Pagan Magic of the Northern Tradition: Customs, Rites, and Ceremonies - Nigel Pennick 2015

The Web of Wyrd and the Eldritch World

It is a human trait to see patterns in all things. According to the spiritual worldview, these patterns are manifestations of a cosmic order. We can discern patterns everywhere we care to look, and our being in the world is determined by these patterns, symbolically described in our ancient myths that tell of the coming-into-being of the world. Two of the most ancient human handicrafts are weaving and pottery, and in ancient scriptures, both of them are used as metaphors for the human condition. The ancient bards perceived the multiple interwoven strands of experience symbolically to be a textile woven by the powers they called fate. The crafts of spinning and weaving are the heart of our linguistically embedded understanding of our being, for our existence is envisaged as a part of a universal interwoven pattern, known in the northern tradition as the Web of Wyrd.

THE WEB OF WYRD

The Web of Wyrd interconnects everything there ever was, is, or will be; all people, things, and events are conceived as being patterns woven in the web. Wyrd is an Old English word derived from weorðan, which means “to become,” “to come into being,” or “to come to pass.” A related Old High German word, wurt, similarly has its basis in a verb, werdan, meaning “to become” or “to come to pass.” It related to the Latin verb vertere, “to turn,” and in the context of Wyrd, this means how events turn out. Another related Old High German word is wirtel, “a spindle,” the tool used in spinning thread from raw fibers. Fortune and destiny are part of weaving in the Old English word gewæf, as in the text “me thæt wyrd gewæf,” “Wyrd wove me that”—that is my lot, or fate, in life. For the individual, Wyrd is his or her “lot in life,” position in the world, with all its limitations and possibilities, a state of being often referred to as one’s destiny or fate. But Wyrd is not the concept of fate as something that predestines us to undergo unavoidable happenings that somehow have been written in advance. The contemporary usage of the words “fate” and “destiny” contains ideas of unavoidable predestination, but our Wyrd does not necessarily doom us to a particular fate. Yet we are where we are. The Scots expression, “Let us dree our weird” exhorts us to accept where we are and use it for the best. The worst position in life is to be a “weirdless person.” Someone who is weirdless has no purpose in life and never prospers, and weirdlessness denotes doing things in the wrong way and thereby failing at every chance.

The Web of Wyrd is an ever-changing process, likened to a woven fabric, constantly being added to and constantly disintegrating. In the European Tradition, the processes that shape events are personified as the Fates, who are three sisters. In ancient Greece, they were the Moirae in White Raiment; in Roman Paganism, the Three Fates; in the northern tradition they are the Norns; and in the English and Scottish tradition, the Weird Sisters. In ancient Greece, the three Moirae were viewed by the Orphics symbolically as the visible phases of the moon: the first, Clotho, is the waxing First Quarter; the middle one, Lachesis, the Full Moon; and the last, Atropos, the waning Last Quarter. Clotho spins the thread; Lachesis measures it out, deciding in which way it will be used; and Atropos, “the Fury with abhorred shears,” cuts it. Whatever they are called in the different traditions, they are personified as three women involved in the processes of spinning and handling yarn. The first signifies the beginning that is the past; the second the formative, creative process of existence, which is the present; and the third, destruction, which is the future.

Fig. 1.1. The Three Fates, architectural feature at Castell Coch, Tongwynlais, Wales (William Burges ca. 1880).

The actual physical craft of spinning is significant in this mythos, as it clearly relates to the visible apparent rotation of the starry sky at night. The image of the rotating spindle and the turning millstone is a reflection of the passing of time and the outcome of events. Many northern European words to do with the development of events and the creation of materials are related to the act of turning round. The Scots word for a wheel or a whirlwind (tornado) is trendle, and the English word trend, which describes how things are developing, is related to this. A physical phenomenon called the “windings of the stars” is mentioned by H. C. Agrippa in the early sixteenth century in his Three Books of Occult Philosophy: the obliquity of the Earth’s axis as it progresses on its orbit around the sun gives the path of the stars and planets an apparent winding motion likened to the winding of a ball of yarn (Agrippa 1993 [1531], II, XXXIV).

The names of the Norns are redolent of meanings embedded deep within our language. In the Northern Tradition the Norns’ names are Urða (That Which Was); Verðandi (That Which Is); and Skuld (That Which Is To Become). Here, the thread is not just spun, measured and cut, but woven into a fabric (the web) before being destroyed. The warp or throw of the woven fabric of the Web of Wyrd is viewed as time and events, whilst the weft is composed of individual human acts within time. As the process of weaving the web continues, the pattern of interactions of the threads, which are lives and events, irreversibly comes together to exist for a while before again being torn apart. Skuld personifies the forces of dissolution. She cuts the individual thread or shears apart the intricate weavings. She represents the inevitable end of all things, the annihilation of present existence. The Norns sit at a well; it is necessary to wet the fiber of flax with water in order to spin them into a thread.

In the English and Scottish tradition, the Weird Sisters appear under that collective name, but their individual names are lost. William Shakespeare borrowed them from Raphael Holinshed’s tale of Macbeth and transformed them into the fateful Three Witches.

Their names have been reconstructed from Old English literary evidence as Wyrd, Weorthend (or Metod), and Sculd (Branston 1957, 71). They are the Old High German sceffarin (female shapers who determine the shape of things to come). The shapers mete out our fate, the Old Saxon metod, “destiny, doom, death,” and so we are subject to metodogiscapu, “the decree of fate” or “the shaping of destiny.” Another term in Old Norse for one’s fate is sköp, which literally means “what is shaped.” The web is not a reality, but a metaphor that gives us some limited understanding of the way things happen.

Fig. 1.2. The Weird Sisters, from the history of Macbeth, from Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles. The Library of the European Tradition

The seamless textile is the prime emblem of the Web of Wyrd, symbolized in traditional dress, whole fabric uncut and unfitted, but gathered or smocked to fit the wearer. For existence is not composed of an assemblage of separate moments, but it is a seamless flow of process, the threads of which are as but currents in a river, tides in a sea, or the blowing of the winds. The Web of Wyrd is a symbolic description of the reality in which we live. Wyrd embodies the fundamental structures and processes that manifest themselves continually as recognizable elements of the physical world. These principles can reveal themselves spontaneously or may be identified by human intelligence. Traditional spirituality recognizes them as divine principles that operate throughout the cosmos, embodying everything that exists and has ever existed. In this sense, the visible world is an emanation of the invisible. The true principles of Wyrd are often viewed as the signature of divinity.

Like a piece of fabric already woven, Wyrd is something that cannot be altered or undone. But either we can be passive and allow the vagaries of life to defeat us or we can deal creatively with the situation in which we find ourselves. Wyrd weaves our place in life, and an old saying from the Borders of Scotland and England expresses creative acceptance of our situation: “Let us dree our weird”; that is, let us endure whatever becomes of us and make the best of it. It tells us that once we stop complaining and accept our Wyrd, we can turn its disadvantages into our advantages. We are within our given circumstances, living in our own time, and must endure their accompanying difficulties, but how we endure them and how we deal with our circumstances is up to us.

Wyrd works like natural magic and science: all things that come to individuals are neither rewards nor punishments sent by the gods, but they are the inevitable consequences of events, affected by the actions of individuals and the collective. But whatever happens to us spiritually is the result of how we react to the conditions in which we find ourselves, for we have free will and choice of how to act within our circumstances. Even the gods are not outside Wyrd, but subject to it, like we are. This is clear from original texts from both Northern Paganism and traditional Anglo-Saxon Christianity. As an Old English gnomic verse in one of the Cotton Manuscripts tells us: “The glories of Christ are great: Wyrd is strongest of all.” Medieval Christian images of the Annunciation—for example, a fifth-century mosaic at Ravenna, Italy, and a ninth-century stone panel at Hoveningham, Yorkshire, England—show Our Lady spinning with spindle in hand, with a (woven) wickerwork basket containing wool beside her. This is the motif of the first Weird Sister, signifying beginning; in this case, the conception of Jesus. Our Lady is also depicted handling thread as Maria Knotenlöserin, “Mary the Unraveller of Knots,” in a baroque painting in the church of St. Peter-am-Perlach in Augsburg, Germany. The church stands on the site of the temple of the Swabian goddess Zisa (Pennick 2002a, 107—10). Whether the concept of the Knotenlöserin was ascribed to the goddess is not recorded. Knotted threads and cords are certainly a major element in magical practice in northern Europe, used in warding off harm, stopping bleeding, binding illnesses, and bringing winds to sailors.

—RLÖG: CHANCE AND FATE

Our existence is not fixed, but part of a process. Nothing exists without coming from somewhere. Every aspect of material existence now is the result of what preceded it in time. The sum of all of the events that led to the present existence of anything is called its ørlög, an Old Norse concept meaning both “primal laws” and “primal layers.” That which has already been woven by the Norns, even if it has been torn apart in the past, is that which came before the present pattern of existence, so it has influenced it profoundly. —rlög is more than just the processes of nature, or the record of history, for it includes all of the factors that go to make up the present time. Each human person has his or her own ørlög. Personal ørlög includes genetic, individual, family, and collective history and every other factor that has made the individual what he or she is. There is no escape from ørlög, for we cannot alter what has already happened or the circumstances that come from it. Everyone’s ørlög also accumulates as we get older; it is the sum of everything that we do, where we are, and the circumstantial events affecting our lives. The individual’s ørlög gives us both our possibilities in life, and also determines their limits. Because of this, ørlög is sometimes confused with destiny or fate, a force that is seen to favor some individuals and to destroy others.

In the Roman worldview, the goddess Fortuna presided over what would now be called random events. She is still invoked now by gamblers, who call upon Lady Luck in the hope of winning games of chance. Her emblem is the Wheel of Fortune. The concept of mathematically calculable randomness did not exist in ancient religious systems. Every event was ascribed to supernatural agency—either to a particular deity like Fortuna, or to an omnipotent creator. Religions that believed in an omnipotent and omniscient god claimed that everything that happened was under the god’s direct control. The Anglo-Saxon king Alfred the Great stated that there was no such thing as chance, everything being due to the actions of God. In this worldview, nothing can happen without the god’s involvement. God’s will is in control of everything from the course of the planets to the weather on Earth. This concept has the consequence that everything that happens must be preordained, fated to happen. Every event and happening has been decided in advance by divine edict and cannot be changed. Randomness is not part of this deterministic belief system, as King Alfred stated. However, the mathematical principles of randomness, discovered after the Renaissance, still apply to divination even when the divinatory system is from a belief system that has no concept of randomness.

Of all forms of divination, dice have a strange position between the sacred and profane uses. The tumbling dice, though random and only predictable in the long run through the laws of statistics, produce a real and immediate outcome. When given human significance, the points facing the thrower can bring fortune or ruin. The random becomes determinate immediately the dice roll to a halt. When the dice are at rest, the success or failure of the prediction is apparent at once. Fate and doom can be decided on the roll of a die, and the saying “dicing with death” emphasizes this reality. Ancient Roman dice terminology was related to the twelvefold division of the world, as expressed in weights and measures. The German word for a die, Wurfel, has the connotation “to throw” (the verb werfen), linking their workings with the “throw” of the weave of Wyrd’s web. Willard Fiske, in his Chess in Iceland (1905), remarks:

Among the adherents to old Germanic mythology Wotan (Odin) was regarded as the inventor of dice. But on the introduction of Christianity several old attributes and spheres of activity were transferred to the spirits of evil, and thus the devil, at a later day, came to be regarded as the originator of dice. He was supposed to have created them for the purpose of gaining souls for his infernal kingdom. (Fiske 1905, 248—49)

The English word “fate” is derived from fatum, the past participle of the Latin fari, “to speak.” The Fates are those who speak about what shall become of us. The Old Icelandic poem Völuspá (The Sybil’s Vision) recounts of the Norns that they “staves did cut, laws did they make, lives did they choose: for the children of men they marked their fates.” The Norns’ name is also interpreted as those who speak, being related to the Middle English verb nurnen, which means “to say.” The Norns’ utterances or decrees are described in Old English as wyrdstafas “wyrd-staves” and can appear in the form of writing, the staves. Staves can mean both runic characters and the wooden staves upon which they are cut, the runestaves being cut upon a runestaff. There is an oblique reference to weaving and knowledge in the poem Vafþrúðnismál (The Lay of Vafþrúðnir) where Odin has a riddling contest against the giant Vafþrúðnir, whose name means “the mighty weaver.” The poem contains prophetic riddles that deal with the nature of the gods, giants, and humans and their relations: the nature of the Web of Wyrd.

The runes are fundamental to understanding something of the weavings of the Web of Wyrd and our place within it. When we use the runes, we can penetrate the surface of outward appearances, and enter the realm of consciousness that perceives the basic unity of life that is the Web of Wyrd. Even in the everyday prosaic use of characters to represent sounds and numbers, we penetrate some of the mysteries that lie at the foundations of existence. At the basic level, the individual runes are various patterns that occur within the Web of Wyrd and serve as gateways for the consciousness to grasp the nature of these patterns. The alphabetic glyphs or signs that we call runes are what appear in the mind when the word “rune” is heard. But a rune is much more than just a letter in an alphabet. In addition to possessing symbolic meaning—whether as an alphabetic letter, an ideogram, or a symbol representing something—it can also mean a song, a poem, an incantation, or an invocation having talismanic power.

The meaning of the word rune itself is a “mystery” or “deliberation,” as in the Old English word rún, the Old Norse rún, and the Middle Welsh word rhin. Similarly, the word rún in modern Irish (Gaeilge) means “secret” and “intention.” But it is a secret in written or spoken form that is not understood by everyone, as in the Scots verb roon and modern German raunen, both meaning “to whisper,” and in a common English idiom, a “rounder” is a whisperer, a person who uses barely audible, secretive speech. Within the simple letter, composed of a few lines, lies a great deal more than its surface appearance. At its basic level, a rune denotes a mystery; that is, something secret and otherworldly, something that is more than just an unknown meaning for a person who is illiterate or uninterested. Each rune stave is a unit of embedded lore, a storehouse of knowledge and meaning within human consciousness. According to the northern worldview, the interconnections of the nerve pathways in the human brain are an obvious aspect of the Web of Wyrd. As a symbol, a rune denotes a formless and eternal reality that is rooted in the world as we experience it.

THE DIVINE HARMONY

Traditional cosmology is a symbolic way of describing the earth and the heavens we perceive to be above us. Above the earth are nine spheres defined by the apparent courses of the planets, the moon, the sun, and the stars. The different planetary spheres correspond to various aspects of existence: they are ruled by the nine Muses; they correspond to metals and the colors used in Anglo-Norman heraldry, and likewise to the notes of the musical octave. The relationship between different spheres is that of numerical proportions discovered originally by Pythagoras (ca. 500 BCE), which are the basis of the Western diatonic musical scale. In 1650 Athanasius Kircher wrote in Musurgia universalis, “The ancient philosophers asserted that the world consisted of a perfect harmony, that is, from the earth to the starry heavens is a perfect Octave.” Hence the single-stringed musical instrument devised by Pythagoras, the Monochord, is an image of the Cosmos, as Robert Fludd wrote in 1617: “The Monochord is the internal principle, which, from the center of the whole, brings about the harmony of all life in the Cosmos.”

Whatever means of division we use, there is the recognition that all are present simultaneously. In his 1642 essay Religio Medici, the English philosopher Sir Thomas Browne (1605—1682) used the example of the seasons and the earth to explain this principle: “whatsoever sign the sun possesseth, those four seasons are actually present. It is the nature of this luminary to distinguish the several seasons of the year; all which it makes at one time in the whole earth, and successive in any part thereof” (Browne 1862, 47). Thus the parts are inextricable components of the whole. Only in modern thought do the parts become separated in a reductionist and fragmental way, and used in isolation from one another without consideration for their place in the totality.

The Greek alchemical text the Anonymus, expressing ideas current in the third and fourth centuries CE, places the origin of the four elements in the Mystical Egg of the alchemists, which is the Seed of Pythagoras. The author was following the traditional Greek coming-into-being symbolism of the Orphic religion, expressed by Aristophanes in his play The Birds. The unknown author of the Anonymus notes that the four elements are also present in music, because there are four main harmonies, and the basic row, the tetrachord, is composed of four elemental tones. These concepts gradually entered the north and became embedded in magical understanding. In the second century CE, Theon of Smyrna pointed out how the four main harmonies of the diatonic scale, the preserve of the Muses, combine the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 as the Musical Tetraktys. The four harmonic ratios are the fourth (4:3), the fifth (3:2), the octave (2:1), and the double octave (4:1). There are six possible tetrachords: Aëchos, Isos, Katharos, Kentros, Paraëchos, and Plagios. Three are ascending scales, three (Aëchos, Isos, and Plagios) descending. Combined, these make twenty-four musical elements (that can be related to the twenty-four characters of the Greek alphabet and the northern runes). By combining these in proper ways, all forms of music—the benedictions, hymns, revelations, and other parts of Orthodox Church music—were made. There are limitless possibilities of combination. In all its complexity of endless realignments, changing relationships, and new harmonies, the “music of the spheres” reflects the limitless combinations of the elements that allow the multiplicities of the existent world to have their being.

Fig. 1.3. Celestial monochord made by Russell Paddon, designed and painted by Nigel Pennick, 2013.

THE TRADITIONAL VIEW OF THE COSMOS

Symbolism of the Mill

A link between the weird sisters and mills appears in medieval laws that banned women with spindles or distaffs from coming near mills. The stones that grind flour in a mill can be understood as an image of the cosmos where the sky rotates above a fixed earth as the upper millstone turns on the lower one. The original mills were querns, handmills where an upper stone driven by hand rotated upon a lower, stationary stone. The first powered mills in northern Europe were watermills built directly over watercourses. An axletree fitted with paddles dipped into the running water below the mill, and fixed to it was the upper stone. The lower stone has a hole in the middle to allow the axletree to rotate. So the upper stone turned against the lower stone to grind the grain into flour. There were no separate waterwheels or transmission gears to drive the stones, as in later, more sophisticated water mills.

Symbolically, the oldest form of water mill structure reflected the tripartite cosmos in the Northern Tradition interpretation: underworldly water (world serpent flowing, Utgard); fixed earth (lower millstone, Midgard); upper stone turning (starry heavens, Asgard). The turning but fixed axletree (the world-tree Yggdrassil) rotates around a fixed point, the Pole Star. The poetic fragment by Snæbjorn in Snorri Sturluson’s Skaldskaparmál tells of nine skerry maidens turning a mill that is a kenning for the churning waves of the sea being cut through by the prow of a ship. Amloði’s mill has been interpreted as an earthly counterpart of the celestial mill that grinds the meal of the strewn stars (Jones 1991b, 4). Amloði is identified with William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (ca. 1602), and the Bard gives the First Player of the play-withina-play the following lines, which connect it with the Wheel of Fortune:

Out, out, thou strumpet, Fortune! All you gods, In general synod, take away her power; Break all the spokes and fellies from her wheel, And bowl the round nave down the hill of heaven, As low as to the fiends! (Shakespeare, Hamlet, II: 2).

The millstones themselves were ascribed magical powers. Old millstones were used to block places where evil might enter, being laid in the gateways of churchyards and the entrances to places of the dead. Broken into four, they were used as foundations of the four corners of the house (Garrad 1989, 110).

THE MODES, THE PLANETARY SPHERES, AND THEIR HARMONY

The seven modes of ancient European music reflect an ancient recognition of this cosmic harmony. It appears to have originated in the speculations of the Greek philosopher Anaximander, who suggested that the heavenly bodies are carried around the earth on a series of concentric spheres. It is this system to which Plato refers. Although two thousand years later, European scientists, most notably Copernicus, determined that the earth is a planet in orbit around the sun, and not the center of the cosmos, the model created by Anaximander is still a valid spiritual metaphor that had a profound influence all over Europe. Credited to Pythagoras, who elaborated the ideas of Anaximander, the system of the octave was worked upon by later Gnostic researchers who used the concept known as the Ogdoas. In this eightfold system, the cosmos is ruled by seven deities who in turn were under the rulership of the Supreme One. In the ancient treatise On Style, conventionally ascribed to Demetrius Phalereus, we find, “In Egypt also the priests venerate the gods through the seven vowels, letting them sound one after the other, and instead of the aulos and the lyre, it is the sound of the letters that is heard harmoniously.” Through the sound of the vowels, properly invoked under the correct liturgical conditions, material existence could be transformed to spirit. These sounds are the pure notes that Plato puts in the mouths of the Sirens.

The Neopythagorean philosopher Nichomachus of Gerasa reinforced this concept when he commented that the planetary spheres each produce their own particular tones, each of which is reflected in a corresponding vowel in the Greek language. According to Nichomachus, the vowel α reflects the sphere of the moon and the mode called Nete. The sphere of Mercury is expressed by the vowel ε and the tone Paranete. The vowel η sounds the sphere of Venus, the tone Trite synemmenon. The vowel ι reflects the sphere of the sun, with the tone of Mese. The vowel o relates to the planetary sphere of Mars and the tone of Lichanos. Vowel υ recalls Jupiter and Parhypate, whilst ω signifies Saturn and Hypate (Nichomachus 1994).

In Greek culture there were no separate characters for numbers, and the letters of the alphabet thus had numerical equivalents. Anyone who learned to read absorbed these numbers along with the meaning of the letters. As a result Greek culture—unlike ours, in which Roman letters and Arabic numerals have no connection—had an integral symbolic understanding of the relationship of name and number. Concepts such as that the Creator had brought matter into being by the utterance of a word, and that number is the underlying structure of existence, which to modern culture seem separate and irreconcilable, were integrated in this worldview. Belief in the power of the word is fundamental to religion and magic alike. Gnostic papyri contain numerous incantations that begin or end with the seven Greek vowels in differing combinations. One text gives an invocation that encapsulates a magical theory: “Thy name, made up of seven letters, according to the harmony of the seven tones, whose sound is made according to the twenty-eight lights of the Moon, Saraphara, Araphara, Braarmarapha, Abraach, Pertaomech, Akmech, Iao — ouee — iao — oue — eiou — aeo — eeou — eeou — Iao.” The numbers seven and eight are an integral part of this spiritual current. The Greek alphabet, having twenty-four characters, is divided into three ogdoads, or groups of eight, each of which has a ruling letter and is thus structured 1 + 7. In common with Greek practice, the twenty-four runes of the Common Germanic fuþark are also divided into three ogdoads, called by their Norse name, ættir. Identically with the Greek alphabet, each ætt is ruled by the first rune of the group, the ogdoad of α (alpha) being the first group of eight in Greek and the ætt of fehu being the first in the runes.

The Gnostic magical text known as Moses’ Book of the Great Name (in the Papyrus Magicus Leyden W) tells of the godly power contained in the name of the Ogdoas: “Present in it is the supreme name, that is Ogdoas, who commands and controls the whole: the angels are obedient to Him, the archangels, the demons and demonesses and all that is within creation.” The use of the musical modes in initiation is recorded in this papyrus. Apotropaic and invocational music based upon the octaval system operates by recreating the vibrations of the divine name; that is, the Music of the Spheres. The modes of the Pagan philosophers are reckoned from the highest note downward, signifying, as it were, the descent of spirit into matter with the heavenly spheres. The Orthodox Christianity of the Eastern Roman Empire, the inheritor of this Greek Pagan philosophy, reckoned the same modes from the lowest note upward, seemingly signifying the ascent of hymns from the earth to heaven. The Byzantine system used the same notes, calling them the echoi (singular, echos).

Around the beginning of the sixth century CE, a monophysite monk named Severus of Antioch wrote a series of hymns for the Common of the Seasons (a cycle of rituals pertaining to the particular liturgical seasons of the Orthodox Church), using the Oktoëchos system. These hymns are sung on a series of eight Sundays in a different echos, beginning with the lowest mode. The first Sunday’s hymn is in the first mode, the second in the second, the third in the third, and so on, through the octave. The whole Oktoëchos is based upon the Pentecontade Calendar that uses a series of seven weeks and a day as the basic unit. The year is built up from seven of these Pentecontades plus fourteen intercalary days. Thus the hymns of a particular day reflect their place in time. Each one is a proper part of a greater sequence that reflects its corresponding place in the greater divine harmony of the cosmos. With the correct enactment of a ritual that reflects the cosmic order, the participants themselves become part of that order, thereby transcending their own finite individuality. It is a means of becoming one with the cosmos, thereby taking communion with the infinite.