can be even sharper than a contemporary stainless steel scalpel.

Making a stone blade out of a piece of rock is an exercise in patience and also in carefulness. Knapping—the art of chipping stone blades out of flint, chert, obsidian, or manufactured glass—is a dangerous activity. Knappers who’ve been at it for a long time often have scars all over their hands. Some have wounded themselves badly, perhaps even severed tendons, if they got careless. People think of stone knives as being primitive and dull, but obsidian, a volcanic glass, can have a sharper edge than it is possible to forge with metal. The allure of metal knives over stone ones was not that metal was sharper, but that it was sturdier, significantly less likely to chip and shatter, and could be made into much larger shapes than stone. However, a well-made stone blade will cut quite cleanly as a tool. More to the point, it is a way to forge a bond with the ancestors—anyone’s ancestors. No matter who we are, we started with stone tools.

It takes a long time and a lot of effort to knap even a small blade. This gives you plenty of time to put your Intent into the work. For the beginner, Raven recommends the book Flintknapping: Making and Understanding Stone Tools, by John C. Whittaker. You’ll notice, as you read, that he puts a heavy emphasis on safety, to the point where he won’t teach a hands-on beginner’s class without gloves for everyone. While it is clumsier to work in gloves—and particularly large shards can go through even heavy glove leather—it’s worth it to take his suggestions on safety for the sake of your hands and their functioning. (We would also suggest wearing safety goggles. It takes only one tiny flying shard to injure an eye.) Work in a well-ventilated area, and if you’re using flint or chert, make sure to wet it periodically to keep from breathing in the dust. Also, knap in a deserted area or on a tarp that can be shaken off into the trash—even the tiny shards are deadly sharp.

Experts also suggest that before you try knapping on stone, go to the thrift store and buy a few large, cheap, and possibly ugly solid glass ashtrays and chip them as your starter pieces. Keep an eye out for them at yard sales—you may even be able to get them for free. (Drunken archaeologists have gotten their conferences banned from hotels by having knapping contests late at night and turning the hotel ashtrays into spearheads.) Then try flint or chert, then obsidian, the more expensive and difficult material to come by.

Exercise: Stone Shaman’s Knife

Practice knapping on your various materials until you are ready to make a stone blade. Start with arrowheads and small points; work your way up to knife blades. Remember that it doesn’t have to be large; it will be used mostly for energy work anyway. As you work, put your Intent into it: that it will have a soul that is also blade-shaped, that it will cut the energetic body the way its physical edge will cut flesh. That it will sever only what needs to be severed and cut nothing you do not intend. Ask for the blessing of the ancestors who used such blades; ask that your hand be steady and your reflexes keen. Thank the Earth from which the stone was cut for providing tools for both you and your ancestors over time.

Stone blades are traditionally hafted into antler, bone, or wood handles and tied on with sinew. Carving antler, bone, or wood is a separate art, but one that isn’t too difficult and is well worth learning. Tap the blade carefully into a tight slot at the end of the handle, and then wrap it with sinew at the notch carved on each side of the base. (Sinew can be bought from various mail-order companies online; don’t buy the artificial stuff.) Then use the blade for your shamanic work.

When someone has a link to someone or something that needs to be cut—and you’ve actually verified this with your energetic senses, not just taken the person’s word for it—take the energetic cord in your hand and pull it taut from their body. Then, quickly and economically, without large flourishes, cut it with your stone blade. (The cutting may or may not manifest as physical pain for the client.) Immediately thereafter light a recaning stick of mugwort and recan the area of the energetic wound. This cleanses the wound and also discourages the cord from reattaching—a sort of energetic cautery. Cleanse the blade with smoke as well to clean off any residue of the other person’s attachments. Your blade is one of your shamanic tools and should not be handled by other people except under supervision.

One note: Regardless of what type of blade you work with, keep it sharp. It is an offense to the ancestors, the blade itself, and every craftsperson who ever lived to consciously dull a blade. Take care not to put yourself and your blade into a situation where law enforcement personnel will feel compelled to take the edge off your blade or take it away. A dull knife is more dangerous anyway.

Iron Knife

Galina: I have worked with blades for years. As a martial artist I’ve studied iaido (Japanese sword work) and defensive use of the knife. It was the first tool that called to me and remains the one that I’m most comfortable using. In my spirit work, I use a special knife with a handle of polished mammoth bone, made by an Inuit craftsman. I also have three katana, old, sharp, and imbued with living spirits. While I did not make them, I tended them, used them regularly in practice, and bled on them—usually accidentally! They have names, and they recognize me. They guard my house, and I have used them in protective work as well. They allow me to channel and direct energy far more effectively than any other tool that I possess.

Of course, I have many other blades, including several that serve a shamanic purpose. Unlike Raven, who walks the path of the shaman-king, my path is that of the warrior-shaman, and I have many taboos around weapons, particularly edged weapons. I am almost always armed in some way, and no matter where you walk in my home, at least one weapon is carefully tucked away within easy reach and arm’s length. I am sometimes obligated to buy weapons from people who aren’t treating them well or with respect, and weapons of all types tend to find their way into my home. Some lessons, I believe, can be learned only through study of the warrior’s arts, and some lessons only a blade can teach. Even if you aren’t on the warrior’s path, as a shamanic practitioner of any kind, people will come to you when they are in deepest need, when every other resource has failed them. Sometimes they will come to you needing protection. The blade is a protective tool, and nothing is better for ordering space and cutting away corruption, negative connections, and energetic cords. You will need the lessons in clarity and ruthless compassion that only working with the magic of a blade can teach.

Blacksmiths were considered to be just short of magic workers in many cultures. Their use of fire to extract metal from earth and their creation of tools with rhythmic pounding were nearly sorcery in the eyes of those who didn’t know their trade. In the early days, the blacksmith might be the most skilled tradesman in the village, and he would take on apprentices carefully, keeping the secrets of tempering to himself. The power of the smith is reflected in the multitude of smith Gods across Europe—Wayland/Volund, Hephaestus, Brigid, Goibniu, and Credne. Some speculate that the physical lameness of many smith Gods reflects either a vocation that was open to the disabled or the deliberate crippling of smiths (as in Wayland’s legend) in order to keep them from leaving the tribe with their valuable knowledge. (One may also consider that those denied beauty of form—which in the ancient world meant physical wholeness—more keenly recognized beauty in all its forms, and poured that into their work.) In ancient circumpolar Eurasia, certain sacred smiths had the power to forge shamanic items from metal—including, in parts of Siberia, the “skeletal” pieces necessary for the ceremonial coats of the shamans and their protective magical breastplates. Their spiritual powers not only allowed them to forge the shamanic items, but protected them from their power during the process. When the vocation of sacred smith declined, shamans reputedly had a terrible time acquiring the hand-forged sacred items as they earned them.

Today certain smiths (and machinists) are learning again the ways of sacred smithing. As with many of the more intricate crafts discussed in this book, we strongly advise the practitioner to get good training at the actual art before attempting to make sacred items. It’s important to be skilled enough that the hands do the work without the full attention, so that at least part of the consciousness can pay attention to the spirit and the Intent. Shamans and shamanic practitioners who learn blacksmithing themselves can fill in the gaps of the practice to a certain extent. This exercise assumes that the practitioner already has training from an experienced smith and knows the fundamentals of ironworking.

Exercise: Iron Shaman’s Knife

Cold iron was used in ancient times to turn away a number of potentially dangerous spirits, and it is still used that way today. Metal takes a psychic charge fairly well, especially if it is forged with the right Intent. To make your blade, first find the piece of iron that wants to be that blade. Running your hand over the options and letting one of them jump into it is a good technique. When the fire is made, say a blessing to the spirit of Fire. (Look in the Red World chapter for our blessing.) When pouring the water for quenching the metal, put a few drops of your blood into it and ask whatever Gods and spirits you work with to give you a good tool, one that will cleave both in the physical and spiritual dimensions, one that will be strong and never break, one that will rarely go dull and can be easily resharpened, one that will never turn on its owner.

Then forge the blade. You might want to have a series of words or very short phrases to channel your Intent or dedicate the blade to a specific purpose or spirit, and say one every time the hammer strikes the metal. When it goes back into the fire to reheat, have a slightly longer prayer to say. Repeat this until the work is done, then quench it in the water containing your blood. When it is cooled, repeat your mantra as you sharpen it. It goes without saying that this blade is now yours alone and should not be used by anyone else, or given away or sold. It will now have a spirit who you have called into it. Name it and keep it safe, and take good care of it.

Staff

Raven: My staff is made of a piece of broken birchwood that came off in my hand when I was hiking. The top of it was naturally shaped like an ugly old man. I gave him a bit of carded wool for a fluff of hair and kept him that way, as a reminder that one day I, too, would be an ugly old man, and power should not be judged by beauty. I sanded the wood and wrapped it with cords of different colors, hung tiny wicker baskets off of it, had my wife carve runes into it, added tiny bells. I use it for standing utiseta. I plant it in the Earth like the tree it once was, and ask the energy of Yggdrasil, the World Tree, to come up through it. The staff becomes the Pole from Earth to Sky, like the Maypole and the Irminsul, the World Tree from Earth to Sky. I brace myself against it with knee, hip, sternum, and cheek, then close my eyes and sway. Its energy holds me upright, even though if I let it go it would fall. It connects me to the Earth as well. It’s not always easy to ground standing, so I ground the staff first and then ground myself through it. To “dance” with the staff this way is to go into a trance straight into the World Tree, which appears in so many mythologies around the world.

Galina: I have two staves. One was given to me in the first year of my training; I had just committed to serving the Gods, and I asked for a sign that my vows had been accepted, that I was truly on the right path. I lived in New York City at the time, and I was walking home; I looked down and in the gutter in the East Village there lay a lovely white birch staff. I snatched her up and took her home, and it was from her that I learned to work with spirits of plants and trees. That was her gift to me, that and the answer to a prayer. I needed her gentleness greatly in those early years, for the beginning of my training was hard and demanded many sacrifices, and I did not yet know the measure of my strength. My other staff, and the one that I work with most often now, is a large spear given to me by a dear friend. It too has a living spirit. Her normal resting place is behind my front door, where she contributes to warding my living space. I dance with her, recalling ancient dances of Northern warriors. The spear is a sacred tool to one owned by Odin, and I use it to connect to him as Warleader and Victory Father, with me in my role as his valkyrie. I also have a wand that is burned with runes, and I use it to tap on the ground and call the ancestral spirits.

Making a staff is a craft that should wait until you’ve learned something about tree spirits. First work your way through the Green World chapter to the sections with trees, and get to know a few of them. It doesn’t even have to be the trees mentioned in this book, but it will be a tree spirit who tells you what tree your staff should be cut from. Will it be strong Oak or gentle Birch who will make that sacrifice for you? Mysterious Apple or sturdy Pine? Will it be a green tree cut in its youth or an already dead standing warrior? It won’t be you who decides, but the tree spirit.

In his book The Viking Way: Religion and War in the Later Iron Age of Scandinavia, Neil Price compares a number of graves in Scandinavia that were theorized to contain the remains of sorceresses or spirit workers of some sort, marked out by—among other things—their magical “staffs.” It seems that they were actually the length of a cane and used as walking sticks, as opposed to the tall Gandalf-style stave favored by many people today. On the other hand, some Siberian shamans use tall staves, usually carved with a horse head to symbolize that it was their steed to ride while in a trance. The tall staff can be utilized as Raven suggests, holding it while in a standing trance; the short staff can be used like a wand to channel energy and will pass in public as an ordinary (or elaborate) cane. Also consider that coming back from journey work or a deep trance can be disorienting, and a staff is a very practical way of holding oneself upright.

Woodcarving is an art best learned from people who know how to do it, but you can start on your own by whittling small things. Carve runes into sticks and scrap wood. Even simple carving requires the time and effort necessary for infusing your Intent into the piece. If you’re more into Fire as an element, you might try woodburning instead of carving.

Exercise: Making a Staff

Start by going through the woods with a handsaw and asking the spirits to show you the right tree. Make sure that you have permission to be cutting wood on that property. If necessary, pay the owners. This wood should be acquired fairly. Bring something to offer to the land spirit (perhaps some food and drink) and something to offer to the tree spirit (perhaps some coins). Take your time—it’s no shame if you have to come back more than once. These things cannot and should not be hurried. When you have found and cut your tree and made your offerings, take it home and debark it. If the wood is dead already, just sand it; if it’s still green, it will need to sit in a warm place and age for a few months.

Then you carve it or burn it or whatever you decide. You don’t need to do it all at once. Each design or symbol can go on with proper meditation; then wait for the spirits to tell you what the next one will be. Do consider what you’ll put on the bottom end—will it be a spike for hiking, or a metal end for sturdiness, or a rubber crutch tip to make it a real cane? You can add ribbons, bells, or anything else that calls to you. You can also feed its spirit by making proper offerings: alcohol, smoke, perhaps blood. Once you form a bond with a tool, don’t neglect it.

When you are done, go stand on a high place to do some utiseta. Plant the end of your staff in the Earth and ground it, imagining it as a World Tree or World Pillar in your mind. If it’s a tall staff, lean against it. If it’s short, lean on top of it and let your own height meld to its energetic tree. Close your eyes and sway, just a little. Hum if you need to. Your consciousness should move upward, possibly as fast as a bird flies. Utiseta with a staff is a much more upward-focused activity than when it’s done seated, and as such is good for communing with tall tree spirits, mountain spirits, and sky/wind spirits—anything whose movement is focused upward.

Brewing

Raven: My wife is actually the brewer in my family, but when I requested to be able to make a sacred beer, she walked me through the process. I used the blessings in the wonderful Northern Tradition book Ingvi’s Blessing, by Geordie Ingerson (Asphodel Press, 2011), which walks one through each step of the process, giving a blessing or offering at each step. We used a recipe for juniper beer in Stephen Buhner’s book Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers, which I recommend for anyone who wants to forge a spiritual relationship with any sort of alcohol, even if only drinking it.

Galina: I’ve brewed mead a couple of times, and it certainly teaches patience. It’s fairly messy, so until I moved into my own house, I wasn’t able to brew very often. There is something very special, however, in being able to offer to the Gods and ancestors something that you have painstakingly brewed yourself. I have a strong working relationship with alcohol. First, I had an adopted mother who took me in hand and trained my palate to professional levels. I seriously considered training as a sommelier, and I’ve had the pleasure of tasting some of the world’s most remarkable wines. I have a deep affection for the beauty and elegance that the spirit of the vine can embody. I’ve also used it at times to move into a headspace in which I can be used as an oracle. Half a glass of wine, taken with proper Intent and with respect to the spirit of the vine, can move me into an oracular headspace. It lubricates the psychic passages, if you’ll pardon the rather crude image, and allows for a smooth and relatively easy transition. Of course, part of honoring the spirit of the vine lies in not abusing it or its gifts. Alcohol is a very sacred thing. It’s a microcosm of the Well of Wyrd where destiny is born, of Odhroerir the mead of inspiration, and of the ever-increasing waters of memory.

Myths from all over the world explain that fermented beverages are a gift to us from the Gods and spirits. There are no tales of people accidentally finding out that fermented plant material or honey tasted good and altered the mind; in every case, a higher being took pity on a humankind in misery and gave us the gift of fermentation in order to provide some joy in living. As animists who believe in the worlds of spirit, we can easily see this as a truth: as with medicinal plants, a higher power bestowed on us the secret of alcoholic beverages.

Today, alcohol is as often a problem as it is a joy. This is because the ancient rules regarding the consumption of alcohol as a sacred beverage are long lost. It’s similar to tobacco—a sacred plant that was solemnly used in ritual ceremonies on special occasions harmed no one and did much good, but that same plant, when grown irreverently and used casually, causes addictions and extracts a high death toll. Alcohol was once the bringer of visions, as much so as the herbal hallucinogens we associate with shamans.

Mead is the most popular sacred beverage of the North, probably because it was the oldest. Tales abound of the sacred Mead of Poetry that blessed certain individuals with silver tongues. Paleolithic hunter-gatherers had occasional access to large amounts of honey, but malt and grain are the products of agriculture. The only fermented beverage that may vie historically for the oldest position is apple cider, which is also immortalized in the myth of Iduna’s apples of eternal youth. However, beer also became sacred when the focus changed to agriculture in the Neolithic era, and the cult of John Barleycorn grew. This archetypal figure was worshiped by every farmer, cut down and sacrificed in his prime, and reborn again in the spring. The Norse called him Ingvi or Frey, and the double X seen on bushels of grain and certain beers comes from his double-X Ing rune. Beers were also made from special combinations of herbs for magical and trance-inducing purposes; Pilsner ale originally contained pilsen, the Old Germanic word for henbane. Sacred to Thor, the henbane ale was poured as a libation for the Thunder God and also drunk to induce visions from him. Odin also has a strong connection to alcohol. He won the sacred mead of inspiration, Odhroerir, and there are tales of his giving aid to the lady of the house when it came to brewing. Norse women were responsible for providing the alcohol for their families. Brewing was an important household craft, and if a woman caught Odin’s eye by her skill and industry in brewing, he was not above spitting into the vats of fermenting mash or mead, thus rendering the finished product extraordinarily excellent.

Exercise: Sacred Brewing

Sacred brewing begins with cleanliness. All vessels for brewing should be carefully washed—although not with bleach, as that will kill the eventual living microorganisms—and a prayer said for cleanliness. Then the malted grain (if one is making beer or ale) or the fruit juice (if one is making fruit wine) or the herbal brew (if one is making a herbal wine) or the honey (if one is making mead) is blessed, and the spirits of the plants are asked to lend their strength and aid to the brew. If you have connections with Gods of grain, fruit, herbs, or bees, this is a good time to call on them. Then follow the recipe you have chosen until you come to adding the yeast.

As Geordie Ingerson points out in Ingvi’s Blessing, it is important to remember that yeast is a living being, or, rather, thousands of tiny living beings that will be sacrificing themselves to give you this drink. In a sense, every alcoholic drink is the sacrificial body not only of the plants but of the yeast itself. Every loaf of bread rises because of their breathing, and every alcoholic drink ferments through their process of eating and excreting. So, at this point, a prayer should be said in honor of the yeast creatures who give their lives for our joy. All the spiritual brewers who we’ve spoken to caution that the yeast must be treated as a guest in the home, that arguments and negative interpersonal energy near their tun or carboy or bottles will distress the yeast and cause the beverage to go flat or sour. Yeast and brewing function best in an atmosphere of happiness. If you can’t provide that atmosphere, perhaps home brewing is not for you.

At the end, when you open the drink, say a prayer of acknowledgment for everything that died for this product, and request that its effects be pleasant and bring wisdom, rather than engendering foolishness. Sacred brews should be used in some sort of ritual context, or at least in a consecrated area. They are not something to knock back while watching football with the rowdy friends. (For that, support your local noncorporate brewery, and buy specialty beer or wine from them.)

Bone and Horn

Raven: As I sat down to write this, archaeologists in Sweden have unearthed a perfectly carved penis made of antler that dates from the Mesolithic era, about 6000–4000 BCE. I smiled, because I have one very like it upstairs, a votive object for a hunter god, handmade for me by a loved one. Scholars are already arguing over whether the phallus might have been merely for adoration, or for magic, or for actual use, or for gender changing. Frankly, as a shaman, mine has been used for all of those purposes at one point or another. The fact that it is made of what was once a living mammal, like myself, makes it easier to link my energy body with it than if it had been carved of wood or stone. Depending on what sort of person carried it, there may have been no boundary between all those uses.

Galina: Bone can provide an incredibly strong connection to the spirit of an animal (or person, for that matter). Like blood, it is a very powerful part of a creature’s being. It is the strength of the body, and its support. When one is in proper relationship with the spirit in question, bone can be used to impart some of the animal’s strength and power, and it can be used to call the spirit forth. I have a knife made of the leg bone of a wolf, one of my spirit allies. I use it to call upon Wolf ’s skills when I have to travel to the Iron Wood, the magical center of the world of Jotunheim. I also have pieces of fur, feathers, and bone from other animal allies, and I use them in my regalia, as connections to those animal spirits. Bone, being porous, also very effectively absorbs one’s blood (we often have to give a few drops of our own blood in this work for various reasons, as discussed in the Blue World chapter). This is useful when such tokens or offerings are needed. I work more often with furs and pelts than bone, but the bone tools that I have are invaluable for the connection they bring.

When you carve in bone, you carve in life itself. Unlike a bit of wood, which might have been from a felled tree and might have been from a cut twig, you can be absolutely certain that something died before you could have that piece of bone. As one of the earliest tools, bone recalls the ancestors. It also recalls the Brown World, the place of the animal spirits, because before you work with it you will be thanking whatever creature donated it to your hands. If you don’t know the provenance of the bone, thank the creature anyway—in fact, you might want to make an extra offering to the animal, just in case it did not die cleanly. Whatever it might have been, it was certainly alive, and it ate and breathed and felt fear and joy. Bone is associated with death, but it is Death with a Purpose. To use bone is to use something that would otherwise be wasted, to make it live again in a small way. Many of our bone tools came from roadkill, reclaimed and repurposed, or from animals killed cleanly on Raven’s farm.

Horn and antlers are similar in essential nature, but antlers are different in that they are not always products of death. Deer shed their antlers yearly. The upswept curve of antlers was a sacred shape to ancient Europeans; some rock carvings in the Arctic show flying reindeer with antlers that are deliberately carved to imply wings—a Paleolithic prelude to Santa’s team. As well as wings, they can also imply tree branches—to the ancients, deer may have been an animal who contained within them something of the wisdom of the trees. These “animal saplings” grow every year from “buds” in the spring, covered in soft velvet. Then the velvet gets shed in long bloody streamers to show the hard, smooth horn underneath—another birth metaphor. Then the antlers are used as a weapon, and then they fall off entirely. This cycle was known by the ancients, another turn of the yearly life-from-death-from-life wheel, illustrated everywhere.

Horns were used as vessels to drink from—to this day we have the custom of “passing the horn” at some Northern Tradition events. They could also be made into sacred headdresses and musical instruments. The latter were important enough that modern brass “horns” still bear the name. Horn, bone, and antler are all “elastic” enough that when soaked, they can be bent and shaped to one extent or another. Horn, especially, has been worked, heated, or boiled to take all sorts of shapes. They would also have been easy to find, as animal carcasses would have been coming into human habitations to be disassembled and eaten on a regular, if not daily, basis.

Exercise: Bone, Horn, or Antler Tool

Rather than giving an exercise for a specific tool here, we invite you to hold and test the substances of bone, horn, and antler and see what calls to you, or what the spirits tell you to make. Sometimes making shamanic tools is less about doing what you think intellectually would be appropriate and more about what ends up being right for the circumstance you’re already in. Ask the spirits what they most want you to make, and see what answer comes. Is it a handle, perhaps for one of the blades mentioned above? Is it a beater for your drum? Is it a carved wand or a phallus? Is it a horn to pour libations to the spirits? Is it, perhaps, small disks of bone or antler to be sanded, carved with special symbols, drilled, and tied to the hem or fringe of a garment? Is it horns or antlers to be mounted on a headdress to better take in the spirit of that animal (or a deity associated with that animal)? Is it a set of runes? Ask someone who knows how to do this craft to teach you, and create the tool that appears to you. (Remember that if you’re wrong and this tool isn’t the right thing, the Universe will usually send someone along to take it off your hands.)

Spirit Home

Raven: One of the spirits I work with is an ancestor of mine, more than 1,300 years dead, sent to me by my patron goddess. He was—is—a noiade, a shaman of the Saami people whose mother was Norse, and who inherited two sets of ancestral spirits. (Frankly, even 1,300 years dead, he’s still a better shaman than I’ll ever be.) His spiritual “focus” in my home is the figure of an old man made of birchbark and decorated with fur scraps, with a benign painted face. I surround the figure with other figures—reindeer, from an inch long to nearly as big as the 8-inch old man figure himself. This is his spirit herd, the coin in which I am repaying him for his valuable teachings. He and his reindeer have pride of place on the ancestor altar.

Other spirit homes reside on my property, including many “god poles,” tall, thick poles with faces carved at the top for people to pray and lay offerings before. As we mentioned earlier in this chapter, our language for these things is shifting. My housemates once heard me mention the Buryat-Siberian term ongon for a small spirit-home item that would be kept in the house. I had been reading the work of Sarangerel, a Buryat shaman and author, and had mentioned, “She calls them ongons!”—and the word caught on in my house. Now I hear, “Something’s fallen behind one of your ongons—you’d better move it for me, because I don’t want to touch it,” and “Look at that piece of basketry! It would make a good ongon.” We wish that we knew our ancestral name for a spirit home. We’ve discussed the possibility of gástærn or náttúrhús, which are Old English and Old Norse, respectively, modernly combined old words that mean, in essence, spirit house. Now it remains to be seen if either catches on.

Galina: I have close to thirty altars and shrines in my home, which I maintain pretty much daily. That includes a god pole to Odin and a huge ancestral altar. On my ancestral altar I have a spirit pot, which is the focus or home for one of my ancestral spirits. I have a little house in my kitchen for my house spirits, and various spirit homes for other allies, each one unique, and many provided to the specifications of the spirit in question. These homes seem to make the spirits more comfortable and provide a focus for offerings and work . . . and if I need to travel and want to call on the help of a specific spirit, being able to take the spirit-house with me makes it that much easier to do so effectively. The maintenance of the spirit homes and various shrines is an offering of respect, commitment, and good faith.

Spirit houses can be made out of many things. Some are anthropomorphic figures, such as statues or stuffed dolls. Some are abstract items that appeal to the spirit in question. Some are containers full of spirit-associated items, as we discussed in the section on pottery. Some hang from beams or trees; some sit on shelves. Some have entire altars, which is the equivalent of giving the spirit house an estate, although altars in this tradition tend to be either for entire families of spirits or for Gods. (For ideas on altars for the Northern Gods, check Northern Tradition for the Solitary Practitioner, our book published by New Page Books.) Spirit houses tend to made of natural materials, such as wood, wicker, cloth, or pottery. They are distinct from tools dedicated to a specific spirit in that they are generally stationary and serve only one purpose: to be a focus and container for that spirit when it chooses to be in your presence.

The spirit house is where you make your offerings to the spirit—setting out food or drink in from of them or other gifts. Some spirits want you to carry their houses with them to specific places—an Ocean spirit might want its náttúrhús carried on a trip to the ocean and splashed with seawater, for instance. Raven’s ancestor once demanded to be taken along and placed on an altar at a class Raven was teaching—the first time that he had taught this particular class, which contained skills taught to him by that ancestor. Raven figured that the old man wanted to oversee this virgin flight and supervise if necessary.

Exercise: Spirit House

As mentioned, there is no way to guess which spirits will take an interest in you, and thus no way to know what kind of spirit house you will need to make. Some spirits demand natural materials; some don’t care. If a spirit is demanding a gástærn and you are stumped, first try going to a natural area that is associated with that spirit and look for things to pick up. (A gástærn for the spirit of a wooded area might simply be a jar containing earth, bark, dried moss, and twigs from that area.) These can be used alone or with a bought or created item that symbolizes the spirit (A náttúrhús for the Horse spirit might be some discarded horsehair from a local stable, tied around a horse figurine.) Or, sometimes, the right item turns up in a store as you’re walking through it; we suggest taking time to walk through craft stores, thrift stores, and yard sales with your mind and intuition as open as possible, and let the spirits tell you what to pick out. (Raven’s birchbark old man, depicting his ancestor, was originally a Santa decoration found during the holiday season.)

Don’t be self-conscious if the náttúrhús looks childish or crude. Everyone has seen spirit figures from tribal societies that are little more than a hanging stick with odd things tied to it. The question is not whether any human being will think it looks good, but whether the spirit likes the way it feels. The energy is more important than the aesthetic, in the long run. Remember that the spirits are not human and do not have human aesthetics. Their idea of what fits them well might not be your idea of what looks good. Remember also that although your effort is valued, your very human opinion of what they ought to have as a home is not appropriate here. You’re not making this for yourself; it’s for them. What anyone else thinks of it is irrelevant.

After your spirit home is finished, put it in a place that the spirit approves of (on a shelf, over a door, on a windowsill, hanging from the ceiling), and periodically give it an offering, or at least greet the spirit as you go by. You might want to schedule special days to give attention to that spirit, if you find that you keep forgetting to do something for it. The one big difficulty with spirit allies, as we’ve said repeatedly, is that they are actual people and they expect regular attention, and sometimes they become disgruntled if they are ignored for too long. Be consistent in your interactions. The worst thing you can do is to allow their homes to fall into disrepair. The relationships we have with the Holy Powers, ancestors, and spirits are meant to be reciprocal. It’s a matter of ongoing attention, not doing something once and forgetting about it.

9

The White World

Air

Hail to the North Wind that sings,

Hail to the South Wind that warms,

Hail to the East Wind that speaks,

Hail to the West Wind that weeps,

Hail to each breath I take into my body.

Here we come to our final element: Air. This is also the final element to come into the human body. A fetus may be a combination of Earth, Water, and Fire, but until the baby takes the first breath, it is not fully in the world. That’s why astrological charts start at the moment of the first breath. It is the solidifying moment when the infant’s wyrd crystallizes. In Northern legends, the shaman-god Odin gave humanity that final wyrd-giving and life-giving breath. He is breath-giver and, sometimes, breath-taker. It is that first sacred breath that begins the cycle of our incarnation, that cements us and drops us into the rhythms of the unfolding of our wyrd. As with other Elemental Powers, Air and Wind are (or should be) highly honored within this tradition.

As we’ve discussed before, the ancient northern Europeans lived in a harsh and often brutal climate that shaped their views of the Universe. When they looked at an element, they saw the harshest side of it first. Their myths about elemental Gods and spirits show this: Water is the ocean that eats you, Fire is the creature that devours you . . . and Air is depicted in the form of blizzards. The Gods and spirits of Air manifest themselves as snow, frost, ice, storm, and similar frightening and inconvenient forms. They are cold and reclusive and live in the coldest lands, which is where the frigid storms come from. At the same time, the word for breath in Old Norse is ond . . . and ond also means “life force,” the same substance that is identified as chi, ki, mana, prana, huna, orgone, and any number of other names. So Air is terrible and destructive . . . and gives life. There’s a deep lesson in there, if you look for it (and if you enter into this work, you will have no choice but to contemplate it).

The next few sections deal with weather-related spirits. Some people will look at them—especially Snow, Frost, and Ice—and say “But that’s Water! What’s it doing in the Air section?” It is true that those situations are a combination of Air and Water, as is Rain (which we put in the Water section). Why are they considered Air spirits? First, most of the water on this planet is liquid . . . but not all of it. The water that has crystallized into solid form did so because it was acted upon by the ambient temperature, and temperature is under the control of Air. So in a way, substances like snow, frost, and ice are Water that has been claimed by Air . . . as Rain is Water that uses Air without being changed by it. (Steam is actually Water being acted on by Fire in this system, even though it may look like Air, so it is described in the Red World, as is Smoke.) Second, snow, frost, and ice are all about weather, and when you deal with weather, you’re dealing with Wind spirits, period.

Wind spirits are capricious by nature, even more than those of Fire and Water. They love conflict; in traditional Tarot decks the suit of Swords is linked to Air, and it is always a story of conflict. Fire loves conflict, too, and for the same reasons: it stimulates creativity. Without it, there is nothing to pit one’s mental wits against—and Air is all about the mind. In other words, without Air, things stagnate. Air and Fire both crave challenge, because challenge inspires and hones. Nothing stimulates the mind like a problem to solve, and the Wind spirits know that, too. They are always running about looking for things to throw themselves into, although persistence is not their strong point. (That’s Earth.)

For the ancestors, the primary reason for forging a relationship with Wind spirits was for easing the weather. Farmers can quite literally live and die by the weather, and sailors depend heavily on it for survival as well. Weather is a huge chain that stretches around the world, and yanking on any one link in one area can cause backlash in another, so it’s not easy to mess with through force of will without causing reverberations that can come back to bite you. (For this reason, many master magicians consider weather magic to be the single most devastating type of magic, and the most likely to err into the unlawful—followed closely by love magic, by the way.)

The spirits of Wind and Weather know that chain much better than you ever could, and they know the best and most subtle way to fix it. If you have a relationship with them, they’ll want to dive in and help with your problems . . . although they cannot (and would not want to) guarantee that they can create the best possible weather at any given time. You may hate rain, but the plants may need it; you may hate snow, but perhaps without it there will be a drought in the spring. Weather spirits are part of the whole system of Earth, and they will rarely indulge your desires past the point of damage to the ecosystem—we are not the apex of the world, and they know it. Once in a while, though, they will go ahead and do just that, because as we pointed out, they are capricious. When that happens, you can bet that someone in another area is suffering for your desire, and that the bill will come due at some time in the future when you will suffer for theirs. That’s why weather magic is so tricky. It’s best to save such propitiations for times when it’s really important—like when a hurricane is coming straight for you.

One of the surprising shadows of shamanic wind-working in our modern culture survives in what we think of as the jester’s cap, with its four dangling points adorned with bells. Apparently the original model for this was the Cap of the Four Winds, worn by some ancient Saami shamans; each bell would be used to call a different wind. Europeans in more “civilized” areas saw drawings of the cap and decided that it looked silly enough that it ought to adorn their court fools, and so it remains today. It is a good sideways reminder, however, that the spirits of Wind are tricksy creatures, and one needs to remember to be quick-witted in their presence, and to laugh often, especially at ourselves.

Breath

Raven: Breathing is how we pump ond, life force, around the body and out of it. We can blow it out deliberately with our breath, and suck it in with our breath as well. While one can do that without the aid of the breath, the breath is so useful that why would you ignore it when you have this wonderful built-in pump as part of your central nervous system? And because you have to breathe anyway, you might as well use it when you need it. There is a lot of amazing stuff out there about breath work from yogis who have been experimenting with it for centuries, but really all you have to do is sit and be aware of your breathing and how it moves your energy. Ideally you would do this on a regular basis. Do it while you sit on the bus, while you wait in the dentist’s office, while you’re in line at the DMV.

Galina: When I was first introduced to meditation, magic, and energy work by my spirit teachers (which seemed to happen all at once, one tumbling into the other), we began with breath. I was taught that breath is the foundation for all of those things. It’s the key, the easiest, most integral, and most accessible means of learning to link into and move energy—including one’s own personal energy. I learned all sorts of techniques based in breath. Eventually, this led me into magic, galdr (shaman-song), journey work, and many other techniques and skills essential to my work both as a shaman and a magician. It also helped me with my devotional practice. The key to stilling the mind (which is really the first thing one must learn, if you get right down to it) is breath, maintaining careful focus on your breathing. It’s the key to everything. So I still start my students off the same way I began, and that’s the first exercise that I’ll share with you, our readers, now.

Exercise: Breath Meditation

Find a comfortable position, sit down, and close your eyes. (We recommend doing this exercise in a seated position rather than lying down. It’s too easy to fall asleep otherwise, especially as you begin to relax.)

Begin to focus on your breath. Feel the gentle expansion of the rib cage as your lungs fill with breath and the easy release as the breath flows from you on the exhalation. Spend five or six minutes really allowing yourself to feel the rhythm and flow of the breath into and out of your lungs. Let this rhythm take on a life of its own and then feel or imagine that your breath is overflowing your lungs and moving throughout your body. Your entire body expands and contracts as you breathe—every atom, every cell, every bone, nerve, muscle, and tissue is inhaling and exhaling, gobbling up breath, soaking it up and taking part in its release. It’s as if you’re not breathing but rather being breathed.

As you continue focusing on this all-body breath, allow yourself to become aware of any places of tension, stress, tightness, or pain in your body. Feel or imagine that you are actually inhaling through the spots that hurt. As you inhale, the breath moves to those places and moves through them, teasing out the tightness, working its way into the knots, surrounding the pain, creating space, creating release. As you exhale, you have the opportunity to exhale some of that tension and pain. Breath can move everywhere. The muscles can soak its power up like a sponge. It can create release where there is tension, create space where there is tightness. It brings expansion, and it can surround, gather up, and move pain. Breath has currents just like water. Through this meditation exercise you are allowing those currents to move through your body, surrendering all those things (like tension) that your body does not need and allowing the breath to free you of them.

Keep up with this as long as you are able, or as long as you feel that you ought to be doing it. Then gently bring your attention back to the inhalation and exhalation, the expansion of the lungs, the gentle stretching of the intercostals. Focus on the feeling of the breath entering and leaving your nostrils, and when you are ready to end the exercise, exhale, using the power of the exhalation to ground yourself.

North Wind

Raven: The North Wind came to me when I was a teenager, and we commenced a brief but intense affair. I would lie out in the cold wind, and he would come to me. I didn’t know anything about him, but later as an adult I discovered who he was, and we met again decades after I first spoke to him. He taught me the art of moving ond with my singing, the way martial artists move chi with their hands. It was an art that I would use often in my daily practice, one of my mainstays, so I am grateful for his lesson. He was a good if impatient teacher when I was an argumentative and rather screwed-up youngster. Recently, oddly enough, my daughter gave me the Fables series of graphic novels, and I discovered that my old lover had a cameo in it . . . and they captured him perfectly, including his impatience with slow learners. Funny about that. I do believe that sometimes fiction writers tap in to something very real.

Galina: Kari, the North Wind, has been very good to me. Perhaps because I belong to a god of the wind (Odin), of the storm, of the power of words and spells and charms, I piqued Kari’s interest. I don’t know, and I don’t want to indulge in any speculation. All I know is that he has watched over me through some of the most frightening and grueling moments of my life. He even gifted me, telling another spirit worker to give me a reindeer hide (which the very confused spirit worker thrust into my hands after I finished a public lecture). He keeps an eye on me, and for that I’m immensely grateful.

There are many Wind spirits, but the Four Winds are the great chieftains of their tribes. They are more powerful, more intelligent, and far less ephemeral in their interest than the smaller Wind spirits. They may appear as male, female, or androgynous to any given person, but in this tradition of shamanism, the North and East Winds tend to appear as men, and the West and South Winds tend to appear as women. One thing that we have definitely learned is that the Four Winds have agreements between them: no one ever gets all four of them as allies. That, according to them, would be too much power for any one person, and their changeable natures don’t fancy the idea of that much control and obligation over them. So it’s quite likely that only one or two of them will talk to you; three if you’re very lucky. That doesn’t mean that you can’t practice the arts that they teach. It just means that you’re on your own with them, or you’ll need to learn them from other Gods or spirits.

The North Wind is the strongest of the winds in the North, as one might expect. He blasts arctic air down upon the lower countries, bringing the most terrifying blizzards. He is the most-depicted wind in all of European mythology—usually, in the North anyway, appearing as a fierce, white-bearded old man, but occasionally as a slender, pale youth. He comes into folktales so regularly and with such similarity of character that it’s not hard to believe that he must have a lot of contact with humanity. In Norse mythology, he was called Kari, and he was one of the chieftains of Niflheim, the world of the frost giants. Kari was said to have two sons (that we know of; as randy as he is, he may well have many children), one named Frosti (Frost) and one named Jokul (Icicle), who is in turn the father of a frost giant named Snaer (Snow) the Old, who is another of the chieftains of Niflheim. Snaer in turn has a son named Thorri (Frozen Snow) and three daughters named Fon (Snowfall), Drifa (Snowdrift), and Mjol (Powder). This last daughter is a powerful sorceress and seer of Niflheim who can fly through the air. (Frosti seems to have married into an elf family.)

In other areas of the North, the Arctic Wind is seen similarly. As in Scandinavian folktales, Russian folktales also show the North Wind (and his siblings) stealing food out of the bowls of peasants who walk through the wind from barn to house, but if they find his home and chide him for it, he gives them magical gifts. Like all the powers of Nature, he takes and gives equally; he loves to be fed and helps himself if no one makes the effort. Galina often sets out plates of food and drink for Kari and gives him liquor. If you live in an apartment, you can set out the food on a table or desk, open the window, and offer it to him. Leave for a bit and let him enjoy the food. You can also leave the offerings out on roofs or ledges. There are always ways to adapt to living in urban areas.

The North Wind’s gift is, as Raven discovered, the ability to move energy with the voice while singing. Shamans and spirit workers all over the world have harnessed the power of song to do their work. In some cases, they must memorize hundreds of songs, or songs that go on for many hours. When a spirit worker sings a sacred song, two things are important. One is the choice of words, which is the province of the East Wind, and we will get to him shortly. The other is the ond that the spirit worker sings out into the air to power the Intent, and this is the North Wind’s teaching. (Please note that you don’t have to have a great voice to do this. While it’s nice if you do, it’s not a prerequisite.)

In northern Europe, this singing of sacred songs is called galdr, and it is one of the most common shamanic techniques. A practitioner who knows how to galdr might sing things into happening, or with coaxing words sing spirits into appearing and helping, or sing healing into someone’s body, or sing power into an object, or sing protections around a person. There are different kinds of galdr; the most common is rune-galdr, which consists of singing the various names of a single rune with Intent. When using galdr, it is best if the words are simple and powerful and the tune has many long notes. Whether the singing should be tuneful, on key, rough, or screechy seems to depend on the practitioner. Galina has fine results with galdr that is quite rough and untuneful, and she points out that the term originally came from a root word meaning “to crow like a rooster.” Raven, on the other hand, finds that he has to keep it pitch-perfect or it doesn’t work well for him; he has speculated that this may be because he is a musician, and his brain objects if he doesn’t make the extra effort to stay on key.

Galdr is a powerful way of working wyrd and moving energy. A skilled practitioner can sing weal or woe directly into a person’s wyrd and bring about the requisite manifestation. The voice is merely the conduit for that power. When someone galdrs (which is how we write the modern Anglicized verb version: galdrs, galdring), a palpable wave of energy should sweep out with the sound. A client who had a shaman galdr into them reported that it was “like having your body rung like a bell.” This should be practiced outside at first, if only because the volume of sound and waves of energy can go through walls and reverberate in people who didn’t ask for that. Also, if you practice in a wild, lonely place, you will be less self-conscious about standing there singing loudly and repetitively for hours.

Exercise: Singing with the Wind

Before you do this exercise, you should know something about sing-ing—at the very least, how to breathe properly to create maximum volume. Prepare for your lesson with the spirits by taking lessons from humans. A few voice lessons should give you practice in breathing properly and help you explore your range. It’s also important to be properly grounded, as galdr can harness a great deal of power and energy that will all be channeled through you. It’s not just a vocal experience; it’s a full-body experience.

To call upon the North Wind, bring a bowl of warm soup and hot tea outside into cold weather, ideally when it is snowing and a good North Wind is blowing. Before you go out, tie white and silver ribbons to your arms and hands. Fling the soup and tea into the air in a big arc. Then wait a few minutes to see if he comes. Try to sense whether the Wind from the North blows on you, whether you can feel his presence, or (if you have the ability) whether you can even see him in the movement of the wind. If it is snowing, it may be even easier to see him. Ask him whether he will help you, and if you get a strong feeling of assent (or a very physical push from the wind that communicates something; remember that this element can definitely move on you at will), then turn around and face away from him, and open your mouth and sing. Anything—it doesn’t matter what—but you might want to start with single sounds held for a long time. Galdr may or may not involve actual words. The power is from the sound, from the flow of energy, and from the sacrifice of the practitioner.

You may feel the North Wind pushing against the back of your head. That’s a good thing—the energy is supposed to shoot from the back of your head out your mouth. Breathe deeply, open your mouth wide, and let the sound roll out of you. Your eyes may unfocus a little, and you may feel the energy vibrating on the way through you. Your whole body should be reverberating with the aftershocks of the enegy when you’re done. If you’re not a little bit wrung out, you probably haven’t done it right. Eventually, you’ll be able to pull in energy with your inhalation and multiply it tenfold on the way out.

Galdr is a hard thing to describe in words, and it’s nearly impossible for us to provide a foolproof way to help you here in this book . . . which is why you ask help from the spirits. If, after the North Wind has helped you awhile and you’ve practiced a good long time, you are not sure if you’re doing it right, go to a shaman or shamanic practitioner in this tradition for assessment.

East Wind

Raven: Winds are changeable, and spirits of the Wind age and change gender—in some tales they are male, in some, female. From my observations, I’ve developed a theory that the major players, the Four Winds, age throughout the year and are actually at the height of their power when they are at their oldest—then they become youthful again and start over with the aging cycle. While the North Wind is at his most powerful in winter, and appears as an old man at that time, the East Wind is a hoary blowing old man later, during the turbulent spring. In summer, the East Wind is a young ambling breeze, while the South Wind is a fierce, wrinkled, warlike crone who bakes the earth with her hot, dry waves. I first met the North Wind in spring as a young man—that’s when he does his courting—and I first met the East Wind in the summer in the same way. He was pleasant and diffident, although certainly capable of havoc like any other wind, but one expected to see glasses perched on his nose and his face buried in a book. Indeed, I once caught the East Wind reading over my shoulder while I sat outside in my garden, trying to turn the pages in his impatience.

Galina: I was born in the spring, and I connect very strongly to the East Wind through his mercurial thirst for adventure, knowledge, and movement. He’s impatient to get things done, but not particularly aggressive. He has an irrepressible interest in a thousand different things. I’ve found him very willing to hash over ideas for creative projects, and he has helped me past writer’s block a time or two. He has also taught me a bit about keeping myself energetically clean. As a classicist in training, I’ve petitioned his help when I was the most frustrated and worn down with my multiple language studies. Bluntly put, in his kindness, he refreshes my brain and helps me gain some needed perspective and clarity. I associate him very strongly with April and find it easiest to connect to him in the spring.

The East Wind is male in this spiritual tradition, although, as we’ve said, the Four Winds change at their whim. He is sharp and cool, with less of a temper than the North Wind, although spring seems to be his time for losing his cool and letting it all blow out. The East Wind is especially important to propitiate if you live on the eastern side of a continent, because if unusual or sudden weather rolls in, it will probably be from the east, and it will be him changing things up for his own amusement or because he thinks it is necessary. He seems to be the most intellectual of all the winds and the most involved with travel and messages. He can be called on to guard letters that must arrive and to protect travelers who must fly through his medium.

The East Wind’s gift is words of power, and powerful speech. He understands that some words are more powerful than others and are better used for magic than others. Usually these words have strong imagery and emotional connotations. When they are combined with other words in specific ways, they hold power of their own that reverberates through the Universe when spoken, altering the workings of reality in subtle or unsubtle ways. The East Wind teaches us how to do this, especially for spoken charms, but also for speeches and other public communication. He is very insistent on the precise use of language. It’s as if language is a vast tapestry, each thread connecting in precise order to every other. It’s vibrant, alive, and redolent with power. It’s also delicately balanced. Every word chosen, whether in speech, in poetry, in song, or in spell, must be the right word, the word that cannot be replaced with any other. He demands exactitude and care. Sloppiness of effort or study will not get you far with the East Wind.

One of the most powerful word-energy tools in our language is alliteration. (That’s repeating sounds in the same line, such as Ellen, Ellen, Lady Ellhorn, eldest Moon and magic made). In the earliest Anglo-Saxon (and Norse) poetry, it was alliteration, not rhyming, that was the mark of poetry and the bardic art. Rhyming came in later, with the French of the Norman Conquest—a Romance language that mixed with Old English until the two were fused. Romance (Latinate-derived) languages tend to have many of the same endings on words, so that the struggle to find rhyme is much easier than in Old Germanic-derived languages. While rhyming can hold energy in a series of words because of the infusion of Norman French and Church Latin (as rhyming is the magical word-tool of Romance languages), it’s really only effective for short kindergarten-style rhymes. This is not to put down the efficacy of kindergarten rhymes, which can bring our minds back to a more open time in our lives and thus be quite powerful as words of power. However, for longer and more complex concepts, the best way to lock power into a series of phrases is to go back to the original Germanic art of alliteration. It has fallen out of fashion, but you’d be surprised at how effective it is for English-language power “songs” (which don’t have to be sung, of course). For this reason, the spoken invocation to the East Wind presented below is alliterative in nature.

Exercise: Words of Power

The East Wind loves words of all sorts, so one of the best propitiations for him is to go out on a windy day when he’s blowing and read him poetry. He also loves scents, so burning nice incense is a good offering. If you want to wear or hang ribbons to blow in his breeze, his colors are pale—pastel blue, light yellow, sunrise pink, white. He likes small bells, perhaps because of their rhythm. They make nice offerings to him, as do coffee and strong teas. We’ve found that many of the frost giants like good, high-quality teas and coffee, which are perhaps difficult for them to acquire. He does not seem to be much interested in food (unlike the North Wind, who likes his hearty meals), but enjoys a fizzy beverage flung bubbling into the air.

The East Wind has a wonderfully clarifying feel to his energy. You breathe him in, and your eyes and mind are suddenly very clear and lucid, and everything seems much brighter. That’s one of the ways you can tell that he’s present. His invocation is as follows:

I stand in East

And stake my claim,

I hail the howling

Hallowed one,

Dawn Treader dare

My tangled tongue,

May I wield my words,

May I work my will,

May wind of morning

Mists awake,

To East I call,

This claim I stake.

We’ll assume that you’ve gone out on a day when the wind is from the east, and you’ve made your offerings and read him poetry. If he comes and you can feel his presence, both energetically and as a highly personal touch of the wind, ask him if he will help you learn the way of channeling power through the spoken word. This is a subtler art than channeling power through singing. Part of the power still comes through the voice, but it comes through in cadence and tone rather than sheer sustaining power. The rest comes through the Words of Power, and the best way to learn which words are powerful for you is to say them to him, and he will tell you if you are tapping into their ancient energy. Strive to delight him with your words, and let them be well chosen. He has more of a sense of humor than the other Wind spirits, as well as brilliance in thought, word knowledge, and speech craft that can be dazzling to experience.

Working with the East Wind is an ongoing project, and it may require a good deal of orating out in a field somewhere. Remember to thank him for his aid and leave him offerings of incense when possible.

West Wind

Raven: She comes like perfume, a dancer among the leaves. Of all the Four Winds, she loves the trees the most and cannot help but stroke and play with them like pets. They all seem to react like puppies rolling over on their backs for her. She has long, long hair and draperies, and she comes in a wave of inaudible music that vibrates through your body as you breathe her in. In contrast to her brother the East Wind, her air intoxicates you and blurs your vision, heady and dizzying. In the winter, she is a delicate maiden dancing amid the snowflakes, almost ignored in the wake of her wintry older brother. In the autumn, she is a bone-thin crone wrapped in her long white hair, robed in the dry brown leaves that spin through the air, dancing with each one in a waltz of sorrow before gently lowering them to the ground, keening the dirge of the fading year.

Galina: I’ve very rarely interacted with the West Wind directly. She and I have but a passing acquaintance with each other, but then, no one gets to ally with each of the Four Winds. There’s a rich fullness to her presence that is unlike the other winds, at least from my perspective, the promise of warmth, of bounty, of an embrace. She speaks, perhaps because of my own associations of the west with the Pacific Ocean, of ocean winds and the richness of the sea, or the wealth of the harvest. I have occasionally seen her when on the beach, usually after honoring Ran, Aegir, and their daughters. She’s laughed in satisfied delight to see them hailed and gifted, and whirled around me as witness when I did so.

In this tradition, the West Wind is the ocean’s wind, because the ocean was in the west for these ancestors. Even living in a place where the ocean is in the opposite direction, you can still touch the ocean energy in her nature. Because weather moves west to east around the globe, she carries the touch of the ocean to all lands. She is particularly important to those living on the western coast of a continent. She is the song that calls the sailors, the breeze that touches two lovers at once in separate faraway places and somehow carries the memory of each others’ scent to them. She is romantic and fanciful, and loves music and things that dangle and clink and chime.

The West Wind’s gift is music. To gain her gift, you must be able to play some kind of melodic instrument with reasonable skill. It should go without saying that she prefers wind instruments over any others, but strings will work as well. Playing shamanic music on an instrument also has the side effect of bringing that instrument to life. It may already have a spirit; well-played instruments of obsessive musicians often do. (Most musicians will also admit to that; they may well have a name for their instrument and treat it like a living being. Raven’s guitar certainly has one: Madrigal.)

If you are just beginning with a new instrument, or one that does not have a spirit in it, start by calling one into it. To do this, look over the Gray World chapter, especially the section about spirit houses. That should give you an idea of how to call a spirit into your musical instrument, but really the best way is just to play it regularly with Intent, and treat it as if it has a spirit, and soon you’ll notice that it does. It may not be the spirit who you wanted for it, but it will be the spirit who the Universe feels is appropriate. If you’ve never played an instrument before, don’t just choose one without handling it. Go to a music store and handle the various instruments. It’s possible to love the sound of an instrument dearly, but to have no connection with it when it’s in your hand. Instruments are very special partners in this work. Take the time to choose one carefully.

Moving energy with music is different from moving it with the voice only in that it is a partnership rather than a solo activity. You and your instrument must be able to work together smoothly, and if that means that you need to practice for three years before you can approach this exercise, so be it. Not everyone is a musician, and the West Wind’s gift is not for all people, although we’ve found that she usually enjoys the effort and the good-faith endeavor. It’s the same with other skills that are co-opted for shamanic work—you’d better be good at the skill first, so that your attention can be on the process of guiding the energy rather than the process of doing the activity. However, if you are good enough at making music that you can do it without concentrating fully on the activity—which, every musician will tell you, requires a lot of practice under your belt in order to build up the body memory—then you can approach the West Wind and ask her to aid you in shamanic music.

Galina was trained for sixteen years as a classical musician, and she is not easily able to use the West Wind’s gift in magic or as a shaman. It’s a grace, and no one gets them all. Still, something is to be gained by exploring music, even if only to develop a greater appreciation of its power. As you are studying and practicing, you can still be honoring the West Wind. Take her offerings, such as playing her music on a CD player.

Exercise: Playing the Wind

Once you’re good enough at playing that you feel ready to speak to the West Wind, go to a solitary place on a day when the wind is coming from that direction and play for her. Give her something sweet—I found that she likes sweetened milk or milkshakes tossed into the air, and small cookies—and then dedicate your musical performance to her and give her some entertainment. To be courteous, introduce your instrument by name before you begin; this will show her that you do actually respect this work as a proper partnership. If you can feel her presence, both on an energetic level and a physical one (she’s touching you, and the West Wind is very affectionate), ask her to help you and your instrument learn to move energy outward for a useful purpose. Tell her the worthy ways in which you will use this gift.

Then you play. The West Wind will slowly and subtly guide you, helping you bond more closely to your instrument, helping the two of you move the energy out of you and into and through your musical partner with focused Intent. Don’t worry if you don’t get it right the first time or if you can’t hold on to it for more than a minute or two. If you’ve come this far with music, you know that practice is what works and that no one ever got it perfect on the first try. You may also ask her to bless your instrument and its spirit.

Afterward, thank the West Wind for her help, and put something up outside your door or window for her to play with—she loves wind chimes and other tinkly things. She also likes ribbons of the colors of ocean and soft twilight—violets, purples, blues, and sea greens. You can hang them up outside or you can wear them, hanging from a hat or clothing in some way that allows her to play with them when you’re outside walking around.

South Wind

Galina: I work mostly with Kari and the South Wind. Her gift is actually not one I’ve spoken about before. I must first touch on a few caveats. In order to utilize her gift, you must have some measure of the warrior’s gift. You must understand warrior work, and you must walk, at least part of the time, the path of the warrior. This isn’t about having physical skills (though that is often an outward manifestation of it); rather, warriorship is a quality of spirit, heart, mind, and nature, and it’s a rare thing today. It is a fundamental starting point; otherwise this particular gift will remain closed to you. It’s a killing gift, a warrior’s weapon. The South Wind, who runs with wildfire, urging it onward, who delights in the destruction of her foes, graces her allies with weapons and the skill to use them. She will not hand such a weapon to someone who lacks the stomach to use it, because doing so would be like handing a small child a ticking bomb or a hand grenade. For those gifted in working with animal spirits, she often allies with Cougar.

Raven: I don’t walk the warrior’s path, so as much as I admire her fierceness from a distance, the South Wind is not one of my allies. I have seen her, though, as a tall young woman with sleek muscles, carrying a spear through autumn leaves. In the winter she is a war leader; in the spring, a war captain; and in the summer, a wrinkled, aged battle teacher who scorches her students with her sarcasm and the earth with her hot regard.

The South Wind is the warrior’s wind. She is fierce and hot, melting ice and drying the summer grasses. In the cold regions she is welcomed with open arms, but she can wreak havoc on hotter areas. She is often seen as a black-haired woman with browned skin, sometimes armored like a warrior and sometimes dressed in skins or leather. She is an archer, but mostly seems to prefer staves and spears as weapons.

So far, we’ve gone through the different sounds gifted by the winds—speech, song, music—but the South Wind’s gift is one that is rarely used by most people, which is why we are putting it last. It is the gift of the war cry, the scream that Asian martial artists call the kiai. It is not just a focusing sound or a way to rev oneself up for battle. It is the cry that reverberates through the brick wall and makes it unstable, through the length of the steel blade and makes it sharper, through the body of the enemy and brings down his shields. It is the killing cry, the destabilizing vibration, the voice as thrown weapon.

Science has shown us that the human body and neural patterns are vulnerable to sound and vibration. This gift takes full advantage of that. The power is solidified through the will and the voice into what amounts to a very keenly focused but crushing blow. This “scream” does not emanate from a place of fear but from a place of absolute control and focused force.

In many respects it may be considered a kind of supergaldr. It’s punishingly effective. Done well against an attacker, it scrambles his synapses; in the hands of a master it can stop his heart. Its applications are predominantly in combat. Learning to use the kiai correctly, consistently, and effectively is, in many respects, a martial art in and of itself. If you use this skill, you’re usually using it to take down an opponent. There are no half measures (though if one is being kind, it can be used to stun long enough to get in a knockout blow).

There is a milder form of the kiai that is somewhat more accessible: the Voice of Command. This involves using the voice and a bit of focused projective empathy to bind and control a person. Your will is channeled through the voice, which acts as a binding and controlling mechanism. It is actually quite useful in dealing with clients who become mentally unstable or physically violent. It can be used to control them until the situation can be defused.

Exercise: South Wind’s Cry

To call the South Wind, bring out a staff or spear and tie ribbons in fiery colors—red, orange, yellow—to its top. Stand out on a windy day and breathe in. Ground yourself thoroughly. Call upon the South Wind, the Warrior’s Wind. Ask for her guidance. Breathe deeply and feel your center. Feel the power of this wind flowing and rushing and dancing around you. Begin moving with the staff. Move and strike in front of you (and strike as though you mean it). Feel the momentum of the staff moving through the air, cutting through it. Visualize that force spread out from the staff as you bring it down, striking the air or striking the Earth. Visualize it moving into an opponent, shattering his bones, and destroying his ground. Visualize yourself as a whirlwind. Where you move, the wind lashes out like a whip. Where you strike, the Earth splits. Your cry, when you utter it, can bring down mountains. This is the place of mind, heart, and will that you must enter. You must be absolutely centered, absolutely cold, without feeling, without mercy, a creature only of focus and Intent. Warriors were the protectors of their people. We are here today because we had ancestors willing to take up blade and bow, staff and gun to protect their people. It is an honorable path, a necessary path. (If you aren’t comfortable with warrior craft, don’t approach this wind. Just don’t.)

Now, once you are in the proper head space, feel the force of the wind, the force of the land, the momentum and power moving into you and gathering in your throat. You are part of that force, and it can be channeled and propelled by sound and will alone. Strike again, and as you strike, also scream and focus on allowing that power to move with your staff as a weapon. See or imagine the energy exiting through the scream and striking down with the staff exactly as though it were another weapon. There’s no easy way to describe this. It takes practice, probably years of practice. This is a very kinetic thing. The exhalation of sound is the end result, but the energy process involves the whole body. The staff work can help you focus, but in the end, it’s about the voice and being graced with the knowledge of how to use it as a weapon.

When you have finished practicing, make an offering to the South Wind with thanks. Galina recommends studying kendo, if you’re really interested in mastering this skill. While kendo is far from what the South Wind will teach you, in this martial art one does cry out upon making a strike, and it can be good preparation for entering into study with this wind. In fact, studying any martial art can’t hurt. It’s a good way to learn something of kinetic sense, how to move the body’s energy, and the South Wind will likely appreciate the respect for warrior craft that it shows.

Snow

Raven: In northern Europe, snow was a part of every winter landscape. Where I live in New England, winter lasts for four months of the year, and there is usually snow for most of that period, sometimes several feet deep. One of my partners, upon moving up to live with me, observed his first New England winter and said, “The snow just doesn’t ever go away, does it?” Well, yes, it does—that’s how we know it’s spring! There are many different kinds of snow—powdery snow, Styrofoam snow, solid snow that’s nearly ice, ice-coated snow that looks safe but will treacherously sink your leg up to the hip and leave you scrabbling and floundering helplessly about. We have to move it, shovelful by shovelful, and find places to stack it or we can’t get around, or perhaps even get out of our houses. It collapses roofs and confines livestock to their barns. It takes an enormous amount of management for a significant section of the year. If it doesn’t come—if we get the ambivalent “open winter”—the subzero temperatures kill plants and trees, which need the insulating layer of snow to survive, and then there is drought in the summer. People in more southerly climates where snow either melts off quickly or never comes at all don’t really understand what a huge presence it is in certain areas of the globe, and the combination of beauty, danger, and struggle it engenders affects us so deeply. I can only imagine what it must have been like in ancestral climates even farther north than my own, and how important it must have been to beg the spirit of Snow to be merciful.

Galina: I also live in the north, though not so far north as Raven, and I’ve learned to become accustomed to brutal winters. Snow has its own voice, its rhythms, its smell. It also has a sense of its own magnificence. I’ve never sensed any malicious intent in snow, but rather a sense of expansive satisfaction at what it is, in its own way, giving to the Earth. Despite the inconvenience it brings to us, it provides necessary rest and rejuvenation to the land itself, and it’s very conscious of its necessity. Snow should be treated with respect and met with joy, if possible. It likes offerings and interaction, but it is ancient and as majestic in its nature as the oldest of mountains. That’s an important point that we ought not to forget: it is an elder worthy of respect. Snow’s purpose is not to cause us trouble. But sometimes we are in the way of what it must do, and the healing it must bring to the land. We’re inadvertent collateral damage. It’s best to make offerings early (the first snows are the youngest Snow spirits, by the way) and to be consistent and respectful throughout the year. Explain your position to the Snow spirit, and ask its blessing and benevolence. It can watch over you too. It’s used to dealing with people, after all, even if we’ve forgotten how to talk to it well. Oh, and as a Snow spirit once said to me: good liquor makes a good offering. Gather the strongest spirits you can, and give them happily. It goes a long way because given that a generation of our ancestors willingly broke faith with the spirits, they’ve really very little reason to be kind to us. It’s a grace, gift, and blessing that they are.

In some Northern cultures, Snow is the Snow Queen, as she is portrayed in the Hans Christian Andersen tale—beautiful, mysterious, utterly coldhearted. Snow maidens in Scandinavia and Russia were said to lure unwary and exhausted travelers to their deaths, showing themselves and their beauty in a vision to the hapless fallen ones just before they died, and then covering their bodies with snow. The whitest spirit brings what one colleague of ours once called “the kindest death.” It is not uncommon in cases of extreme hypothermia to have hallucinations, or at the least go into an altered state because the body and soul are very close to death. One could believe that those about to succumb to the dancing snow maidens would see their full beauty just before leaving the meat shell to dance with them.

In Norse myth, as we’ve mentioned above, Snaer (Snow) is the grandson of the North Wind, and his children are the powerful Thorri (Frozen Snow) and the three snow maidens Fon (Snowfall), Drifa (Snowdrift), and the sorceress Mjol (Powder). There are also hundreds of tiny ephemeral Snow spirits. They can be very playful or charmingly regal, and they love to talk and chatter with each other. Some, particularly the youngest, are also very curious about humans. If you’re not comfortable calling on greater Snow spirits by culturally specific names, just call out to the Snow Queen or Snow King; they’ll know who you’re talking about.

Just as the curse of Snow spirits is a cold death in the drifts, their gift is survival in the cold. Shamans (and many shamanic practitioners as well) often end up going out into all weather to do their work. Neither clients nor spirits are necessarily convenient, and sometimes you end up in inclement weather, doing the job because the job needs to be done. Snow spirits can give you the sturdiness to cope with snow longer than you otherwise would be able to, with fewer detrimental side effects. That doesn’t mean that you should be stupid about exposure and hypothermia, but it does mean that you will do better with Snow on your side.

Exercise: Snow Survival

This exercise should be done on a very cold night, the coldest night of the year that it is safe for you to be out in. (We are aware that in some areas of the world, the coldest night of the year is simply not safe for anyone at all. Use your judgment, neither cheating the spirit nor endangering yourself too much.) Snow seems to like sweets, like scattered candy or maple syrup poured over the frozen ground. It also likes good, strong spirits and aromatic teas.

First, find a white or clear stone that reminds you of snow. Then you need to bake some sort of cake or cookies with white flour and sugar, ideally dusted with powdered sugar after baking. Put the stone into the batter and bake it right into the cake or one of the cookies. (A crystal is not the ideal stone for this, as it may crack in the heat of baking. Macrocrystalline stones are better.)

Then go out on the coldest day. You’re not trying to be a martyr, so dress appropriately. Lay the white cake or cookies on the frozen ground. Make your offering of candy or syrup or sweet alcohol or milk to the Snow spirit, let it freeze on the ground, and then lay down on the cold earth, facedown. Snow’s invocation is this:

Pure and white, I have brought you the heat of the fire, Deadly and white, bring me safety from the bitter cold, Beautiful and white, steal not my warmth in the winter.

Lay there until you can feel Snow touching you, or contacting you in some way, or until you are certain that it is not going to happen. Either way, go inside and leave the cake or cookies there until the spring thaw and they fall apart. If they vanish, your offering was accepted, but the deal was not made. If they fall apart in spring and you can easily pick out the stone, the bargain was accepted. Keep the stone as your charm against frostbite and hypothermia, with Snow’s blessing. (It is advisable to have an assistant for this exercise. The call of a Snow spirit can be quite compelling. Often during such journeys time seems to work differently. It’s very easy to end up staying out for two hours when you really feel it’s only been ten minutes. We suggest having someone on hand who can come check on you if you fail to return after a prearranged amount of time.)

Frost

Raven: The Frost spirit is the first one to arrive, the messenger who says, “Winter is here.” He kills tender plants in minutes—if we haven’t harvested the basil or tomatoes by that night, they will be a blackened, soggy, useless mass by morning. We listen closely for news of his coming so that we can throw down plastic and protect the delicate garden plants, keep them producing for just those few more days. Often the Frost spirit is weeks ahead of his snowy, icy brothers, dancing in and out, taunting us. He is a trickster, as anyone who has had to cope with his vagaries while minding a farm or garden will tell you. We either get everything harvested well beforehand, or we play the gambling game that he loves—can we risk just a few more days of production? Is this the first of the permanent nightly frosts, or is this an early aberration? He loves the game because he always wins it. Sooner or later, he paints our whole world.

Galina: I owe Frost a tremendous debt. He first came to me at the behest of his father and has continued to be very, very kind. As a shaman, I am also an ordeal master. As part of my work I was required by Odin to undergo nine ordeals, one for each of the Nine Worlds. For Niflheim, our world of ice, I had to “pathwalk” (journey to another world energetically while the body is in a similar place here) there and experience its cold and ice directly. This involved three days of cold camping in twenty-fivebelow-zero weather in the woods of Vermont. There was no fire, and I fasted for most of the time. I was miserable, colder than I’d ever been in my life, isolated from everything of the human world, and terrified at times as the ordeal progressed. The first night and every night after, Kari sent Frost to watch over me, to let me know that I was not without friends in this world, to keep a protective eye on me. Frost appeared to me as a slender man with pointed features and a beard, and he was compassionate and cheerful, but his eyes were ancient. It was a small thing, but it helped to get me through, and I remain grateful. I honor him regularly as Father Frost, and I will until the day I die.

One of the few spirits who survives in modern folktales, if only as a joking reference, is Jack Frost, the painter who decorates windows and other cold, moist surfaces. He is a holdover from older myths about Frosti, the son of the North Wind, one of the lords of the frost giants, or the Russian Frost King, who was a blacksmith and flung pieces of frozen iron to Earth. In Finland, myths tell of the Frost Queen and Frost King who bring the winter.

Even in the traditional myths, folktales, and general folk culture, Frost is a trickster. He is also an artist, which anyone can tell you as well, with a keen sense of beauty. In fact, one of the things that pleases him the most is when you walk outside on a day when everything is covered with his glittering artwork, exclaim in wonder, and tell him what a marvelous artist he is. People with farms and gardens can propitiate him by making little scarecrows, about a foot tall, of pieces of glittering glass or metal. They don’t have to be anthropomorphic; they can be stakes with glittery bits hanging from them. Spirit houses for Frost can be erected outside in the fall, before the first frost, and propitiated; they come down in the spring and are wrapped in cloth and laid to rest in a dark place until fall comes again. If you make offerings to him, he may skip your garden or hold off until a little later in the year . . . but don’t push your luck.

Exercise: Frost Scrying

On a night when you know that the temperature will drop and frost will cover the windows the next morning, go outside to a noninsulated window where you know frost will develop. Pour out a libation for him—he likes clear liqueurs. You can pour it right over the window if you like. Ask him to answer your question for you. Then, with your fingertip, write your question on the glass. If you are worried about privacy, don’t write it in letters—use symbols instead. Then go to bed, and get up early in the morning before the Sun heats anything. Go outside to the frost-covered window where you asked your question, and openly admire his artwork. (If there is no frost on it, that’s his way of saying that this is not a question he can answer.) Then breathe gently, three times, on the frost, and stare at it as it recrystallizes. An image will form in its feathery designs that will tell you what you need to know.

Ice

Raven: Ice is one of the most frightening of the wintry spirits. One can laugh at Frost’s antics, or admire Snow’s beauty, but Ice . . . just makes you shiver. Ice locks things up and traps them, and we know it, and our animal selves smell the trapper with the cold glance and we shy away. Still, if you are brave, Ice can be a strong ally. It’s perhaps easiest for people who already have a bit of Ice in their nature. You know, the ones whom people accuse of being cold. Like me. I still shiver, but I understand Ice, because it’s in me.

Galina: In order to work with Fire, I had to learn how to work with Ice. They are equals and, in some ways, partners. For all that, their lessons are quite different. Ice is about power and dominance. It is the most hierarchical of the elemental spirits, the one most exquisitely poised to gauge your position in whatever hierarchy you’ve stumbled into. It is a tremendously attractive element and tremendously deadly. Ice is about long-term species survival, and it is absolutely ruthless in enforcing that. Emotional pleas will get you nowhere with Ice and may in fact cause you to be met with potentially deadly contempt. Ice is about personal control, and also about learning how to acknowledge currents of power and how to recognize and accept your place in those currents. Knowing your place, knowing who is above you and who is below you without casting any judgment on those placements, is essential for working with this elemental spirit effectively. Learning how to effectively govern your emotions and put them aside when necessary is also part of this element’s “medicine.” It will teach you about power, and what you are and are not willing to sacrifice in order to gain it. It will teach you your place and whether you are predator or prey (as well as instill the knowledge that there is honor in both). If you are prey who plays at being a predator, it might just crush you out of existence. It may also show you exactly what your mettle and worth is, exactly what you’re willing to do to survive. That is Ice. Its ancestors carved the Earth to their liking, moving in glacier form across the globe. They wiped out entire species and challenged early humans to prove their resilience and their worth. It is the most unforgiving of elements and one of the most compelling. It has a voice like no other; like Fire, it sings, and its song is a very ancient one.

Isa, or Ice, is one of the major Norse/Germanic runes, and the most simply written. It is just a single vertical line, reminding us of the icicles that hang off our houses. The second son of the North Wind, Jokul, the icicle giant, is an embodiment of this energy, as are the various legends of ice maidens. Ice may show up as either male or female and is just as likely to appear androgynous or asexual. Ice spirit, or Icicle spirit, has an affinity for clear glass and especially mirrors. One can scry in a bowl of ice, or the surface of a frozen pond, or a mirror with a deep frame that has been filled with a thin layer of water and frozen while horizontal. Icicle spirit is cold and seems very inhuman due to its unemotional nature, but Icicle spirit also reflects things back to you, which is hard for us to take. Often the things Ice reflects back are the frozen parts of ourselves, the parts that we didn’t like so we put them in psychological cold storage . . . but there they are staring out at us through the glass when we talk to Ice. It’s not done to mess around with us; it’s just part of the nature of Ice. It is attracted to what is trapped, and if we can get over ourselves, we find that this quality can be useful. Ice is not completely still, though; it’s always moving, expanding, contracting. Even beneath the glaciers one finds power in motion. That is important to remember: Ice, like Fire, is never really still. It simply keeps up a warrior’s face, showing nothing of the tumultuous currents underneath.

For example, one of the easiest ways to do a binding on someone is to tie nine knots in a string while saying the person’s name and putting your Intent into each knot, and placing the string into a vessel of water, which you then stick in the back of your freezer. Of course, some readers at this point will be asking, “Why bind someone? Isn’t that unethical?” That depends. Even holding to the most stringent ethical standards that this path requires, there still could be very good reasons to do this. The Northern Tradition is a practical one. If you are being actively harmed by someone, then it is lawful to bind them. It depends on the circumstances and the people involved, but bindings have many uses. Maybe someone is having trouble quitting a bad habit and agrees to be energetically bound, but doesn’t have the willpower to do the binding him- or herself. Maybe someone has made a promise and wants some help keeping it. Maybe someone is doing something that is clearly harmful and it needs to be stopped.

For the latter situation, in which energetic binding is done without consent, we strongly recommend that practitioners pray to their Gods and spirits and get at least two separate positive divinations from neutral parties before they take this on. If the omens are all good, sometimes it is a matter of Dire Necessity, stopping harmful behavior that cannot be stopped any other way. Ice understands this. Ice is a spirit of Dire Necessity. Ice is also, by human mores, amoral. It has its own code of ethics and its own culture, and we are not part of that. Ice will do what needs to be done without any emotional qualms whatsoever.

When it comes to putting magic into water, it’s actually easier to put it into ice and make it stay than into liquid water. Most people haven’t discovered this fact because working with ice is inconvenient in so many ways. It’s hard to touch, it melts quickly in temperatures that we find comfortable, and it requires either being outside in winter or having a freezer nearby. Most people would rather work with liquid water, and they may not have made the ice connection yet. Why is it easier? Because ice is water turned, however ephemerally, to crystal. Crystals hold energy very well due to the shape of their matrix; that’s why so many people use them. Ice is, ironically, the cheapest and most readily available crystal around, and you can ingest it with ease on top of that. Unlike stone, it is transient, which is probably why it hasn’t caught on for crystal uses—why advertise something that almost anyone can get for free? Still, if you can’t afford crystal stones or need “disposable” crystal for something, ice is a very reasonable alternative. One can even make it in specifically shaped molds for the purpose.

Exercise: Raven’s Ice Cleansing

Get a large bowl of ice, just small enough that you can wrap your arms around it. The bigger the chunks of ice, the better. Pour a little bit of some offering liquid into it for Icicle spirit—milk, white wine, clear soda, liqueur. (Raven likes to use vodkas with the word ice on the label—there are a few of them of various levels of costliness—for offerings to the wintry spirits, perhaps with a little raw milk mixed in. Galina likes to use good cognac or sometimes ice wine.) There should be enough ice in the bowl that the offering hardly makes a dent. Ask the Icicle spirit to take the filth that has built up inside you. Blow across the ice with a warm breath, and watch the steam that rises. If you can catch a glimpse of Icicle spirit nodding his head, that’s a good sign.

Hold the bowl in your arms, against your chest. You can rest it on your lap if need be, but don’t protect yourself too much from the cold. The cold is uncomfortable, and that’s part of the process. (Whether you do this outside in cold weather or inside in a heated house is up to you and your ability to deal with the cold.) Take deep breaths, and with each exhalation try to empty your lungs completely. Breathe directly onto the ice, and as you do so, try to feel the negative energy in your body leaving through your lungs and getting sucked into the ice crystals. You may also channel the negative energy into the ice through your hands holding the bowl. After a while, if Icicle spirit is helping, it will feel as if the psychic filth is drawing up out of the rest of your body and down from your head, and going into your lungs, and then each exhalation is being pulled out of you and into the ice. Do not touch the ice with your hands or body, as it is taking away what you don’t want coming back.

As you do this, the ice will slowly melt. Continue this exercise until the ice is entirely melted, a bowl of cold water. Take the water outside and fling it into the air, being careful to throw it away from you. Pour out more of the offering for the Icicle spirit, and say thank you.

Flute

Raven: The recorder was the first musical instrument that I ever played. Well, there was that kazoo at age four that my mother quickly took away from me, but the recorder was the first one that I ever made anything resembling music on. I played the concert flute as an older child for years, until an accident in my teens cut up my lip and prevented me from making the right mouth shape. By that time I was enamored of the piano and guitar and mandolin, and wind instruments went by the wayside. My favorite recorder was stolen and broken by schoolmates, and I told the Universe that when it was ready for me to play anything with my breath, it could replace what I’d lost. In my fit of pique, I turned entirely to strings and voice, which I was better at anyway.

Thirty years later, my first lover died of pancreatic cancer. When our daughter sadly cleaned out the house, she found the handsome alto recorder that belonged to my lover and spouse, and gave it to me. “It felt like it wanted to come to you,” she said. As I work most closely with a death goddess, it is not surprising that many of my most timely gifts have come from deceased loved ones . . . and apparently, it’s time to pick up the practice of breath music yet again.

Galina: I studied piano for sixteen years as a child and was torn between pursuing music or ballet professionally. I chose the latter and gave up music for a very long time. My adopted mother was a musician, though. She trained at a specialized conservatory in Basel and taught piano for more than twenty years. When she died, I hungered for any fragment of her life that I might snatch up and tuck away, any crumb, no matter how small. Even as I honored her in my ancestral devotions, I craved some shadow of the physical, real-world connection that we used to share. Because she’d been a musician, I decided to go back to music. It was frustrating with the piano—I’d lost all my technique, and playing it reminded me a bit too painfully of her—but her favorite instrument had actually been the alto recorder. She didn’t play it because it always felt strange in her hands, but she loved the sound, so I took that up instead. Playing became one new way of connecting to her, and I would often hear her correcting my mistakes as I practiced. People tend to dismiss the recorder as a child’s instrument, but in actuality it’s not. There’s a tremendous musical canon for it, especially in Baroque music. I continue to play, and it’s one of my ways of honoring both my love for my mother and the Wind spirits. There’s peace there and beauty and tremendous respect: for my mom, for Wind, for the spirit of Music itself. It also made me far more aware of the importance of breath and breathing properly!

Wind spirits all love music and sound, but they have a special affinity for instruments that are played with the breath. These are some of the oldest instruments, as far as we can tell from tribal peoples, but because they are usually made of perishable materials, we rarely see them in archaeological finds. The earliest flutes were likely made of hollow plant stems with holes cut in them, an instrument played by children in some rural areas to this day. They have also been carved of wooden saplings (or bamboo in Asia), cast in clay, and—most likely to survive—bone and antler. The earliest known flute was found in the Ach Valley of southern Germany, one of the areas of this shamanic tradition. It was carved from the hollow wing bone of a giant vulture, and was dated to thirty-five thousand years ago.

There are many different kinds of flutes, but they can be sorted into two main types: horizontal and vertical. Horizontal flutes are easier to make, but much harder to play. Vertical flutes are a little more complicated, but easier to play, especially for inexperienced musicians who may find it difficult to perform the mouth-blowing of a horizontal flute. For this reason, we give directions for making a vertical flute, but one can easily find directions for horizontal flutes in books and online. You can also find directions and videos for vertical flutes by searching online for “making tin whistles” or “penny whistles.”

Craft: Making a Flute

The hardest part of making a flute is getting the holes at just the right length from each other. With this in mind, we suggest that you make some cheap practice flutes out of PVC pipe first in order to get the pitch right and to help you decide which key you want to play in. You can always give them to children or to a kindergarten or daycare when you’re ready to make the sacred piece. Pick up a piece of ¾-inch-diameter PVC pipe the length of your forearm as well as a PVC adapter meant to link your ¾-inch-diameter pipe with a ½-inch diameter pipe.

With a rasp, sand down a 3-inch strip about ½-inch wide, starting at one end of the pipe. You want to remove enough material to make it significantly flatter. How to know if it’s enough? Put the adapter on the end and look under the edge. The flattened area should create a gap between the inner surface of the adapter and the outer surface of the flute. Smooth the area with sandpaper and then drill a ¼-inch hole at the very end of the pipe on the flattened area, just a tiny bit from the edge. About ½ inch farther down on the flattened area, drill two
1/8-inch holes right next to each other, close enough that you can drill out the tiny bit between them and create a rectangular hole.

The next step involves finding a piece of ¾-inch wooden dowel and cutting off a piece that is the exact width between the end hole and the rectangular hole. You want to wedge this plug right between those two holes, which many require a bit of sanding to get it in. If it doesn’t stick perfectly, you can glue it. Then you push the adapter onto that end, so that it is covering the first hole and a little of the second.

Then you will make the holes for the notes. The first flute you make will be sized to your hands, and there’s no telling what key it will be in, but it’s a good practice run. Drill ¼-inch holes down the flute in the following order:

1. Drill the first hole one hand’s width below the rectangular hole.

2. Drill the second hole one hand’s width from the other end.

3. Drill the third hole the distance between the first and second knuckle below hole 1.

4. Drill the fourth hole the distance between the first and second knuckle above hole 2.

5. Drill the fifth one hole the distance between the first and second knuckle above hole 4.

Blow through the flute and see what kind of sounds you can make. Check to see what key it is in. The Winds would say that this is your own personal key. You can make a few more if you want to learn to make flutes in specific keys. After you add the adapter “mouthpiece,” blow through it and check the note. You can make a new flute that is shorter if you want to change the key and then shrink the distances between the holes accordingly when you measure them. You can also try spacing holes equally and see how that works. Figure out which combination is best for you.

When you are ready to make a shamanic flute out of natural materials, you can repeat the process with a piece of ¾-inch hollowed-out wood sapling and a specially carved mouthpiece that copies the plug-and-holes of the PVC flute, or the right size of bone, or—if you’re a very good potter—a clay flute fired around a metal pipe, which is how a potter friend of Raven’s made his. If you drill the flute from wood or bone, every time you drill—whether it is drilling out the initial hollow or drilling each hole, say, “I open you that spirit may come into you and through you.” The hidden plug can be made special as well with runes or symbols. To preserve a wooden flute, once it is sanded down, coat it on the inside with oil. This can be ordinary linseed oil, or you can add a few drops of essential oils that are pleasing to the Air spirits.

To bring a spirit into it, decorate it with symbols of the Wind spirits and leave it hanging from a tree branch for three days and nights. You can hang ribbons and chimes around it to encourage the spirit to come into it. Play your flute outside when the winds are strong. Let them tell you what their tunes are. Each has a simple tune, but they don’t share those quickly. They also know all sorts of tunes to control other things—the North Wind taught Raven the simple tune to activate a labyrinth and make it into a door to other worlds.

If making a flute is beyond you, commit to learning to play a flute or recorder well. Burn designs into your instrument if it is made of wood. Decorate it, honor it, keep it in pristine condition, and, most of all, practice. Nothing comes without the daily discipline of practice. It’s the only thing that gives birth to excellence, and it can be an excellent devotional offering to the Winds.

10

The Black World

Ancestors

We live because you lived,

Because you wrote, we have your wisdom;

Your blood runs through our veins,

Your brightest flames our inspiration,

We grew because you cared,

Because you dared to swear survival,

We know the road behind,

The threads unwind, the hope we find,

Because you lived.

FROM “BECAUSE YOU
LIVED” BY GEORDIE
INGERSON

Many traditions pay special homage to their ancestors, to those who have walked the spiritual path before us, contributing to the common threads of being that we all share. Honoring one’s lineage is the first and one of the most important steps in developing a strong spiritual foundation. It is a place of beginning. For shamans, spirit workers, and shamanic practitioners, it is essential.

The word ancestor is a very broad term. Ancestors may include those who died for you, or who were close enough to be spiritual kin (teachers, mentors, friends). They may include relatives or colleagues from past incarnations. They may even include the Elemental Powers, who are our oldest ancestors. If you are adopted, you have your maternal and paternal biological lines as well as your maternal and paternal adopted lines. In fact, you have ancestors back to the time the first ancient critter hauled itself out of the primordial ooze to try a little land living. You don’t need to know all their names. They know you. They are connected to you by blood, bone, marrow, hope, sacrifice, and spirit.

We want to take a moment to note that no one lineage is better than another. Paying homage to the ancestors is not, in any way, shape, or form an excuse for racism, which goes against the sacred practice of diversity found in all of Nature. Rather, it is a means of honoring those who came before us, whose actions and lives helped create and shape our own. It means honoring those who shed blood for us, who suffered and sacrificed so that we might remember, live fully, and learn to craft lives of honor. It is an acknowledgment that we are all connected through the Holy Powers, through the cycle that Hela—the Goddess of Death—governs. We honor the continuity of divine presence throughout the course of our lives. We honor their strength, courage, wisdom, and struggles, and we seek to learn from them. If in your life and in this work you do nothing else but honor your dead consistently and well, you are doing something powerful, important, and meaningful . . . maybe even crucial. It all begins here. Power, wisdom, and wholeness all come from our roots, and our ancestors are those roots.

In the Northern Tradition, we have several different types of ancestors. The word Dis (plural: Disir) refers specifically to the female guardian ancestors of one’s line. They are women who have chosen not to be reborn, but to dedicate themselves to the task of watching over their descendants. Disir are very important because they are guardians of the luck you gain through your genetic line. In this tradition we believe that luck relies particularly heavily on the female line in passing from one generation to the next. We also have the word Alf (plural: Alfar) for the male ancestors. Neither of us use this word much because it may also refer to a denizen of Alfheim, the elven realms, and we prefer to avoid the confusion. Usually, we refer to our Disir, our foremothers and forefathers, and our collective ancestors, and that seems to do the trick.

Our blood kin are the ancestors of the body, of Earth. We also have the ancestors of the heart, which corresponds to Water. These include foster parents, beloved friends, stepparents, deceased spouses, and other close companions. If you loved them and they loved you, they count. Then there are the ancestors of the mind, which corresponds to Air—teachers, writers, and other people whose words made you think and who expanded your mind, who you respect and perhaps wish you’d known. Finally, there are ancestors of the spirit, of Fire—people who have done great deeds that inspired you and caused you to keep going on your own path. You can see how an ancestor altar could be set up with different people’s names and pictures in different directions.

One does not evolve spiritually in a vacuum. We as shamans and shamanic practitioners are tradition builders, whether we want to be or not. Some of our ancestors lived lives steeped in the very traditions we’re struggling to reconstruct. They can help us. They have the wisdom of having an instinctive, organic understanding of why things need to be a certain way. Moreover, they are on our side. Most of our ancestors want us to succeed, to thrive, to be happy. There’s tremendous protection and support when, through proper honoring of one’s dead, one is able to tap in to that.

Much of our luck flows from our dead. You can build a strong spiritual house by maintaining the integrity of your lineage. Integrity means honoring them properly, engaging with them regularly, and living in a way that does them and ourselves honor. Our ancestors and the vaettir of our world can assist us in our journey and in our spiritual work. We can learn much from them, but only if we empower them to act with us. Ancestors are not Gods, and they must be invited and given a place in our lives.

A brick house cannot be built without many single bricks, which cannot be secured without mortar. Paying homage to one’s ancestors (and also to the spirits of the land) is the mortar and clay from which those bricks are formed. We begin in the physical because we are physical beings. The senses of touch, sight, sound, smell, and taste are the primary filters through which we experience our world. Eventually, like strengthening a muscle, our ability to sense and interact with the unseen, the nonphysical, develops and grows. An important step in growing strong and whole and healthy in this tradition, however, is honoring those who have struggled to do exactly that before us. This process is helped by the fact that many spirits choose to stay as guides and watchers, and many people have at least one strong ancestral spirit who has been given the responsibility of guidance for their soul. Our dead will work as hard to facilitate communication with us as we do with them, and usually one particular powerful spirit steps forward to order one’s ancestral house and keep things smoothly running.

There are two questions that we get asked more than any others when the subject of ancestor veneration arises: What if I’m adopted? and What if the people in my family were horrible human beings?

The first is easy: great! As we noted above, if you’re adopted, you have two sets of ancestors. Honor both lines, and see who steps forward to speak for you. The second is a bit more complicated, but ultimately everyone has at least one person in his or her line who was a terrible person. We can learn from our ancestors’ failures as much as from their successes. Rest assured, you are not alone in having unsavory people in your ancestral line. It happens. You don’t have to honor the abusive uncle or the bad parent. Go around them. You have many, many ancestors; just go back as far as you have to in order to make the connection. Eventually, with help from their side and hard work from yours, it will all sort itself out.

Ceremonies called ancestor elevation rites can be done by a sincere descendant of a suffering, aggressive, angry, or abusive dead relative in order to bring that soul to a better state where the person understands, repents, and is willing to do what must be done in order to make things right. Sometimes it’s easier to help difficult relatives after they are dead than while they are still living and trapped by things like brain chemistry, past history, and circumstances. If you are interested in the work of ancestor elevation, it is explained on this website:
www.northernpaganism.org/shrines/ancestors/writings/a-ritual-to-elevate-the-troubleddead.html.

In addition, we very strongly recommended Weaving Memory: A Guide to Honoring the Ancestors, by Laura Patsouris (Asphodel Press, 2011). It’s an excellent guide to this work by a very experienced and skilled ancestor worker. It will teach you pretty much everything you need to know to delve into these fundamental practices.

One side note: In addition to personal ancestors, those of us who are shamans, spirit workers, shamanic practitioners, clergy members, diviners, warriors, healers, and so forth also have what we like to call our lineage ancestors. This isn’t our physical lineage but our spiritual one. Let’s use divination as an example. As diviners, we are the most recent practitioners in a long line of men and women who have committed their lives to practicing this sacred art in service to their Gods, ancestors, spirits, and community. The diviners who came before us are our elders in the work. It is a sacred and holy thing. We are, for lack of a better term, their descendants. It doesn’t matter if the tradition was lost for a time. We’re picking up those threads. We can learn much about how to do this work right not only from our regular ancestors, but from our lineage ones as well.

Galina: I struggled for over ten years to develop an engaged ancestral practice. I was very lucky too; I was living at the time with a roommate who practiced Santeria. One day while I was doing a bit of magical work, Hela “showed up” and chastised me coldly. Who was I to do this type of work without first paying homage to my dead? Who was I to think that I could stand alone without showing any respect to those who paved the way for my successes? Who was I to think that I had no obligations to anyone but myself? Who was I to disrespect the dead? I didn’t need to be told twice. When I told my roommate what had happened, he brought me to his teacher, and she taught me the basics of maintaining an ancestral altar. I struggled and stumbled along for years. I didn’t have a particularly good relationship with my birth family, and it was hard to really form that connection. Eventually things sorted themselves out, and when my adopted mother died, I found that she stepped forward and finished putting my ancestral house in order. Now I actually function as an ancestor worker, meaning that part of my spiritual work is teaching others how to honor their dead, helping to heal ancestral lines, and honoring the forgotten dead.

Raven: As I described in the last chapter, at some point in my training an ancestral spirit showed up in my house. He is very old—around 1,300 years dead—and had been a Saami noaide, or spirit worker. He was half-Norse on his mother’s side, and his Nordic mother introduced him to some of her Gods, including Hela. He told me that she died when he was around puberty, by which time he already knew that he would be a noaide. In exchange for his mother’s safe passage and peace after death, he offered to serve Hela himself for part of his life and again after he died. I can’t make out his name through the language barrier—the dialect of Saami that he speaks has since died out—so I call him Uncle Noaide, and give him stew and tea and cakes. He taught me how to use a drum for healing, how to observe the plants in an ecosystem, and many other things. He is, in effect, the ancestor of my lineage, although he did not have children himself and I am descended through his sister’s family. But he is my elder, sent here to teach me, and I respect him.

Exercise: Setting Up an Ancestral Altar

For the Black World, there is only one exercise: setting up an ancestral altar or shrine. There are endless ways of making proper offerings, but the first step is constructing an ancestral altar. This should be a separate altar from anything given to the Gods or the spirits of Nature. A simple shelf will do, dedicated entirely to the ancestors. There’s no right or wrong way to set up an altar, and we believe that in time your own ancestors will guide you into arranging it in a way that they like best. Our ancestral altars look quite different and reflect the differing ways in which we came into this work.

Galina: I’ve been told that my ancestral altars are distinctly Cuban. I suspect this is because my first bumbling forays into ancestor veneration were guided by a very patient santera (priest) in a Cuban Santerian house. I’m OK with that. My dead like it. It works for them. In fact, I didn’t actually realize it was very Cuban flavored until teaching a public workshop on polytheism. I began by laying out an ancestral altar. Since we all have ancestors, it’s usually a nice way of making some common ground right off. Three of the people present had grown up in Cuban Santerian households, and they all sat down by the altar with happy, contented little sighs and told me it reminded them of their childhoods. I was amused. To me, it was just what my dead liked.

I maintain three ancestor shrines in my home. The main shrine is a huge credenza that takes up one wall of my dining room. It has a shelf above it and above that a sixteenth-century map of Basel. Many of my maternal relatives both adopted and biological came from a little town outside of Basel. On the shelf I have pictures of my immediate relatives from all my lines, my grandmother’s prayer book and a couple of small knickknacks that belonged to her, two Lithuanian dolls in folk costumes for my paternal line, which, despite my last name, is almost 100 percent Lithuanian. On the bottom I have images of teachers and mentors, more blood ancestors, my ancestor pot, a small section given over to my lineage ancestors (as shaman, priest, warrior, and diviner) and a small section given over to honor Scathach. (She was a great warrior woman and teacher among the ancient Celts; I honor her as a heroic ancestor and am slowly working to restore her hero cult.) I also have images of various allies who help me maintain clean lines of communication with my dead, and many glasses filled with offerings. There are usually candles, incense, flowers, and offering plates of food, too, and of course, tobacco. I speak for the military dead, our warrior dead, so a small section of my altar is devoted to them as well.

On either side of this shrine I have framed images: to the right an image of Beli, a giant from whom I get my Jotun (giant-god) blood; beneath that, my paternal aunt’s wedding photo, and to the left an image of my dad when he graduated boot camp right before WWII. It’s framed in a shadow box and surrounded by his military medals. Beneath that is a lovely photo of my adopted mom. I also have several deity statues on my ancestral altar: Odin, as I share his bloodline; Surt, as progenitor of all (Fire being one of our eldest ancestors); Sekhmet the Egyptian lioness goddess, because she is my spiritual mother; Ganesh the elephant-headed Hindu god, because a relative has a connection to him; Chango the Santerian orisha of fire, because one of my ancestors (not related to me by blood) was devoted to him; and several of the Virgin Mary for various of my dead. Sometimes when honoring the dead, we have to respect their wishes and their own spiritual connections. One of my dead wanted a Virgin Mary statue, so she got a Virgin Mary statue.

I also have part of my adopted mom’s ancestral altar, including pictures of certain writers and poets whose work nourished her and helped her survive a difficult childhood. Offerings are always out. Opposite this credenza, nestled in a bookcase, is an iron pot, which is the home of one of my protective spirits, an ancestor who requested this particular placement and who keeps watch over my home. In my living room is a shelf with images of my adopted mom and certain sacred items that belonged to her (a deity image, her prayer beads, a small offering bowl), as well as candles, incense, flowers, and such. I make offerings at each every day, and the altars are a visible sign of my love and respect for my dead, and a conduit for mindfulness, memory, and active veneration. I do something with or for my ancestors every single day. Additionally, as an ancestor worker, I lead public rituals to the dead, lecture, teach, and do whatever I can to help clients who come to me get right with their ancestral house and obligations.

Raven: My ancestor altar is a little simpler—despite having Hela as my patron deity, I am not specifically an ancestor worker. As my eldest elder, Uncle Noaide takes the central place, surrounded by his náttúrhús and little reindeer herd. Around them are pieces of glassware owned by my grandparents. I inherited my grandmother’s collection of colored glass bottles, and they reside on a separate shelf against the window as part of my house warding, but the nicest pieces are on the ancestors’ altar. Also on the altar are some old photos, as well as names written down for people who have no photos. There are my grandfather’s broken pocket watches and his father’s old pocket knives. There is a Dala horse for my Scandinavian ancestors and some old dolls from Germany for the German half of the family. There is my grandmother’s old doll Celeste, a very early Madame Alexander model that was passed to my mother and then to me, and some items of my dead ex. (Even though we were age mates, I do consider my ex to have become an ancestor, and as we did make a daughter together, we are still family.)

I also have a vase of egunguns, an Umbanda tradition that I was moved to carry on. An egungun is a stick with strips of colored fabric tied to the end and cascading down, ideally cut from the clothing of the beloved dead or at the least what they would have worn. I have several, mostly from the friends who have died during my life and whose old clothes I grabbed to make the egungun. One is for the woman whose portrait grave rubbing was given to me as a gift and hangs on my wall; she died in 1386, but upon receiving that gift I was obligated to honor Elizabeth Bellingham as an ancestor as well. Doing the work we do often means that you can’t get away with casual things like hanging a dead person’s grave rubbing on the wall with no obligation.

As you can see, there’s a great deal of variation between our altars. That’s to be expected. There’s no right or wrong way to do this. Our dead are their own individuals, and we have unique relationships with them, and doing this is a partnership in many ways. By setting up an altar, you’re welcoming them into your life and home. You’re giving a visible sign of the hospitality that you are offering, and a visible sign that they are remembered, cared for, and honored.

Creating an ancestral altar can be as much an exercise in creativity as creating an altar to a spirit or deity. Whatever reminds you of your beloved dead can go on an ancestral altar; if you have small objects belonging to specific ancestors and wish to honor those people, all the better. The important thing is that the ancestral altar serves as a potent reminder that these people are still part of one’s family and one can still have an ongoing relationship with them.

The most common items to place on an ancestral altar are pictures of the dead. There is one caveat here: it is appropriate to place pictures of the deceased, even if they died as infants, on one’s ancestral altar, but under no circumstances should the picture of a living person be included. This is considered the equivalent of tempting or thumbing one’s nose at Death, neither of which is a wise course of action. Offerings may include cigarettes, raw tobacco, cornmeal, glasses of water, glasses of wine or other alcohol, foods that they might have liked, and various symbols of our ancestors from further back in both our spiritual and physical lineage. (Those who have Native American ancestry may find that their ancestors do not want alcohol, in which case it’s appropriate to give good clean water, juice, coconut milk, or any other nonalcoholic beverage. Similarly, Raven’s ancestors will not tolerate tobacco on their altar—most disapproved of smoking and a few had loved ones die of lung cancer. It’s interesting that both substances are sacred to the ancestors of specific people and were misused to terrible ends by those who did not recognize them as sacred.)

Any objects belonging to one’s deceased ancestors are completely appropriate, as are items from specific areas. It really is as simple as that, though it’s vital to remember that an altar is a living, changing thing, and there must ever be a consistent flow of energy. Keep the offerings ongoing and fresh. Do not neglect the altar, be it the ancestral altar or the primary devotional one. The altar is a link between the living and the honored dead. It is a pathway that must be walked regularly. In the Hávamál, Odin cautions us:

Hast thou a friend whom thou trustest well,

from whom thou cravest good?

Share thy mind with him, gifts exchange with him,

fare to find him oft.

POETIC EDDA, HÁVAMÁL,
STANZA 44

Ancestor worker Laura Patsouris also advises strongly against fair-weather propitiation to ancestral altars: “As much as this holds true with the living, it holds equally true with the dead. I am always surprised when I run into Heathens or Pagans who neglect their ancestors. Our ancestral dead are no less than the lynchpin of our spiritual protection, luck, and well-being. They are truly invested in our safety and will gladly defend us, asking only for our love and reciprocal devotion in return. Consistency is the key here; they want to be an active part of our lives. Honor them regularly, not just when you need a favor. They gave us life; we owe them our gratitude and respect. Anything less is just bad manners.”

In addition to making an altar, there are many other ways of honoring one’s ancestors. We visit cemeteries (especially on anniversaries of a loved one’s death), tell stories of our dead, name children after beloved dead, and keep pictures of our loved ones. These are all ways of remembering the dead, of keeping their memories alive, of reminding ourselves that they’re still part of our families. This is what ancestor veneration is all about, and moving those things into the sphere of conscious action and then fleshing them out makes it all the more powerful a practice.

Because our ancestors are part of our spiritual life, it is appropriate to invite them to partake of the energy and offerings of each ritual. Therefore, offerings and calls may be made during services. I suggest that in ritual practice, after the space has been consecrated, pour or place the offering down and make a formal statement inviting the vaettir and ancestors to partake. It is also proper to set aside a portion of one’s meals, and even set an empty place at table for the ancestors. Walking through a graveyard and reading the names on the graves is a way of honoring the dead in general. We both will honor other people’s ancestors if there is no one else to do it. Remembering and speaking aloud the ancestor’s name, thus imbuing it with life and making it sacred, is a way of aligning one’s spirit with eternal life. The same holds true for telling their stories. Cemeteries are sacred places. The gateway into them, much like the torii gate marking the passage into Shinto temples, delineates passage between worlds, passage into sacred territory.

Craft: Cooking for the Dead

There is no more essential way of providing nourishment than cooking for someone. That holds true for the dead as much as for the living. Moreover, so much of culture, traditions, folk practices, and such are passed down through the tangibles of our lives, especially food. Once you’ve gotten your altar or shrine created and you’ve been working with it for a couple of weeks, offer your dead an ancestral feast. Cook foods that specific relatives liked, foods native to the places from which your ancestors came, or anything else that they tell you that they want. Lay the table nicely, and set out the food just as you would if you were having special guests over. Have good things to drink, and use nice dishes. If you and your grandma spent time in the kitchen making certain things, well, make those recipes. If you’ve never been in a kitchen before, that’s okay. Just keep it simple. Start with something that isn’t too frightening, or better yet, have a friend who is experienced at cooking come help for moral (and practical) support. There are lots of very simple recipe books out there. If cooking is intimidating to you, just keep it as simple as you can. Even cooking up some pasta and sauce, if that is the best you can do, is a good and worthy offering.

We usually advise setting the food out, calling your ancestors and welcoming them, and then going away. We also leave the food on the table for twenty-four hours and then dispose of it. (Both of us have land, so we can leave it outside under a tree or in the woods for critters to snack on afterward. If you are a city dweller, respectfully put it in the garbage just as you would after a regular dinner party with the living.) We have often encountered people who wonder at this waste of food. It’s not a waste, though. The ancestors are real. The Gods are real. You are sharing the food with real beings. That they are taking the ond, or energy, of the offering and not the physical food itself does not mean that the food is not being consumed. We generally advise against eating what has been offered to them, by the way. (Raven likes to sit in front of the altar for a while and make a spirit connection to whatever dead he is feeding, and then eat and drink for them, letting them taste the food through his body. This can be accomplished using the same instructions for connecting to any of the spirits in this book—by this time you ought to know how to do that, and these are actual human beings, so it’s easier.)

Some ancestor workers cook for their dead every single week. Galina offers part of most meals to her dead. The ancestral feast, though, is very special. If you can do it once a week, that is fantastic, but if not, try to do it every month, or every couple of months, and talk to your ancestors frequently. Consistency is the key here. They will more than meet you halfway if you are consistent and respectful. After all, no one likes to deal with the relative who calls only when he needs money! Don’t be that person.

In the Northern Tradition, the goal of one’s life is to die well. This is not the outcome of some morbid fascination with death, but rather the acknowledgment not only of the natural, eternal cycle of rebirth but that dying well encompasses every part of one’s life and involves living well, living each day in truth, serving the Holy Powers, honoring the ancestors, and crafting something for the future. In this work, we strive not only to better ourselves and to grow closer to the Gods, but to strengthen the threads of our communal wyrd, to craft something better for those who will come after us. Working with the ancestors in honesty and integrity of spirit is the first step on that path. One day we will be the ancestors upon which others call. It is incumbent on us to become the type of people whom our descendants will remember with honor and respect.

Epilogue

Broken Promises

While we’ve already made it clear that this shamanic tradition is for everyone who is called to it, regardless of ancestry, it is also true that the heritage of Northern Tradition shamanism is largely European. For this basic book, we’ve concentrated on beginning elements that are less obviously imbued with that cultural context, but if you choose to take on more advanced work, those cultural elements become much more obvious and necessary to the practice. This is the ancestral practice of people of northern European ancestry, whose descendants are almost all Caucasian. The authors are members of that demographic, and the fact that it is our ancestral heritage is important to us . . . because we grew up being told that we had no shamanic ancestral heritage, or at least none worth speaking of. We learned differently from the Gods and spirits themselves, and it was amazing and revelatory information. So while we’re fine with people of any ancestry taking on this tradition, here we feel that we need to speak specifically to people of European ancestry. Very few writers, speakers, and teachers are addressing this issue from this particular point of view.

We are the inheritors of a terrible burden. Those of us who are called to revive our ancient traditions face tremendous difficulties. This holds true for the average person, and the difficulties are increased a thousand times for the priest, mystic, shaman, spirit worker, ancestor worker, or shamanic practitioner engaged in this work. We are tasked with reaching back into the past to find and reweave threads sundered very long ago, and we are also tasked with integrating those threads into the warp and weft of modernity. We are given the job of rebuilding and restoring, and sometimes before that can happen, we are given the more difficult job of tearing down and demolishing: our own preconceptions, cultural corruption, spiritual roadblocks, and personal anxieties. Sometimes we have to fight the poison of our own cultural hubris. This is not easy work. It is, at times, heartbreaking. It is often grueling and always challenging. Yet it is, perhaps, the most crucial work that any of us will ever do.

We like our spirituality neat. We modern people abhor a mess, especially an emotional mess. Religion should be “civilized,” after all, whatever that may mean to us. We are children of the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution: mountains of ideology standing between us and the world of our ancestors. Worse, we are children of forced monotheism. It’s true that we’ve gained a great deal over the passing centuries, but we’ve lost a great deal too, in some areas far more than we’ve acquired.

Restoration is a terrible thing. It presupposes a sundering, a destruction, and the need for bringing back something that was lost. Those of us who have taken up this work, whether we realize it or not, are in the process of restoring ancestral traditions. We are engaged in a rather radical reimagining and re-creation for the contemporary age. Each time we hail our Gods or gather in ritual, each time we pour out a libation or bow before our dead, each time we admit to being a member of a religion or spiritual practice based on ancient European beliefs, we are undoing in some small way the cultural and religious devastation wrought by forced monotheism and the abandonment of our indigenous Gods. We are taking up again a very ancient contract. We are returning to our ancestral obligations and practices, restoring the sacred bonds between humans and land, humans and ancestors, humans and Gods. We are restoring balance. This is a good and holy thing, and a necessary thing. Most of all, it’s about time.

However, in our attempts to do this work, we are sadly hobbled by circumstance. We’re working without roots, without any grounding in the core spiritual values that would support such an undertaking. We are so far removed from the basic comprehension of the place of holiness in the physical world that our ancestors experienced (in part, by virtue of their necessary dependence on it) that even when we find a deep connection to that sacredness, we do not know how to integrate it into our daily lives and our behavior toward others. We have forgotten concepts that our ancestors would have taken for granted: the independent existence of the Gods, spirits, and other Holy Powers; the efficacy and importance of prayer; the correct way to show respect for the Gods and spirits; the rightness of sacrifices; the power of the holy to act directly in our lives; the need to honor the dead consistently; and the necessity for realistic and thorough training for our spiritual specialists (like shamans and priests). Or, worse, we look at these things with an air of condescension and superiority. “What, get down on my knees, beat the floor, and cry out with tears and shouts to my ancestors? That’s primitive superstition; we’re more civilized. We’re more orderly. We know better.” Or, more amusingly, “Our ancestors didn’t really mean that; they just didn’t understand.” This again culminates in the hubris of “We know better about all things.” Philosophers call this idea Urdummheit, the idea that our ancestors were stupid.

The sad thing is, however, is that we don’t know better. In fact, we don’t know at all. There is a vast chasm between the polytheistic worldview, in which the multiplicity and diversity of divine expression (and by extension human religious expression) were valued and seen as normal and natural, and the monotheistic worldview, in which there is so often “one true way” and everyone must believe and practice in relatively the same way. We are nowhere near to bridging that divide. We’ve been separated from our traditions for too long.

Think about it as we digress for a moment: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the American government established a policy of routinely stealing Native American children away from their families. They locked them up in schools, like the one in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where they were beaten if they spoke their own language; forced into Christianity; forced into European garb; and forced to deny anything of their culture, religion, or values. It took one generation to wreak untold devastation on the surviving Native cultures. Native peoples are still struggling to recover from the devastation, not only of European conquest and genocide, but of cultural and religious genocide as well. This all happened within the past two hundred years. There are Native men and women alive today who were taken illegally from their families or forcibly adopted into white families “for their own good.” We are, at best, a generation away from these crimes.

Those of us of European ancestry, once upon a time, had indigenous religious traditions too. These were taken from us. In some cases, methods included torture, blackmail, threats to family members, economic pressure, and outright mass murder. There was a slow, insidious spread of cultural and religious imperialism across Europe. The chaos of many Gods became the order of one, by force. All the traditions by which our ancestors maintained right order and balance in their world—with themselves, the Holy Powers, the ancestors, the Elemental Powers—were condemned, attacked, and eventually lost. One might even call it a form of religious genocide, if you consider that those with psychic “gifts” that had been placed into their bloodline by the Gods and spirits in order to be better mediators were among the most wanted in the slaughter. European bloodlines became impoverished by a thousand years of killing off the people who might have been spirit workers, had they lived in a different culture.

In areas of the world where indigenous religion was only recently wiped out in the past century, and the tribal spirit workers have died out or been killed off without heirs, it’s not unusual for waves of bad fortune to befall the people. One example is the tribes of Siberia, whose shamans were executed by the Soviet regime; they now suffer from a painfully high incidence of alcoholism and sometimes murderous infighting. (See Piers Vitebsky, The Reindeer People, in the Resources.) Another example is Micronesia, where Islam and modern fashion have seen to it that the tribal priests and shamans have almost died out, with no youths to take their place . . . and a wave of mental illness has struck many of the islands. On some islands, as much as 2 percent of the population is suffering from schizophrenia and other thought disorders.*2

We know from the history and folklore of many lands that if members of a tribe reject their ancestral spirits en masse, the spirits have the lawful right to strike back, often cursing them and all their descendants. While we have no proof that this is what is happening in Siberia and Micronesia, from a spirit worker’s perspective it is a distinct possibility. This does not mean that no one can be personally called to another faith and convert, but forced conversions of whole peoples—especially in ways that demonize and dishonor the original Gods and spirits and make it difficult for the children of the future to know them—invoke the wrath of the wronged powers. (Among the Hmong people of Asia, if individuals choose to convert to Christianity, they must first go through a ceremony in which they make amends to the spirits whom they are leaving behind, or bad luck will follow them and their entire family, regardless of religion.) If we accept this as a possibility and apply it to the forced conversion of an entire continent with many cultures’ worth of abandoned Gods and spirits . . . it throws an entirely different light on the fairly insane history of European-descended peoples ever since. How many curses do we bear that have brought us to this pass? It’s something to consider.

This does not mean that everyone of European descent needs to convert back to his or her ancestral religions, whatever they were. We believe, however, that it does mean that enough people of European descent need to begin to honor at least some of the spirits and Gods that have been heretofore scorned, in order to show them that we are not like our ancestors who made the mistake, and hopefully to allay the curses that we may bear twined around our bloodlines. How many is enough? We don’t know, but every person of European descent who comes willingly and gladly to at least some part of this work of reclaiming the ancient ways helps a little bit. At the least, enough people need to publicly practice the ancient ways so that anyone who is drawn to them can find community, and enough people need to become professional practitioners of the Northern Tradition and other original European shamanic traditions so that if someone needs them, they can easily be found. However, it’s not our job to evangelize—the Gods and spirits can bring people to it, if they’re meant to find it. Our job is only to let people know that it exists.

Those of you reading this who have chosen to reclaim your ancestral ways, to recognize the holiness of the land, or to in whatever small way recognize and return to the practices of your ancient ancestors should feel very proud. That honest pride need not be lessened because we are restructuring these things for our own time, place, and culture. We may be stumbling and bumbling along, we may be screwing up right and left, but we’re trying to do something very difficult, very important, and very holy. It’s a courageous thing to look back and pluck from the rushing tide of wyrd the recognition that the abandonment of the old religions was not necessarily a good thing. It’s even more courageous to try to do something to correct it.

We believe, however, that we also need to acknowledge that we have a very long way to go. The pre-Christian Paganisms of Europe (and the shamanic practices linked to them), like any other indigenous religions, evolved organically over generations and almost always within a clear cultural context. What might have seemed like chaos of expression was actually a very natural and ordered evolution. The contemporary rebirth of ancient European spirituality evolved out of social change and unrest in a very different cultural climate. (The Holy Powers, after all, are opportunists, and will use every loophole they can get!) Instead of slow growth and the deepening of practices over generations, the transmission of knowledge from parent to child within families and communities, we have been forced into an artificial convergence of praxis and Intent. Out of necessity, we consciously forced what our ancestors would have gained and understood organically. The result is that our communities don’t know what to do with the Gods, with their ancestors, and perhaps most of all with their new and fumbling spiritual specialists.

Given the difficult circumstances, this was probably inevitable. We’ve also picked up bad habits, made a few wrong turns, and thrown more than a few babies out with the dirty bathwater during the process. But now it’s time not only to entertain the idea of restoring ancient ways, but to actually reconnect with the ancestors and spirits who will ultimately make possible a sustainable relationship for the long term—engagement on their terms, not ours. That begins with a change in mind-set. It begins by discarding the filters in our hearts that say, “We know better now, because we’re all rational modern people.” It begins with sacrificing our need to be right, ordered, and sure. It begins with people like you, reading this book, committing to taking up whatever portion of the work you can.

We are all coming to this work corrupted. There’s no getting around that. We were raised in a monotheistic and mechanistic culture, in a world vastly sundered from its ancient ways. But we’re not coming to this work alone. Our ancient ancestors are there to guide us. Our Holy Powers can teach us again how to be in this world, not separated from it. We are not alone—we never were—and all we have to do is learn to listen.

Appendix

Elemental Disasters

Working with the elements isn’t all fun and games. As we said earlier, the ancestors of the ancient North tended to first look at the most difficult and terrifying aspect of any natural force. This is a crucial part of understanding any element—or, for that matter, any deity or spirit. Euphemizing them is not right relationship, nor is anthropomorphizing them, because sooner or later you will run up against the aspects of them that are least human, least concerned with humanity, and most destructive.

Our friend and colleague Wintersong Tashlin, a shaman in another tradition, wrote to us about the four books that he suggests as reading material for all the students he trains in elemental spirit work. These books are good examples of the most frightening and disastrous aspects of the elements, which must be faced calmly before one can truly appreciate their positive aspects. We strongly suggest that readers pick up these four books, read them, and meditate on them while they are working on the exercises in this book. The descriptions are written by Wintersong, who has graciously allowed us to reprint them here.

Each book corresponds to an elemental force that humans in their hubris believed they had gained some form of mastery or dominion over, only to find out how dreadfully wrong they were. These books have been chosen in part for their unflinching descriptions of the personal consequences of tangling with the elements in their unfettered states, and in part because of the broad scale represented by the circumstances described in each one. Every story has broader historical implications than the described disaster, whether it be the evolution of land management, the story of the Eastern European immigration and the settlement of the Midwest, or the development of modern weather forecasting. Each book also looks at the heights of honor and courage, and sometimes the depths of cowardice that humans can be brought to when faced with disaster and horror beyond their ken.

Fire

Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinkley Firestorm of 1894, by Daniel James Brown

In the days when the Hinkley Fire occurred, fire was a constant summer companion in many parts of the United States. Haze from hundreds or even thousands of small fires scented the air and fouled laundry hung out to dry. People were complacent. As the forests of Minnesota were logged and harvested, “fire management” was still a distant concept and the refuse left behind from the logging process cluttered the forest floor for thousands of square miles, drying in the summer Sun or even being lit ablaze by locals eager to dispose of the debris as quickly as possible.

On September 1, 1894, two forest fires met at Hinkley, Minnesota, and merged into a true firestorm. With hurricane-force winds driven by the engine of combustion and glowing balls of incandescent gas spat out by the advancing fire’s front, this blaze was unlike any even remotely contemplated. Moving at a rapid rate, the firestorm obliterated Hinkley and several surrounding towns. Some lived, many died, and many more were horribly burned. Brown eloquently describes the circumstances that led to the firestorm, as well as the physical effects of fire on humans and their works, not to mention the effects on the land. Students would do well to keep these thoughts and images in the back of their minds when sitting in front of a “tame” candle flame or spinning poi. Under a Flaming Sky helps prevent students from losing sight of the dangerous power that all fire possesses.

Water

Isaac’s Storm, by Erik Larson

The deadliest natural disaster in United States history was presaged, as so many are, by the assurance that the disaster was impossible. Less than ten years prior to the destruction of Galveston, Texas, the city’s weather service representative explained in the local paper that due to atmospheric conditions, a storm of any size could not hit the coastal city. The designers of the Titanic should have taken the lesson to heart.

This book is truly about two phenomena—the first being the monstrous storm that completely submerged Galveston during the fall of 1900, killing more than six thousand people, and the second, the immense hubris of individuals who believed that their science had solved the mysteries of climate and weather, to the point where the U.S. Weather Service stopped accepting reports from Caribbean weather stations, in part out of bureaucratic infighting, and in part because firsthand observations disputed their prediction of how the weather should be behaving. Larson, who has since become quite well-known, writes eloquently about the often futile struggle against the advancing water that swept across the city, built on a barrier island. Perhaps the book’s most powerful lesson for students of magic is that water has immense and unstoppable mass. Wind too plays a role in this story, as it does in all of these books, but water is the engine driving the horrors of Galveston’s destruction, arriving without drama as the storm surge pushes its way up into the city before the storm is even a glimmer on the horizon.

Air

The Children’s Blizzard, by David Laskin

This deadly storm was known colloquially as the “Children’s Blizzard” after the high percentage of young people whose lives it took. It is a brutal illustration of the raw power of wind and air. On January 12, 1888, a great storm swept across the northern plains, bringing with it near-instant temperature drops of 18 degrees below zero Fahrenheit and wind so powerful that the snow was pulverized into a powder as fine as sifted flower, which killed people and animals by suffocation before the terrible cold could. The storm front hit with such violence that many witnesses likened the wind’s arrival to the sound of a freight train, a staggering thought in any age, but particularly in the late 1800s.

This book is invaluable for students working with wind, air, and weather. With our greatly improved homes, automobiles, and clothing, there is a tendency among modern folk to lose sight of just how much at the mercy of the wind we can truly be.

Earth

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan

The Dust Bowl is fairly well-known in American history, but what makes The Worst Hard Time of particular value to students of magic is its focus on the experiences of the people who stayed behind on the plains during this disaster. Timothy Egan describes in agonizing detail the lives of people whose world quite literally was turned upside down as the earth beneath their feet took flight, with clouds of Midwestern topsoil at times drifting as far as the Atlantic Ocean. On the turbulent ground, the earth choked the life out of people as it clogged lungs and was unavoidably consumed in every bite of food.

This book isn’t just about suffering and tragedy, however. Egan explains with excellent clarity the causes of the Dust Bowl from an economic and environmental perspective, as well as the steps taken to finally alleviate the crisis. It is important to remember that while the great Midwestern Dust Bowl is perhaps the best known, it is far from the only one of its kind (the Desert of Maine is the result of a dust bowl in microcosm, for instance). For those of us who work with natural forces in our spiritual traditions, The Worst Hard Time is a stunning reminder of what happens when Earth, traditionally seen as the most stable of elements, is pushed past its breaking point.

Footnotes

*1. See “Schizophrenia and Chronic Mental Illness in Micronesia,” by F. X. Hezel and M. A. Wylie, in the Journal of Micronesian Studies, 1992.

*2. Written by Jalkr, a Northern Tradition spirit worker who runs Breidablik Farm, a sanctuary for abused and abandoned horses that is dedicated to Odin. His farm’s website is
http://breidabliktemple.weebly.com.

Resources for Further Study

The following books are listed by the chapter they are mentioned in or may be relevant to.

Introduction. The Ancient World of Northern Shamanism

Blain, Jenny. Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic: Ecstasy and Neo-Shamanism in North European Paganism. London, U.K.: Routledge Press, 2001.

Czaplicka, Marie. The Collected Works of M. A. Czaplicka. Richmond, U.K.: Curzon Press, 1999. This book is out of print and very hard to come by, but the relevant part—Shamanism in Siberia—is online at
www.sacred-texts.com/sha/sis/index.htm

DuBois, Thomas. Nordic Religions in the Viking Age. Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

Isaacson, Rupert. The Horse Boy. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2009.

Kaldera, Raven. Jotunbok: Working with the Giants of the Northern Tradition. Hubbardston, Mass.: Asphodel Press, 2006.

———. Pathwalker’s Guide to the Nine Worlds. Hubbardston, Mass.: Asphodel Press, 2006.

———. Wightridden: Paths of Northern-Tradition Shamanism. Hubbardston, Mass.: Asphodel Press, 2007.

———. Wyrdwalkers: Techniques of Northern-Tradition Shamanism. Hubbardston, Mass.: Asphodel Press, 2007.

Krasskova, Galina. Exploring the Northern Tradition. Pompton Plains, N.J.: New Page Books, 2005.

———. Runes: Theory and Practice. Pompton Plains, N.J.: New Page Books, 2010.

Krasskova, Galina, and Raven Kaldera. Northern Tradition for the Solitary Practitioner. Pompton Plains, N.J.: New Page Books, 2009.

Laestadius, Lars Levi. Fragments of Lappish Mythology. Aspasia Books, Beaverton, Ontario, Canada, 2002.

Price, Neil. The Viking Way: Religion and War in the Later Iron Age of Scandinavia. Oxford, U.K.: Oxbow Books, 2011.

Runic John. The Book of Seidr. Sequim, Wash.: Holmes Publishing Group, 2004.

Sarangerel. Chosen by the Spirits. Rochester, Vt.: Destiny Books, 2001.

———. Riding Windhorses. Rochester, Vt.: Destiny Books, 2000.

Turk, Jonathan. The Raven’s Gift. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010.

Vitebsky, Piers. The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia. Boston, Mass.: Mariner Books, 2006.

———. Shamanism. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. Wallis, Robert J. Shamans/Neo-Shamans. London, U.K.: Routledge Press, 2003.

Chapter 1. The Beginning Place: Earth

Arismendi, Fuensanta, and Galina Krasskova. Root, Stone, and Bone: Honoring Andvari and the Vaettir of Money. Hubbardston, Mass.: Asphodel Press, 2008.

Filan, Kenaz, and Raven Kaldera. Drawing Down the Spirits. Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2009.

Krasskova, Galina. Sigdrifa’s Prayer. Hubbardston, Mass.: Asphodel Press, 2007.

Mickaharic, Draja. Spiritual Cleansing. Newburyport, Mass.: Weiser Books, 2003.

Reicher, Sophie. Spiritual Protection. Pompton Plains, N.J.: New Page Books, 2010.

Chapter 2. The Golden World: Sun

Cornelius, Geoffrey, and Paul Devereaux. The Secret Language of the Stars and Planets. London, U.K.: Duncan Baird Publishers, 1996.

Krasskova, Galina. Day Star and Whirling Wheel. Hubbardston, Mass.:

Asphodel Press, 2009.

Tchipakkan. Anglo-Saxon Magic. Hubbardston, Mass.: Ellhorn Press, 2010.

Waugh, Albert. Sundials: Their Theory and Construction. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Books, 1973.

Chapter 3. The Silver World: Moon

Kaldera, Raven. Moon Phase Astrology. Rochester, Vt.: Destiny Books, 2011.

———. Pagan Astrology. Rochester, Vt.: Destiny Books, 2010.

Krasskova, Galina. Day Star and Whirling Wheel. Hubbardston, Mass.: Asphodel Press, 2009.

Sachs, Maryam. The Moon. New York: Abbeville Press, 1998.

Chapter 4. The Green World: Plants

Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years. New York: Norton and Co., 1995.

Buchanan, Rita. A Dyer’s Garden. Loveland, Colo.: Interweave Press, 1995.

———. A Weaver’s Garden. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Books, 1999.

Buhner, Stephen Harrod. The Lost Language of Plants. White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green Press, 2002.

Filan, Kenaz. The Power of the Poppy. Rochester, Vt.: Park Street Press, 2011.

Ingerson, Geordie. Ingvi’s Blessing: Prayers and Charms for Field and Farm. Hubbardston, Mass.: Asphodel Press, 2011.

Kaldera, Raven. The Northern Shamanic Healer. Hubbardston, Mass.: Asphodel Press, 2013.

———. The Northern Shamanic Herbal. Hubbardston, Mass.: Asphodel Press, 2011.

Chapter 5. The Brown World: Animals

Tenpenny, Joshua. Honey, Grain, and Gold. Hubbardston, Mass.: Asphodel Press, 2010.

Vitebsky, Piers. The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

Chapter 6. The Blue World: Water

Danson, Ted, and Michael D’Orso. Oceana: Our Endangered Oceans and What We Can Do to Save Them. Harlan, Iowa.: Rodale Books, 2011.

Parker, Bruce. The Power of the Sea. Hampshire, U.K.: Palgrave McMillan, 2010.

Chapter 7. The Red World: Fire

Schmid, Edward. Advanced Glassblowing Techniques. Bellingham, Wash.: Glass Mountain Press, 1997.

———. Beginning Glassblowing. Bellingham, Wash.: Glass Mountain Press, 2005.

———. The Glassworker’s Bathroom Reader. Bellingham, Wash.: Glass Mountain Press, 2006. The section of anecdotes on accidents, scars, and other follies is particularly useful.

Chapter 8. The Gray World: Craft

Buhner, Stephen Harrod. Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers. Boulder, Colo.: Siris Books, 1998.

Hart, Mickey. Drumming on the Edge of Magic. San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishing, 1998.

Levinson, David, and David Sherwood. The Tribal Living Book. Boulder, Colo.: Johnson Books, 1993.

Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009.

Sims, Lorelei. The Backyard Blacksmith. Beverly, Mass.: Quarry Books, 2006.

Whittaker, John. Flint Knapping. Austin, Tx.: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Galina also highly recommends Cat Yronwode’s “Hoodoo Magic Correspondence Course,” offered at
www.luckymojo.com. Hoodoo is a combination of folk magic from Native American, African American, German, Scottish, and Anglo-Saxon sources. It provides an excellent background in esoteric cleansings and the creation of small charms. These things come in handy at times in the work.

Chapter 9. The White World: Air

Any books on yogic breathing—there are so many.

Chapter 10. The Black World: Ancestors

Patsouris, Laura. Weaving Memory: A Guide to Honoring the Ancestors. Hubbardston, Mass.: Asphodel Press, 2011.

A virtual shrine to the ancestors:
www.northernpaganism.org/shrines/ancestors/welcome.html

About the Author

Raven Kaldera is a Northern Tradition Pagan shaman who has been a practicing astrologer since 1984 and a Pagan since 1986. The author of
Northern Tradition for the Solitary Practitioner and MythAstrology and coauthor, with Kenaz Filan, of
Drawing Down the Spirits, Kaldera lives in Hubbardston, Massachusetts.

Galina Krasskova is a Heathen priest and Northern Tradition shaman with a master’s degree in religious studies from New York University. The author of many books,
including Runes: Theory and Practice, and coauthor with Raven Kaldera of
Northern Tradition for the Solitary Practitioner, she is a columnist for
Witches and Pagans magazine. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

About Inner Traditions • Bear & Company

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Books of Related Interest

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Barbarian Rites
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The Pagan Book of Days
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by Ellen Evert Hopman

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by Frank Joseph

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Copyright © 2012 by Raven Kaldera and Galina Krasskova

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kaldera, Raven.

Neolithic shamanism : spirit work in the Norse tradition / Raven Kaldera and Galina Krasskova.

p. cm.

Summary: “A step-by-step guide to working with the spirits of ancient northern Europe”—Provided by publisher.

print ISBN: 978-1-59477-490-4

ebook ISBN: 978-1-59477-504-8

1. Shamanism. 2. Scandinavia—Religion. 3. Germanic peoples—Religion. I.

Krasskova, Galina, 1972- II. Title.

BF1591.K35 2012

293—dc23

2012014979

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