Neolithic Shamanism: Spirit Work in the Norse Tradition - Raven Kaldera 2012
Boar
The Brown World: Animals
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.