Neolithic Shamanism: Spirit Work in the Norse Tradition - Raven Kaldera 2012
Common Questions about the Northern Tradition
Introduction
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.