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

The Gray World: Craft

Hail to the spirits who come to the door,

I open this path for you

To speak to those who can hear,

To sing to those who will listen,

To aid those who will feed you,

To love those who love you,

And I am one of those.

Making spirit objects is an integral part of shamanic work. Unlike occult magical practice, you can’t just go into a store and buy something ready-made—at least in this tradition, shamanic objects are almost always handmade (or, in some cases, heirlooms or special gifts). This is because they need to be made with Intent, with energy pouring into them during the making process. Crafting something is a means of bringing something to life. There’s immense power in the act, and it forges a connection between the tool and the maker like nothing else. It’s possible to energize any ready-made object with Intent, but we are working not with simple magic or energy work. We are working with entities and their energies, and the process of creating a sacred object transforms your hands into doors through which their energy can pass. It makes it that much easier for the spirit of a tool, its vaettir—or kami, to use a Shinto term—to become a partner and conscious ally.

Shamanic objects don’t always have to be made by the shaman or shamanic practitioner, but if they are made by someone else, he or she needs to be a crafter who understands those energies, the purpose for which the object will be used, and how to craft it in a way that opens it to your Intent. Siberian shamans, for example, had a number of sacred metal items that would be added to their ceremonial coats as they grew more skilled and powerful. They got those items from “sacred smiths,” metalsmiths who were specially trained to make shamanic items. (In many cultures, smithcraft was considered holy work on par with shamanism and priestcraft.) Today there are few crafts-people who can do this for a shaman, but some are still around and not impossible to find. However, we still suggest that would-be shamanic practitioners master at least a couple of the craft skills, because it’s just better to be able to do this yourself when necessary. For those who work with animal spirits, it is especially important to take care in acquiring tools made from animal parts. The animal spirits may not take kindly to a supposed ally using their children without respect. Be sure that any animal parts you acquire were respectfully killed.

If you do decide to adapt an existing object into a spirit home or shamanic tool of some kind, we suggest at least remaking it in some way—taking pieces of it apart and reassembling them differently, decorating it in a way that changes its look, polishing and rehabilitating it, anything that can provide enough making energy to solidify the Intent and let the spirits get a handhold. One of Raven’s spirit figures is an 8-inch Santa made out of birchbark, bought for him by a friend. It isn’t the classic American Santa, but rather a cloaked-and-hooded European Father Frost figure. An ancestral spirit of his claimed it, and in order to give the spirit more of a foothold, Raven took away Santa’s toy bag and added bits of animal fur to his clothing. He also hollowed out the inside and put sacred items in it—pine needles, stones, and so on. It wasn’t handmade, but it was “remade” with enough time and attention to detail to establish the Intent and create the spirit channel.

Almost any handcraft can be turned to shamanic work. Some provide a direct way to work with an element and its nature. Glassblowing, for instance, allows us to work directly with fire. Some handcrafts offer a direct way to work with a specific spirit, such as carving a staff out of birch or tanning an animal hide. Some, like drum making, involve using a mix of craft methods to make a traditional object. Others are more general purpose, such as sewing ceremonial (or even everyday) garments while working Intent into them, and then embroidering them with sacred symbols to add layers to that Intent. We couldn’t describe every Northern Tradition craft in this book; an in-depth look at all such crafts would require its own book (which is still in the planning process). So if you have a craft we didn’t mention here, and a shamanic use for it has just exploded in your head, by all means give it a go. Learning one of these traditional crafts is also a powerful way to honor your ancestors, because the dead whose sacrifices and struggles made it possible for you to be here today depended on many of these crafts for survival. We can read all we want about how things were a hundred or a thousand or three thousand years ago, but there is a special kind of knowing that comes only from doing as our ancestors did, and for however brief a time, entering into their world through the magic of craftwork.

Most shamans and shamanic practitioners in this tradition will have at least one object for each spirit they work with. Some will have entire altars or elaborate shrines to that spirit. Others might simply have a pendant, a single item in a bag of small objects, or even just a small tattoo. It depends on their relationship with that spirit and what that spirit wants of them. Many will also have items that are practice-specific, tools for each type of working. Use of a single tool for a single purpose is good practice because that tool will retain its energetic signature better, and will probably need less cleansing (unless it’s a tool used for a particularly energetically “dirty” job, in which case it’s best kept to one purpose in order to clean it regularly, perhaps in a special way).

Language is a powerful thing. If you want to remove a concept from a people’s collective consciousness, if you want to make it impossible to conceive of an action, remove the terminology that describes those things. Make it impossible to frame it in conscious linguistic expression. The American government knew this in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when it ripped Native American children from their families and confined them in special schools, where they were beaten for speaking their language and practicing their native religions. Native peoples are still struggling to recover from this horror. Language shapes our experience and our comprehension of what is possible. Every word that we reclaim or coin anew is a victory over those who sought to destroy our ancestral ways. Because of this, one of the most important things that we are crafting in this tradition is an array of language to describe our practices that is uniquely ours.

The Northern Tradition lost many of its ancient words for shamanic workings and items, due first to the civilization that replaced the old tribal ways of life, and second to invading Christianity. It would be great, for example, if we had a word that was the equivalent of the Buryat term ongon. This word indicates a figure (abstract or otherwise) that is used as a container for the energy of a spirit, their “home” in our homes, as it were. Raven finds himself absentmindedly using the word ongon in the meantime, describing his various spirit figures. We have considered trying to enrich and restore our working vocabulary of terms by looking to Old Norse and Old Anglo-Saxon, which give us náttúrhús (Old Norse) and gástærn (Old Anglo-Saxon), both meaning “spirit house.”

As we mentioned in the introduction, we aren’t going to discuss how to master any of these crafts. We’re going to assume that if everyone reading this is a competent adult, you should be able to find someone to teach you whichever ones you are drawn to. Neither of us has mastered all of these crafts, nor do we practice most of them, except once in a while; we have our specialties, and we work with those the most. Don’t feel that you have to learn them all. Not every shaman is also a master craftsman, nor do you need to be. In fact, supporting spiritual craftspeople who do know how to make a shamanic object to order, ready to have a spirit invoked into it, is a valuable gift to the world.