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