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

Bone and Horn
The Gray World: Craft

Raven: As I sat down to write this, archaeologists in Sweden have unearthed a perfectly carved penis made of antler that dates from the Mesolithic era, about 6000—4000 BCE. I smiled, because I have one very like it upstairs, a votive object for a hunter god, handmade for me by a loved one. Scholars are already arguing over whether the phallus might have been merely for adoration, or for magic, or for actual use, or for gender changing. Frankly, as a shaman, mine has been used for all of those purposes at one point or another. The fact that it is made of what was once a living mammal, like myself, makes it easier to link my energy body with it than if it had been carved of wood or stone. Depending on what sort of person carried it, there may have been no boundary between all those uses.

Galina: Bone can provide an incredibly strong connection to the spirit of an animal (or person, for that matter). Like blood, it is a very powerful part of a creature’s being. It is the strength of the body, and its support. When one is in proper relationship with the spirit in question, bone can be used to impart some of the animal’s strength and power, and it can be used to call the spirit forth. I have a knife made of the leg bone of a wolf, one of my spirit allies. I use it to call upon Wolf ’s skills when I have to travel to the Iron Wood, the magical center of the world of Jotunheim. I also have pieces of fur, feathers, and bone from other animal allies, and I use them in my regalia, as connections to those animal spirits. Bone, being porous, also very effectively absorbs one’s blood (we often have to give a few drops of our own blood in this work for various reasons, as discussed in the Blue World chapter). This is useful when such tokens or offerings are needed. I work more often with furs and pelts than bone, but the bone tools that I have are invaluable for the connection they bring.

When you carve in bone, you carve in life itself. Unlike a bit of wood, which might have been from a felled tree and might have been from a cut twig, you can be absolutely certain that something died before you could have that piece of bone. As one of the earliest tools, bone recalls the ancestors. It also recalls the Brown World, the place of the animal spirits, because before you work with it you will be thanking whatever creature donated it to your hands. If you don’t know the provenance of the bone, thank the creature anyway—in fact, you might want to make an extra offering to the animal, just in case it did not die cleanly. Whatever it might have been, it was certainly alive, and it ate and breathed and felt fear and joy. Bone is associated with death, but it is Death with a Purpose. To use bone is to use something that would otherwise be wasted, to make it live again in a small way. Many of our bone tools came from roadkill, reclaimed and repurposed, or from animals killed cleanly on Raven’s farm.

Horn and antlers are similar in essential nature, but antlers are different in that they are not always products of death. Deer shed their antlers yearly. The upswept curve of antlers was a sacred shape to ancient Europeans; some rock carvings in the Arctic show flying reindeer with antlers that are deliberately carved to imply wings—a Paleolithic prelude to Santa’s team. As well as wings, they can also imply tree branches—to the ancients, deer may have been an animal who contained within them something of the wisdom of the trees. These “animal saplings” grow every year from “buds” in the spring, covered in soft velvet. Then the velvet gets shed in long bloody streamers to show the hard, smooth horn underneath—another birth metaphor. Then the antlers are used as a weapon, and then they fall off entirely. This cycle was known by the ancients, another turn of the yearly life-from-death-from-life wheel, illustrated everywhere.

Horns were used as vessels to drink from—to this day we have the custom of “passing the horn” at some Northern Tradition events. They could also be made into sacred headdresses and musical instruments. The latter were important enough that modern brass “horns” still bear the name. Horn, bone, and antler are all “elastic” enough that when soaked, they can be bent and shaped to one extent or another. Horn, especially, has been worked, heated, or boiled to take all sorts of shapes. They would also have been easy to find, as animal carcasses would have been coming into human habitations to be disassembled and eaten on a regular, if not daily, basis.

Exercise: Bone, Horn, or Antler Tool

Rather than giving an exercise for a specific tool here, we invite you to hold and test the substances of bone, horn, and antler and see what calls to you, or what the spirits tell you to make. Sometimes making shamanic tools is less about doing what you think intellectually would be appropriate and more about what ends up being right for the circumstance you’re already in. Ask the spirits what they most want you to make, and see what answer comes. Is it a handle, perhaps for one of the blades mentioned above? Is it a beater for your drum? Is it a carved wand or a phallus? Is it a horn to pour libations to the spirits? Is it, perhaps, small disks of bone or antler to be sanded, carved with special symbols, drilled, and tied to the hem or fringe of a garment? Is it horns or antlers to be mounted on a headdress to better take in the spirit of that animal (or a deity associated with that animal)? Is it a set of runes? Ask someone who knows how to do this craft to teach you, and create the tool that appears to you. (Remember that if you’re wrong and this tool isn’t the right thing, the Universe will usually send someone along to take it off your hands.)