Neolithic Shamanism: Spirit Work in the Norse Tradition - Raven Kaldera 2012

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.