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

Epilogue: Broken Promises

While we’ve already made it clear that this shamanic tradition is for everyone who is called to it, regardless of ancestry, it is also true that the heritage of Northern Tradition shamanism is largely European. For this basic book, we’ve concentrated on beginning elements that are less obviously imbued with that cultural context, but if you choose to take on more advanced work, those cultural elements become much more obvious and necessary to the practice. This is the ancestral practice of people of northern European ancestry, whose descendants are almost all Caucasian. The authors are members of that demographic, and the fact that it is our ancestral heritage is important to us . . . because we grew up being told that we had no shamanic ancestral heritage, or at least none worth speaking of. We learned differently from the Gods and spirits themselves, and it was amazing and revelatory information. So while we’re fine with people of any ancestry taking on this tradition, here we feel that we need to speak specifically to people of European ancestry. Very few writers, speakers, and teachers are addressing this issue from this particular point of view.

We are the inheritors of a terrible burden. Those of us who are called to revive our ancient traditions face tremendous difficulties. This holds true for the average person, and the difficulties are increased a thousand times for the priest, mystic, shaman, spirit worker, ancestor worker, or shamanic practitioner engaged in this work. We are tasked with reaching back into the past to find and reweave threads sundered very long ago, and we are also tasked with integrating those threads into the warp and weft of modernity. We are given the job of rebuilding and restoring, and sometimes before that can happen, we are given the more difficult job of tearing down and demolishing: our own preconceptions, cultural corruption, spiritual roadblocks, and personal anxieties. Sometimes we have to fight the poison of our own cultural hubris. This is not easy work. It is, at times, heartbreaking. It is often grueling and always challenging. Yet it is, perhaps, the most crucial work that any of us will ever do.

We like our spirituality neat. We modern people abhor a mess, especially an emotional mess. Religion should be “civilized,” after all, whatever that may mean to us. We are children of the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution: mountains of ideology standing between us and the world of our ancestors. Worse, we are children of forced monotheism. It’s true that we’ve gained a great deal over the passing centuries, but we’ve lost a great deal too, in some areas far more than we’ve acquired.

Restoration is a terrible thing. It presupposes a sundering, a destruction, and the need for bringing back something that was lost. Those of us who have taken up this work, whether we realize it or not, are in the process of restoring ancestral traditions. We are engaged in a rather radical reimagining and re-creation for the contemporary age. Each time we hail our Gods or gather in ritual, each time we pour out a libation or bow before our dead, each time we admit to being a member of a religion or spiritual practice based on ancient European beliefs, we are undoing in some small way the cultural and religious devastation wrought by forced monotheism and the abandonment of our indigenous Gods. We are taking up again a very ancient contract. We are returning to our ancestral obligations and practices, restoring the sacred bonds between humans and land, humans and ancestors, humans and Gods. We are restoring balance. This is a good and holy thing, and a necessary thing. Most of all, it’s about time.

However, in our attempts to do this work, we are sadly hobbled by circumstance. We’re working without roots, without any grounding in the core spiritual values that would support such an undertaking. We are so far removed from the basic comprehension of the place of holiness in the physical world that our ancestors experienced (in part, by virtue of their necessary dependence on it) that even when we find a deep connection to that sacredness, we do not know how to integrate it into our daily lives and our behavior toward others. We have forgotten concepts that our ancestors would have taken for granted: the independent existence of the Gods, spirits, and other Holy Powers; the efficacy and importance of prayer; the correct way to show respect for the Gods and spirits; the rightness of sacrifices; the power of the holy to act directly in our lives; the need to honor the dead consistently; and the necessity for realistic and thorough training for our spiritual specialists (like shamans and priests). Or, worse, we look at these things with an air of condescension and superiority. “What, get down on my knees, beat the floor, and cry out with tears and shouts to my ancestors? That’s primitive superstition; we’re more civilized. We’re more orderly. We know better.” Or, more amusingly, “Our ancestors didn’t really mean that; they just didn’t understand.” This again culminates in the hubris of “We know better about all things.” Philosophers call this idea Urdummheit, the idea that our ancestors were stupid.

The sad thing is, however, is that we don’t know better. In fact, we don’t know at all. There is a vast chasm between the polytheistic worldview, in which the multiplicity and diversity of divine expression (and by extension human religious expression) were valued and seen as normal and natural, and the monotheistic worldview, in which there is so often “one true way” and everyone must believe and practice in relatively the same way. We are nowhere near to bridging that divide. We’ve been separated from our traditions for too long.

Think about it as we digress for a moment: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the American government established a policy of routinely stealing Native American children away from their families. They locked them up in schools, like the one in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where they were beaten if they spoke their own language; forced into Christianity; forced into European garb; and forced to deny anything of their culture, religion, or values. It took one generation to wreak untold devastation on the surviving Native cultures. Native peoples are still struggling to recover from the devastation, not only of European conquest and genocide, but of cultural and religious genocide as well. This all happened within the past two hundred years. There are Native men and women alive today who were taken illegally from their families or forcibly adopted into white families “for their own good.” We are, at best, a generation away from these crimes.

Those of us of European ancestry, once upon a time, had indigenous religious traditions too. These were taken from us. In some cases, methods included torture, blackmail, threats to family members, economic pressure, and outright mass murder. There was a slow, insidious spread of cultural and religious imperialism across Europe. The chaos of many Gods became the order of one, by force. All the traditions by which our ancestors maintained right order and balance in their world—with themselves, the Holy Powers, the ancestors, the Elemental Powers—were condemned, attacked, and eventually lost. One might even call it a form of religious genocide, if you consider that those with psychic “gifts” that had been placed into their bloodline by the Gods and spirits in order to be better mediators were among the most wanted in the slaughter. European bloodlines became impoverished by a thousand years of killing off the people who might have been spirit workers, had they lived in a different culture.

In areas of the world where indigenous religion was only recently wiped out in the past century, and the tribal spirit workers have died out or been killed off without heirs, it’s not unusual for waves of bad fortune to befall the people. One example is the tribes of Siberia, whose shamans were executed by the Soviet regime; they now suffer from a painfully high incidence of alcoholism and sometimes murderous infighting. (See Piers Vitebsky, The Reindeer People, in the Resources.) Another example is Micronesia, where Islam and modern fashion have seen to it that the tribal priests and shamans have almost died out, with no youths to take their place . . . and a wave of mental illness has struck many of the islands. On some islands, as much as 2 percent of the population is suffering from schizophrenia and other thought disorders.^*2

We know from the history and folklore of many lands that if members of a tribe reject their ancestral spirits en masse, the spirits have the lawful right to strike back, often cursing them and all their descendants. While we have no proof that this is what is happening in Siberia and Micronesia, from a spirit worker’s perspective it is a distinct possibility. This does not mean that no one can be personally called to another faith and convert, but forced conversions of whole peoples—especially in ways that demonize and dishonor the original Gods and spirits and make it difficult for the children of the future to know them—invoke the wrath of the wronged powers. (Among the Hmong people of Asia, if individuals choose to convert to Christianity, they must first go through a ceremony in which they make amends to the spirits whom they are leaving behind, or bad luck will follow them and their entire family, regardless of religion.) If we accept this as a possibility and apply it to the forced conversion of an entire continent with many cultures’ worth of abandoned Gods and spirits . . . it throws an entirely different light on the fairly insane history of European-descended peoples ever since. How many curses do we bear that have brought us to this pass? It’s something to consider.

This does not mean that everyone of European descent needs to convert back to his or her ancestral religions, whatever they were. We believe, however, that it does mean that enough people of European descent need to begin to honor at least some of the spirits and Gods that have been heretofore scorned, in order to show them that we are not like our ancestors who made the mistake, and hopefully to allay the curses that we may bear twined around our bloodlines. How many is enough? We don’t know, but every person of European descent who comes willingly and gladly to at least some part of this work of reclaiming the ancient ways helps a little bit. At the least, enough people need to publicly practice the ancient ways so that anyone who is drawn to them can find community, and enough people need to become professional practitioners of the Northern Tradition and other original European shamanic traditions so that if someone needs them, they can easily be found. However, it’s not our job to evangelize—the Gods and spirits can bring people to it, if they’re meant to find it. Our job is only to let people know that it exists.

Those of you reading this who have chosen to reclaim your ancestral ways, to recognize the holiness of the land, or to in whatever small way recognize and return to the practices of your ancient ancestors should feel very proud. That honest pride need not be lessened because we are restructuring these things for our own time, place, and culture. We may be stumbling and bumbling along, we may be screwing up right and left, but we’re trying to do something very difficult, very important, and very holy. It’s a courageous thing to look back and pluck from the rushing tide of wyrd the recognition that the abandonment of the old religions was not necessarily a good thing. It’s even more courageous to try to do something to correct it.

We believe, however, that we also need to acknowledge that we have a very long way to go. The pre-Christian Paganisms of Europe (and the shamanic practices linked to them), like any other indigenous religions, evolved organically over generations and almost always within a clear cultural context. What might have seemed like chaos of expression was actually a very natural and ordered evolution. The contemporary rebirth of ancient European spirituality evolved out of social change and unrest in a very different cultural climate. (The Holy Powers, after all, are opportunists, and will use every loophole they can get!) Instead of slow growth and the deepening of practices over generations, the transmission of knowledge from parent to child within families and communities, we have been forced into an artificial convergence of praxis and Intent. Out of necessity, we consciously forced what our ancestors would have gained and understood organically. The result is that our communities don’t know what to do with the Gods, with their ancestors, and perhaps most of all with their new and fumbling spiritual specialists.

Given the difficult circumstances, this was probably inevitable. We’ve also picked up bad habits, made a few wrong turns, and thrown more than a few babies out with the dirty bathwater during the process. But now it’s time not only to entertain the idea of restoring ancient ways, but to actually reconnect with the ancestors and spirits who will ultimately make possible a sustainable relationship for the long term—engagement on their terms, not ours. That begins with a change in mind-set. It begins by discarding the filters in our hearts that say, “We know better now, because we’re all rational modern people.” It begins with sacrificing our need to be right, ordered, and sure. It begins with people like you, reading this book, committing to taking up whatever portion of the work you can.

We are all coming to this work corrupted. There’s no getting around that. We were raised in a monotheistic and mechanistic culture, in a world vastly sundered from its ancient ways. But we’re not coming to this work alone. Our ancient ancestors are there to guide us. Our Holy Powers can teach us again how to be in this world, not separated from it. We are not alone—we never were—and all we have to do is learn to listen.