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

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.